Almost 40 percent of Tigrayans are suffering from an extreme lack of food, a new study by the World Food Programme (WFP) has found.
The Tigray Emergency Food Security Assessment found that 83 percent of people in the region are food insecure since the conflict began in the area 15 months ago.
More than 2.1 million people have been displaced due to fighting between Ethiopian troops and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the regional government in Tigray.
The conflict started after the TPLF attacked a key Ethiopian military base in the region in November 2020.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) had reported that the lack of medicines, fuel, and other essential commodities was severely disrupting humanitarian response in the region.
Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was reported by Development Diaries to have called for humanitarian access to the region to allow the delivery of life-saving medical and food supplies.
However, the recent food security assessment by WFP revealed that no convoy has reached Tigray since mid-December.
Also, recent health screening shows that 13 percent of Tigrayan children under age five and half of all pregnant and breastfeeding women are malnourished, further leading to poor pregnancy outcomes, low-birth weight, stunting and maternal death.
‘This bleak assessment reconfirms that what the people of northern Ethiopia need is scaled up humanitarian assistance, and they need it now’, WFP’s Regional Director for Eastern Africa, Michael Dunford, said.
‘WFP is doing all it can to ensure our convoys with food and medicines make it through the frontlines. But if hostilities persist, we need all the parties to the conflict to agree to a humanitarian pause and formally agree on transport corridors, so that supplies can reach the millions besieged by hunger’.
Despite the challenges posed on its operations in the region, WFP said it had reached almost four million people across northern Ethiopia with food and nutrition assistance since the start of the conflict.
According to WFP, it requires U.S.$337 million to deliver assistance over the next six months, and will begin running out of the capacity to purchase food from February.
Source: WFP
Photo source: UNHCR/Will Swanson
