The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said nearly 40 percent of people in Ethiopia’s war-hit Tigray are suffering from an extreme lack of food in the face of an extended de-facto blockade of the region, reported Reuters.
The WFP’s assessment report comes as humanitarian groups are forced to curtail aid activities because of fuel and supply shortages. As per reports, no aid convoy has reached Tigray since mid-December.
The report is the first reliable food security assessment conducted since a UN report more than six months ago, which estimated that hundreds of thousands of people in Tigray were facing famine-like conditions.
The war that pits the Ethiopian government and its allies against Tigrayan forces loyal to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) broke out in November 2020. The conflict has killed thousands of people and displaced millions across three regions in Ethiopia and into neighboring Sudan.
The new assessment found that about 4.6 million people in Tigray, or 83 percent of the population, were food-insecure, two million of them “severely” so.
In a statement, the WFP said the assessment has found that three-quarters of people are using extreme coping strategies like cutting the number of meals they eat daily.
“Diets are increasingly impoverished as food items become unavailable and families rely almost exclusively on cereals while limiting portion sizes and the number of meals they eat each day to make whatever food is available stretch further,” it added.
The UN food agency also sounded the alarm about rising hunger in Amhara and Afar regions, which have also been hit hard due to the fighting in recent months.
Michael Dunford, the East African director of WFP, said the agency is doing all it can to ensure that the convoys with food and medicines make it through the frontlines.
On Friday, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said all international aid groups operating in Tigray had run out of fuel.
