Addis Ababa, Jan 28 (Agency) Nearly 40 per cent of Ethiopia’s ethnic minority Tigray population is suffering from an extreme lack of food after 15 months of fighting, the UN’s World Food Programme agency said Friday. The WFP’s newest estimate suggests that 83 per cent of the region’s population are food insecure and rely on shrinking food supplies consisting mostly of cereals to survive.
About three-quarters of Tigrayans have been employing “extreme coping strategies,” such as limiting portion sizes and the number of meals, to make supplies last longer after relief aid stopped. The UN agency said no food convoys were able to reach the northern Ethiopian region since mid-December and assistance prior to that had been sporadic. Off-and-on fighting between the Ethiopian government and Tigrayan rebel forces has stymied the UN’s food distribution efforts, doubling hunger in the Amhara region, to the south, and pushing malnutrition rates up in Afar, in the east.