The strength of this year’s El Niño has decimated rainfall levels across large stretches of Ethiopia according to Ethiopian officials, the UN and the FEWS Network, a crisis monitoring group created by USAID, reports the New York Times.
According to the article, more than 80% of Ethiopia’s population works in agriculture, which makes up about 40 percent of the nation’s economic output making the country especially vulnerable to drought. Since 2005, the government has been distributing aid through a system that delivers food to citizens in exchange for labor on development projects like construction, terracing or irrigation. But the last round of the program ended in July, and it will not start up again until January.