People Are Dying of Hunger in Drought-Hit Wag Hemra, Residents and a District Official Tell DW

Zegabi.com
News and Articles

People have begun dying of hunger in Sahala Seyemt, a district of Wag Hemra in northern Amhara, where drought has wiped out the harvest after years of war, residents and a district agriculture official told DW Amharic in a report published on Saturday.

Eshetu Zegeye, who leads the early warning team at the Sahala Seyemt district agriculture office, told DW that more than 66,000 people in the district are directly exposed to the drought, but that the government had sent food for only 30,000 people for one month, about 4,000 quintals. “The whole 60-some thousand are in danger,” he said, and of the 15 kilogram ration meant to last one month, he said, “we are now giving it for half.” He said the situation was getting worse and that deaths “have reached five people so far.”

Muluken Abebaw, who lives in kebele 13 of Sahala Seyemt, told DW that nothing was improving, “only getting worse,” with insecurity coming “from every direction,” and that about four people had died in a single kebele. In the neighboring district of Tsagbji, Abeje Mengiste said this drought was unlike any before it and compared it to 1977 in the Ethiopian calendar, the year of the great famine of 1984 and 1985. “There is not one sack, not ten tins of sorghum left in our district,” he said, adding that there was no fodder for the animals and that families feared for the weak and the children in the coming month.

Another resident, Yigzaw Teshome, said more than 120,000 people in the two districts are exposed to the drought and that the area had been hurt by both war and failed rains. He recalled that an armed force had earlier come demanding that farmers “bring grain, bring money, bring goats, bring cattle,” without naming it, and said that “now the children, the elderly and the young have all been thrown into hunger and disease.” People believe they face death unless the government or private aid groups come, he told DW.

The deputy commissioner of the Amhara region’s Disaster Risk Management Commission, Serkaddis Atale, gave DW a different picture. He said more than 11,000 quintals of food had been sent for more than 66,000 people in five districts hit by El Niño, namely Ziquala, Dahana, Sahala, Sekota and Gazgibla, that most of it had arrived, and that the commission was using many trucks despite transport delays. His figure of 66,000 covers five districts, while the district office gave the same number for Sahala Seyemt alone, and Zegabi could not independently confirm the number of deaths.

Wag Hemra, whose main town is Sekota, lies in the far north of the Amhara region next to Tigray and Afar and was badly hit in the 2020 to 2022 war in northern Ethiopia. In Abergele, another of its districts, officials said on Oct. 19 that more than 72,000 of 80,874 residents needed urgent food aid, that crops had failed on more than 90 percent of the district’s farmland, and that 27,717 sheep and goats and 8,909 cattle had died for lack of feed, The Abay Times reported. The World Food Programme warned in its August country brief that more than 1.3 million people in northern Ethiopia were projected to face acute food insecurity between October and December, that insecurity in Amhara was holding up deliveries, and that it did not have the resources to cover the rise in need from November. Last month the UN said that 10 of the 16 mobile health and nutrition teams still working in Amhara would shut down by the end of October for lack of money, as Zegabi reported.

Addis Standard (@addisstandard) wrote on X on Oct. 23 that about 90 percent of the grain sown in Abergele had failed and quoted a Sahala Seyemt resident as saying, “Both day and night have turned dark for us, and we have lost all peace. The proverb ‘war is better than famine’ has come true for us.” On Oct. 27 the outlet (@addisstandard) cited a humanitarian assessment as saying that a cholera outbreak in Wag Hemra “remains a concern, with humanitarian sources reporting limited availability of treatment supplies, including fluids.” Zegabi searched X in Amharic, Tigrigna and English for posts by residents of the zone and found no others that could be traced to the area.

Sources