Why is ethiopia starving

The staffer described speaking with one mother who said her family had been living on borrowed food since June. For the past month, they had eaten only bread with salt. She worried that without food aid in the coming days they would die. At least people starved to death in August, including in camps for displaced people, the Tigray External Affairs Office has alleged.

The International Organization for Migration, the U. People who ate three meals a day now eat only one. Camp residents rely on the charity of host communities who often struggle to feed themselves. Food security experts months ago estimated that , people in Tigray face famine conditions, more than the rest of the world combined.

But the blockade means experts cannot collect the needed data to make a formal declaration of famine. Now the war is hollowing out the economy, and stomachs. As the war spreads, so might hunger. Tigray forces have entered the neighboring regions of Amhara and Afar in recent weeks, and some residents accuse them of carrying out acts of retaliation, including closing off supply routes. The U. There is little help coming. But as of Sept. No medical supplies or fuel have been delivered to Tigray in more than a month, the U.

In mid-September the U. Often, that number was zero. There are also reliable reports that the advancing Tigrayan forces have requisitioned food and medicine supplies. The government also says that the Tigrayan advances have blocked humanitarian access routes. However, there hasn't been any fighting on the main road used by aid convoys from the Afar city of Semera, while aid agencies attribute insecurity to government-aligned militia.

It also says that the reason why so few trucks are able to travel to Tigray is that those who arrive are commandeered by the TPLF for its war effort. Fact-checking by the BBC shows this is not supported by evidence - the aid trucks are stranded in Tigray because fuel supplies have run out.

The government blames the food crisis on a locust infestation last year and points out that a million people needed aid before the war began. In fact, it was the TPLF's defeat of the Ethiopian army in Tigray in June that made it possible for farmers there to plant crops and aid agencies to travel unobstructed within the region. The problems of humanitarian access are not within Tigray - but getting there in the first place. UN officials are increasingly explicit that it is the government policy of blockading the region that is the root of the problem.

On 29 September, Ocha head Martin Griffiths said: "This is man-made; this can be remedied by the act of government. The Ethiopian representative to the UN, Taye Atske Selassie, then made a series of allegations that UN staff were TPLF sympathisers and, in a step almost without precedent, Mr Guterres took to the floor a second time to challenge him to provide evidence, saying that he had personally spoken twice with Mr Abiy on the topic, without the prime minister providing details to back up the allegations.

Mr Lowcock continued: "There's not just an attempt to starve six million people but an attempt to cover up what's going on. There is no question that Tigrayans are starving.

But because there are no nutrition and mortality surveys of the type that are standard in such emergencies, the UN is hesitating to call it a famine. That is a technical nicety that is increasingly difficult to defend. Speaking at the G7 summit in June, US special envoy Jeff Feltman warned, we "should not wait to count the graves" before declaring the crisis in Tigray what it is: a famine. That was a warning. Without immediate action it will be a forecast, and a verdict.

The question is no longer whether there is famine in Tigray, but how many people will starve to death before it is stopped. The fighting has displaced hundreds of thousands who have left behind their homes, their livelihoods, and any source of income they may have had.

It has demolished roads, health care facilities, banks, water pumps, and much of the other infrastructure people and food systems rely on. When the fighting broke out in November, it also disrupted the harvest season. Witnesses have said troops have incinerated crops, looted farms and food stores, and killed livestock, like oxen — destroying not just potential food sources but also the tools people need to grow and collect food.

There are also reports that Eritrean soldiers are forbidding farmers from plowing their fields, and humanitarian aid workers have reported being threatened by armed forces, especially Eritrean forces, and having their supplies and vehicles confiscated. But most of it is going to areas where the Ethiopian government is in control; those outside of it, especially in rural areas, do not have access.

The Tigrayan defense forces have a lot of support among the population, and the Ethiopian government wants to erode that support. The Tigrayan forces are also blending in with the population, and Ethiopia and its allies believe that cutting off food and supplies is a way to weaken those forces, too.

The Ethiopian and Eritrean governments both deny that their forces are preventing aid from reaching parts of Tigray. The Ethiopian government has also said most farmers in Tigray were planting crops on schedule. In fact, the Ethiopian government has denied there is any hunger crisis at all. Drought increased the hunger crisis in the s, but then, as now, politics and war turned it into a catastrophe.

All of this is happening as Ethiopia holds elections. There is no voting in Tigray, and opposition parties in other regions are boycotting, arguing their leaders are facing threats and intimidation from Abiy and his ruling Prosperity Party. All of this makes it likely that Abiy and his party will win handily, despite the resistance at home and international criticism.

Which means Abiy has less incentive to attempt to resolve the conflict in Tigray or respond to international pressure to do so.