Ethiopia’s Tigray Conflict: Hunger beyond headlines

You don’t see the blockade at first. There are no walls, no warning signs, no checkpoints with banners announcing what’s happening. Food just stops arriving. Fuel disappears. Medicine runs out. Roads go quiet. Prices rise. People wait. And then they start to starve.

By the time the war in northern Ethiopia had been going for a year, hunger wasn’t a side effect anymore. It was the system.

The conflict began in November 2020, when fighting broke out between Ethiopia’s federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. At first, the suffering looked like what you’d expect in a war: airstrikes, displacement, people fleeing their homes. But as the months passed, something changed. Movement was restricted. Roads were blocked. Electricity and telecoms were cut. Humanitarian access tightened again and again.

According to Professor Tronvoll, Prorector for Research and Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Oslo New University College, this was when wartime disruption crossed into blockade. Not chaos. Not collateral damage. A governed scarcity, where food, fuel, cash, and medicine were deliberately kept out.

Tigray had already been partly isolated before the war. Protests in 2018 led to road restrictions that slowed trade long before the first shots were fired. But after federal forces were pushed back in early 2021, the situation collapsed fast. Aid access dropped by roughly 70%. Banking froze. Public employees went unpaid. Fuel vanished. Hospitals ran out of basic supplies.

The deaths that followed didn’t come mainly from bullets. Later estimates suggested around 600,000 people died during the two-year conflict. Research teams found most of those deaths were indirect: starvation, untreated illness, lack of medicine. At least 1,400 people are confirmed to have died from hunger after food aid was suspended again because of theft concerns. Local groups say the real number is far higher.

In rural areas, daily life shrank. Markets stopped functioning. Cash became meaningless. Families relied on what they could grow, but even farming broke down. Fertiliser didn’t arrive. Seeds were scarce. Fuel shortages meant irrigation pumps stopped working. Entire planting seasons were missed in 2021 and 2022.

When harvests failed, people sold what they could. First household goods. Then livestock. Then plough oxen, which farmers normally never sell unless things are desperate. Without oxen, fields can’t be planted. That’s not just hunger today, it’s hunger locked into the future.

When there was nothing left, people turned to what older generations remembered from past famines: wild plants, leaves, cactus fruit. Enough to keep going for a while. Not enough to rebuild.

The blockade didn’t just affect bodies. It reshaped how people understood the state. Tigray has long felt marginalised by the centre, but the war hardened that feeling into certainty. Professor Tronvoll describes the blockade as administrative violence, a method that convinced many civilians that starvation was not accidental. Aid restrictions were read as intent. Resistance became about survival, not politics.

Unlike massacres or airstrikes, blockades don’t leave dramatic images. There’s no single moment the world can point to. Harm builds quietly, behind closed doors. People weaken. Children stop growing properly. Diseases that are easy to treat elsewhere become deadly. That quiet is what makes blockades effective, and hard to hold anyone accountable for.

Aid access has improved since the Pretoria Agreement was signed in November 2022, but recovery is fragile. Officially, there is no longer a blockade. In practice, funding shortages mean food doesn’t always arrive. Displacement camps are still short of supplies. Clinics operate without drugs. Teachers and civil servants who worked for years without pay are buried in debt.

Humanitarian aid comes and goes. When it stops suddenly, people are left exposed. Smuggling fills some gaps, but at brutal prices. Goods that get through are sold on local markets at levels most families can’t afford. Survival becomes collective, but also competitive.

The damage goes deeper than hunger. Farming systems broken over multiple seasons don’t bounce back quickly. Children who grew up during the blockade learned scarcity as normal. Trust in federal institutions collapsed. Grievances hardened. Professor Tronvoll warns that even after ceasefires, the social wounds left by blockade make real reconciliation difficult.

Today, more than 20 million people across Ethiopia need humanitarian assistance. Over 5 million of them are in Tigray. The war no longer dominates headlines, but its effects are everywhere: empty clinics, underfed children, fields that can’t be planted.

Blockades don’t announce themselves. They work slowly. Patiently. By the time they’re visible, the damage is already done. In Tigray, hunger wasn’t just a consequence of war. It became the way the war was fought.

Further information and opportunities to engage with organisations working in this area are listed below:
https://www.rescue.org/article/ethiopia-crisis-why-millions-need-support-and-how-you-can-help
https://www.actionaid.org.uk/about-us/where-we-work/ethiopia
https://www.marysmeals.org/campaigns/crisis-in-ethiopia

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