The Tigray region of northern Ethiopia stands on the edge of a humanitarian disaster, the UN has said, as fighting escalates and stocks of essential food for malnourished children run out.
The World Food Programme (WFP) said on Friday that it would be distributing its last supplies of cereals, pulses and oil next week to Tigray, where more than 5 million people are estimated to be in need of food assistance.
Stocks of nutritionally fortified food for the treatment of malnourished children and women have now been exhausted, the agency said in a statement. Fuel to deliver the last of the essential food supplies is also running extremely low, it said.
It is also increasingly worried about hunger levels in the neighbouring regions of Amhara and Afar, where more than 4 million people are thought to be in need of food assistance.
“We’re now having to choose who goes hungry to prevent another from starving,” said Michael Dunford, WFP’s regional director for eastern Africa. “We need immediate guarantees from all parties to the conflict for safe and secure humanitarian corridors, via all routes, across northern Ethiopia. Humanitarian supplies are simply not flowing at the pace and scale needed,” he said. “The lack of both food and fuel means we’ve only been able to reach 20% of those we should have in this latest distribution in Tigray. We’re on the edge of a humanitarian disaster.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has accused the Ethiopian authorities of blocking medical supplies to the region. He told reporters it was “so dreadful and unimaginable during this time, the 21st century, when a government is denying its own people for more than a year food and medicine and the rest to survive”. Tedros is from Tigray.
Ethiopia: Tigray on brink of humanitarian disaster, UN says | Global development | The Guardian
2 comments:
Yes, it is a tragedy. But it seems this post is a bit lopsided. The tragedy is not happening as quoted by Dr. Tedros Adhanom by the government, but by the rebels seizing wfp trucks for war, fuel for war, and t Dr. Tedros himself was a tplf high ranking member of the rebels, so of course he will blame the government. Please be a little more balanced in your articles.
If the post appears to have a bias, it is unintentional.
This blog's sole concern is with the suffering of civilians on all sides of the conflict and how they are always drawn into conflicts that they have little to benefit from.
Neither of the combatant forces possesses clean hands.
The government's military blocks the delivery of humanitarian aid and what aid that does get through is looted by rebel forces.
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