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The following Summary is taken from a longer report just completed by the authors. Conflict, Relief and Development: Aid Responses to the Current Food Crisis in the Horn of Africa' is available from the University of Leeds. See end for details.
The Ethiopian blitzkrieg into south-west Eritrea beginning on Friday 12 May has shifted the two-year old war from grumbling stalemate to hot realities. It has also fundamentally altered the terms of the war.
This is no longer a border dispute that has got out of hand. The political gains which Ethiopia is seeking through its military onslaught go far beyond reclaiming territory - though it is still not clear exactly what these are: forcing concessions so Eritrea will sue for peace, destroying the Eritrean military capacity, reconquering the country, or replacing its government forcibly? If any of the latter, these would be prescriptions for massively prolonged warfare. The terrain of Eritrea alone means any further advances into rugged mountainous areas beyond the plains Ethiopian armies have just swept will be far from easy.
Even if the future course of conflict is still unclear, the humanitarian consequences are already starkly evident. Hundreds of thousands of refugees are fleeing the areas of fighting in south west Eritrea into Sudan and into northern parts of Eritrea.
The destruction of towns, infrastructure and inevitably livelihoods is already under way. The bloody nature of the conventional tank-trench battles will continue to claim many thousands of young lives. In the light of these daunting prospects, it becomes even more pertinent to probe just what are the connections between war and the prospect of famine to which the world has been alerted in the last few months.
This new study has carefully analysed just how far these two events are connected, seeking to go beyond the simple and extreme postures that are often taken: 'war has caused the famine' or 'war has nothing to do with the famine'. Some of the main findings are summarised here under two heads:
How severe is the threat of famine and who and where are the people at risk?
How exactly has war impacted on food security?
The study then goes on to ask:
What can aid agencies do to feed the hungry and promote...