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Emergency food security assessment: Tigray Region, Ethiopia

A new food security assessment, released by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), shows that almost 40 percent of Tigrayans are suffering an extreme lack of food, after 15 months of conflict. Meanwhile, across all three conflict-affected regions of the north more than 9 million people are in need of humanitarian food assistance, the highest number yet. The Tigray Emergency Food Security Assessment found that 83 percent of people are food insecure. Families are exhausting all means to feed themselves, with three quarters of the population using extreme coping strategies to survive. Diets are increasingly impoverished as food items become unavailable and families rely almost exclusively on cereals while limiting portion sizes and the number of meals they eat each day to make whatever food is available stretch further.