Why is Ethiopia seeing starvation deaths?
The Tigray region is suffering widespread hunger and starvation as war and climate change combine to cause a catastrophic crisis.
It might be a little bit hard to fathom that we live in a world where we waste 30 percent of the food produced, but some people suffer and die from hunger. But that is where we are.
395 people died of starvation in the last six months in Ethiopia’s Tigray and Amhara regions. That is according to a new report by the Ethiopian national ombudsman released last week.
This is a rare admission of starvation-related deaths by a government body in Ethiopia and perhaps points to how dire the situation truly is.
The worst of the crisis is being suffered by the war-ravaged region of Tigray, the northernmost state in Ethiopia, where 351 people died due to starvation in the last six months, according to the ombudsman’s report.
Observersers have been pointing to the severity of food insecurity in the region for a while now.
The extent of the problem
However, the actual extent of food insecurity is even graver than reported. Health officials in Tigray and the local Mekelle University conducted a study last year and came to some startling findings.
It found that hunger was not only a significant cause of death but the main cause of death in Tigary, accounting for 68% of all the deaths that the study investigated. The researchers attributed 1,329 deaths to hunger between November 2022 and August 2023.
This number is likely to be much higher because the researchers conducted their analysis in only a small part of the vast Tigray region.
President of Tigray’s interior regional administrator Getachew Reda said people are “staring death in the eye.” He also said that the present situation would “pale in comparison to 1985.”, when Ethiopia saw a devastating famine in which, according to estimates, a million people died of starvation.
While the situation is most severe in the Tigray region, it has impacted all parts of Ethiopia. According to the World Food Programme, 11.8 million people across Ethiopia are facing “severe hunger” — that's about 10% of Ethiopia’s population.
The reasons
Broadly there are three reasons why the situation is as dire as it is — war, drought and insufficient aid delivery.
The civil war between the Tigray People’s Liberation Front on one side and Ethiopia’s federal government and Eritrea on the other brought widespread destruction to the region. It is estimated that as many as 600,000 people died in the conflict which began in November 2020 and came to an end officially in November 2022.
The war left millions displaced and led to lost harvests. The Eritrean and Ethiopian soldiers have also been accused of intentionally torching and burning farms, slaughtering cattle and vandalising water systems.
Conflict and climate change have come together to create a catastrophic situation in Ethiopia. The horn of Africa, the horn-shaped easternmost region of Africa where Ethiopia is located, has seen below-average rainfall for the last five seasons.
The devastating drought is directly linked to human-induced climate change, a recent attribution study by a group of scientists found. This crisis would not have occurred in a world that was 1.2C cooler.
Even as the region’s food security has suffered due to conflict, displacement, failed harvests, climate change and spiralling inflation, food aid delivery has been shoddy.
Ethiopia’s government has repeatedly failed to acknowledge the problem. Even after the ombudsman’s report that starvation has caused deaths in the Tigray region, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Nobel laureate Abiy Ahmed, claimed in Parliament “there are no people dying due to hunger in Ethiopia.” His government has been accused of using starvation as a “method of warfare” by a UN body.
The UN’s actions itself have led to further worsening of the crisis. Last year, the UN body responsible for delivering food aid across the world, the World Food Programme, and the USAID suspended food aid into the Tigary region after they found widespread misappropriation. Food aid that was meant to be delivered to those in need ended up being sold in the market.
The programs have since resumed the delivery of food aid in Tigray and surrounding regions. But they remain hamstrung in their ability to reach all those who need assistance.
The WFP was reaching 6 million people in Ethiopia before the suspension of food aid, it is now “scaling up” to reach 3 million people. It has also warned that it faces a funding shortfall.