famine-stricken Tigray after suspension of food aid

Urgent situation. Seven months after the agreement that ended two years of devastating conflict, Tigray is crying out for hunger. And the situation is likely to get worse after decisions in May by the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) and the US government’s aid agency (USAID) to suspend food aid to Tigray due to diversions.

A region of six million people located in northern Ethiopia, Tigray has been in search of food for more than two years. During the war that raged between November 2020 and November 2022, UN experts accused the Ethiopian federal government of subjecting the region to a blockade “fact”. Authorities have denied the allegations, accusing rebel authorities in Tigray of requisitioning food aid for their war effort.

“I’m afraid of losing my children”

“The number of people going to food distribution centers has increased”, said Nigisti Solomon, a volunteer worker at a center funded by the Tigray Action Committee, a pressure group for the Tigrayan diaspora based in the United States. Displaced people are begging in the street, others are queuing in front of food distribution centers, she told Agence France Presse.

In an interview with AFP, Desta Hailu, a university professor in the town of Adigrat, located a few kilometers from the Eritrean border, said he had not eaten for two days. His last meal consisted of a slice of bread with tea. With his wife, they deprive themselves in order to be able to feed their children. But it’s never enough. “My son constantly complains of hunger, he wants to eat his little sister’s portion”says the forties.

Today, Desta Hailu’s days revolve around the desperate search for food so that her children eat at least once a day. “If this situation continues, I’m afraid of losing my children to hunger, that they will die before my eyes.”