Medical charity Doctors – Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) says there has been a surge in malnutrition amongst Ethiopians after the aid suspension.
Food distribution from international aid agencies working in Ethiopia must be resumed as “malnutrition rates surge”, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has said.
USAid and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) froze aid to the northern region of Tigray and then to the rest of the country last month after discovering that food shipments were being diverted and sold at local markets.
Tigray suffered from dire shortages of food, fuel, cash and medicines during a brutal two-year conflict between forces loyal to Ethiopia’s government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.
The MSF in a statement on Friday says more than 20 million people in Ethiopia rely heavily on food aid and “even before the suspension came into effect our medical teams were witnessing alarmingly high rates of global acute malnutrition”.
“We already see that the food shortage is pushing vulnerable communities into harmful coping mechanisms, including selling assets as substitutes for food, begging, and child labour,” MSF medical coordinator Samreen Hussain said.
“This situation will only worsen with a protracted suspension of food aid.”
“According to the data collected by our teams between January and April this year, of the 8,000 pregnant women and new mothers screened in MSF health facilities in Shire and Sheraro in Tigray, 72.5 per cent were acutely malnourished”.
“Pregnant women who are malnourished are at a higher risk of experiencing complications during childbirth and their babies are more likely to have poor health outcomes”.
“Our teams also screened 17,803 children under five in Shire and Sheraro clinics and found that 21.5 per cent had moderate acute malnutrition and 6.5 per cent had severe acute malnutrition, which is life threatening,” the statement added.
