Shades of ocher stretched as far as the eye could see. The plots of land and terrace farms where cereals would normally grow have been reduced to huge fields of dust. The only rainy morning, two months ago, lightly sprinkled over the hills of Atsbi, an eastern district of Ethiopia's Tigray region, exposing fine wheat shoots in a meadow, before they were roasted under the sun.

In this semi-arid area of Tigray, the last significant rainfall dated back to the autumn of 2022, when the last clashes of this region's civil war took place. Between 2020 and 2022, the conflict pitted Tigrayan rebels against federal Ethiopian forces, backed by neighboring Eritrea. According to an African Union estimate, at least 600,000 people died in the conflict.

Tesfaye Hailu, the village administrator of Felegweyni in eastern Tigray – with his plastic sandals covered in dust from the parched ground that was once a field of teff, the country's staple cereal – pointed to several empty farms. Their inhabitants had fled, abandoning their homes and land. Their livestock had been dead for months. The farmers had no wish to suffer the same fate, said the administrator. "We don't know where they've gone, we don't know if they'll come back, we don't know if they're alive," said Hailu, whose own pebble-filled field was just as bleak as those of his neighbors.

At least 42 inhabitants of this village of 9,000 souls have already starved to death since October 2023, said the administrator, notes in hand. "Usually, February is the time of the first harvests, but here we don't have a single grain. The death toll is going to rise, because the next rains won't come until May or June, if they come at all," said this man in his 40s, whose gaze wandered over the barren, deserted horizon.

The Atsbi hospital has recorded a 200% increase in malnutrition cases since November 2023. Hailu, meanwhile, has stopped counting the number of his neighbors who have left his village to beg for food in Tigray's main towns, or gone into exile in Yemen or Saudi Arabia. Others are still conscripted into the ranks of the Tigray Defense Forces.

Lishan Hagos, a 48-year-old farmer whose face has been worn down by the Ethiopian highland sun, has not yet left her farm – unlike her six children, who have gone to Mekele, the regional capital, or to Wukro, the nearest town. Her barn is empty, with the one cow it had contained having been sold in November 2023 to compensate for missing harvests. Her mother, Azmera, "died there five months ago. She was losing weight like crazy, she had no strength left, she only ate one meal a day like me," she said in a hollow voice, staring into space, huddled against the wall of her barn, her shoulders wrapped in a traditional netela shawl. Exhaustion seemed to have drained her body of tears. Since January, she has received only 15 kilos of roasted barley and wheat seeds. She would grind them into porridge to make her only meal of the day. "It's what keeps me going, but for how much longer? I'm too weak to move around," she said.

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