BEIJING - China will provide about $14 million in humanitarian assistance to drought affected areas in the Horn of Africa, including more than $7 million to Ethiopia, the Chinese ambassador to Ethiopia said earlier this week.

The Chinese government is also holding consultations with concerned parties of the United Nations to provide humanitarian assistance to Somalia, Ambassador Gu Xiaojie said during a news conference on Tuesday at the Chinese Embassy in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.

China has always been committed to enhancing relations with Ethiopia and Africa in general, Gu said, according to a press release published on Thursday on the foreign ministry's website.

Gu said the humanitarian assistance would be provided to Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti, and would include about $7.7 million worth of food for Ethiopia.

The Horn of Africa is experiencing one of its worst droughts in 60 years.

According to the World Food Program, the southern and central areas of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia have been the hardest hit by the drought, which has affected about 12.4 million people.

On Wednesday, the UN declared three additional regions in Somalia as famine zones.

"China is always on Africa's side to support African governments and people during a crisis," said Gu.

Last week, the foreign ministry rejected claims by a German official that China has been buying up land in the drought-ravaged Horn of Africa, saying the allegations are "completely unfounded" and have "ulterior motives", according to AFP.

Germany's Africa policy coordinator Guenter Nooke said last week that China has been involved in "large-scale land purchases" which have contributed to the devastating drought affecting the region.

Nooke told the daily Frankfurter Rundschau that the Chinese investments were focused on farming for export which he said can lead to "major social conflicts in Africa when small farmers have their land and thus their livelihoods taken away".

"China has never had plans to buy land overseas, and China has never purchased land in Africa," the foreign ministry said in a statement sent to AFP.

"The claim is completely unfounded and even has ulterior motives," it said, adding that China had set up 10 agricultural demonstration centers in Africa and dispatched nearly 1,000 experts and technical staff to help countries handle food safety issues.

The experts and staff were "warmly welcomed", the statement said.

The causes of starvation in the Horn of Africa aren't simple, William G. Moseley, professor of geography and African studies at Macalester College, said in an article he recently wrote for The News Tribune, a US newspaper.

"The semi-arid Horn of Africa and the entire Sahelian region - running just south of the Sahara Desert across the continent - have long experienced erratic rainfall. While climate change may be exacerbating rainfall variability, traditional livelihoods in the region are adaptable to deal with situations when rainfall is not dependable," he said.

However, to portray ecological factors as the sole cause of the region's recurring predicament is to vastly oversimplify the situation, said Abeje T. Chumo, an expert on International law and chief editor for The Horn of Africa Press website.

"Long and recurrent conflicts, poor infrastructure, misguided policy options, weak market systems and seasonal migration patterns contribute to the ever-increasing drought problems in the region," Chumo wrote on the Foreign Policy Blog network, a production of the Foreign Policy Association based in New York.

China Daily

(China Daily 08/05/2011 page12)