Main news content: The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has been forced to make deep cuts to food assistance for nearly 780,000 refugees across 27 camps in Ethiopia due to a severe funding crisis. Effective October, rations were slashed from 60 percent to just 40 percent of the refugees’ minimum daily caloric requirement. This reduction means most recipients are now surviving on less than 1,000 calories per day, a level described by Zlatan Milisic, WFP Ethiopia Country Director, as pushing vulnerable families “closer to the edge.” Only 70,000 recent arrivals from Sudan and South Sudan will temporarily receive full rations, despite the broader crisis of hunger and malnutrition worsening across the refugee population.
The WFP is sounding a critical alarm, warning that without immediate and significant financial support, the agency faces the prospect of a complete suspension of food assistance for hundreds of thousands of people, placing lives at immediate risk. To maintain essential life-saving operations for the next six months, the WFP has issued an urgent appeal for US$230 million. Milisic emphasized the devastating nature of the “impossible choices” forced upon the organization by the lack of donor funding.Adding to the emergency, supplies of specialized nutritious food are expected to run out completely by December. This would terminate critical nutrition support for one million malnourished children and pregnant and breastfeeding women across Ethiopia. While the WFP also assists 700,000 people in the drought- and flood-affected Somali region and has reached 4.7 million vulnerable people this year, ongoing insecurity in regions like Amhara continues to disrupt humanitarian efforts, severely undermining the agency’s capacity to respond to compounding crises.
