Up to 900,000 in Ethiopia's Tigray Face Famine, U.S. Says

The United States estimates that up to 900,000 people in Ethiopia’s Tigray region now face famine conditions amid a deadly conflict, even as the prime minister says there is “no hunger” there.

The hunger crisis in Tigray is the world’s worst in a decade, and the new famine findings are “terrifying,” the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Samantha Power, said Friday, adding that millions more people are at risk.

The new estimate more than doubles the warning issued earlier this month by the United Nations and aid groups that more than 350,000 people face famine conditions in Tigray.

Even as scattered reports emerge of people starving to death, the real number of people facing famine conditions is unknown because active fighting and access restrictions keep aid workers from reaching all parts of the region of 6 million people.

“Conditions will worsen in the coming months, particularly as Tigray enters the July-to-September lean season, unless humanitarian assistance reaches the populations most in need,” the new USAID analysis says.

This is forced starvation, Tigray residents and some observers have said. Witnesses have described being blocked by Ethiopian soldiers, backed by soldiers from neighboring Eritrea, from planting their fields or having their crops looted or burned since the conflict erupted in November.

Ethiopia’s government says it has delivered food aid to millions of people in Tigray even as its troops pursue the region’s former leaders after political tensions exploded into war.

But Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2019, in an interview aired this week with a state-affiliated network expressed concern that outside aid to Tigray might end up supporting the Tigray fighters, recalling a similar situation during Ethiopia’s devastating famine in the 1980s. Such a situation can’t happen again, he said.

“There is no hunger in Tigray,” the prime minister told the BBC this week.

“This is false,” Power’s tweet said Friday.

The new famine warning adds to pressure on Ethiopia’s government for a cease-fire, especially after an Ethiopian military airstrike this week on a busy market in Tigray killed at least 64 people and the aid group Doctors Without Borders on Friday said three staffers had been murdered in the region.