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More than 350,000 people in Ethiopia’s Tigray region are starving, with millions more at risk, according to an analysis by UN agencies and aid groups that blamed the conflict for the worst food crisis in a decade.
“There is famine now in Tigray,” Mark Lowcock, the UN aid coordinator, said Thursday after the release of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis.
“The number of people suffering from starvation … is higher than anywhere in the world, at any point since a quarter of a million Somalis lost their lives in 2011,” Lowcock said.
Most of Tigray’s 5.5 million people need food aid. Fighting broke out in the area in November between government forces and the region’s former ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.
The violence killed thousands of civilians and forced more than two million people from their homes in the mountainous region.
The most extreme warning by the IPC – the measure used by UN agencies, regional bodies and aid groups to identify food insecurity – is the fifth stage, which begins with a warning of disaster and rises to declaring famine in the region.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said more than 350,000 people in Tigray are in the fifth phase of the disaster. This means that families are experiencing famine conditions, but less than 20% of the population is affected, and deaths and malnutrition have not reached the limits of famine.
The IPC analysis found that “this acute crisis is the result of the cascading effects of the conflict, including population displacement, movement restrictions, limited humanitarian access, loss of harvest assets and livelihoods, and disruption or non-existence of markets.”
To declare a famine, at least 20% of the population must suffer from severe food shortages, with one in three children suffering from acute malnutrition and two out of every 10,000 dying daily from starvation or malnutrition and disease.
“If the conflict escalates further or, for any other reason, humanitarian aid is disrupted, most areas of Tigray will be at risk of starvation,” according to the IPC, which added that even if aid delivery is escalated, the situation is expected to worsen during September.
The Ethiopian government has disputed the IPC’s analysis, saying food shortages are not severe and aid is being delivered.
Ethiopian Foreign Ministry spokesman Dina Mufti said at a press conference on Thursday that the government is providing food aid and helping farmers in Tigray.
“they [diplomats] They compare it to the 1984-1985 famine in Ethiopia. “This will not happen.”
“We don’t have any food shortages,” Mitoko Kasa, head of Ethiopia’s National Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Committee, said on Wednesday.
But the US ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas Greenfield, said a humanitarian nightmare was unfolding.
“This is not the kind of disaster that can be reversed,” she said. Referring to a previous famine in Ethiopia that killed more than a million people, she said, “We cannot make the same mistake twice. We cannot leave Ethiopia to starve. We have to act now.”
To prevent starvation from killing millions of people in Tigray, WFP Executive Director David Beasley said there must be a ceasefire, unimpeded access to aid and more money to expand relief operations.
According to notes from a meeting of UN agencies on Monday, the IPC’s analysis could be worse because it “did not include those in the Amhara-controlled areas” of western Tigray.
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