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| OX-CARTS USED TO TRANSPORT FOOD AS VEHICLES CAN NOT REACH VERY REMOTE AREAS |
Situation in Ethiopia is worsening day by day as more attacks on the poor civilians continue.
Since the month of December, 2020 till today over 1 million people have died either by the attacks or die to hunger as a result of displacement.
More than 4.5 million people, nearly the region’s entire population, need emergency food, participants say. At their next meeting on Jan. 8, a Tigray administrator warned that without aid, “hundreds of thousands might starve to death” and some already had, according to minutes obtained by The Associated Press.
“There is an extreme urgent need — I don’t know what more words in English I could use to rapidly scale up the humanitarian response because the population is dying every day as we speak,” Mari Carmen Vinoles, head of the emergency unit for Doctors Without Borders, told the BBC.
But pockets of fighting, resistance from some officials and sheer destruction stand in the way of a massive food delivery effort. To send 15-kilogram (33-pound) rations to 4.5 million people would require more than 2,000 trucks, the meeting’s minutes said, while some local responders are reduced to getting around on foot.
The specter of hunger is sensitive in Ethiopia, which transformed into one of the world’s fastest-growing economies in the decades since images of starvation there in the 1980s led to a global outcry. Drought, conflict and government denial contributed to the famine, which swept through Tigray and killed also a million plus citizens.
Humanitarian social workers are struggling to estimate the extent of need of food.
“Not being able to travel off main highways, it always poses the question of what’s happening with people still off-limits,” said Panos Navrozidis, Action Against Hunger’s director in Ethiopia.
Before the conflict, Ethiopia’s national disaster management body classified some Tigray woredas, or administrative areas, as priority one hotspots for food insecurity. If some already had high malnutrition numbers, “two-and-half months into the crisis, it’s a safe assumption that thousands of children and mothers are in urgent need of food,” Navrozidis said.
“The next few months are very critical, John Shumlansky”, the Catholic Relief Services representative in Ethiopia said.
His group so far has given up to 70,000 people in Tigray a three-month food supply, he said. He also urged all the well wishers across the globe to please to take part in saving human lives as thousands of people are dying everyday.
On the part of government, the Minister responsible for homeland security assured the people that the government is working hard to end the conflicts and also to make shy that the food supply is met.
