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Ethiopia is sliding into a “humanitarian catastrophe” with more than 3mn people facing acute hunger in the north of the country, the UK government has said in a warning that will invite comparisons with the 1984 famine in which half a million Ethiopians starved to death.

Andrew Mitchell, the UK’s development minister, stopped short of using the word “famine”. But after a visit to Tigray region in the north, he compared the situation to a football heading straight for a plate-glass window. “If we don’t head the ball away, it’s going to smash the glass,” he told the Financial Times.

Mitchell said the UK government was making £100mn available to help 3mn people, including pregnant mothers, in combating malnutrition and gaining access to life-saving medical care. The crisis, he said, had been provoked by drought as well as by a two-year civil war fought between Tigray and the federal government in Addis Ababa.

Getachew Reda, chair of Tigray’s interim regional administration, told Channel Four News on Friday that the 1984 catastrophe, which prompted Irish musician Bob Geldof’s Live Aid fundraising drive, could pale by comparison with today’s “unfolding famine”. Farming capacity had been destroyed in the civil war, which ended in 2021, he said.

The government in Addis Ababa, while acknowledging some food shortages, has called comparisons with 1984 “completely wrong”. In December, Shiferaw Teklemariam, head of the federal government’s Disaster Risk Management Commission, said: “The information that the drought has escalated to famine is unfounded and is being propagated by entities with hidden agendas.”

As well as Tigray, aid agencies have reported acute hunger in neighbouring Amhara region as well as in parts of the south.

Getachew said the government in Addis Ababa had the means to prevent famine by letting more aid into the region and by acknowledging the gravity of the situation. “Drought is something that nature could bring about,” he said. “Famine is essentially about governments not being able to face such an issue.”

He said his regional government had punished some 500 officials for stealing food aid last year. The World Food Programme recently resumed delivering food after suspending shipments last June in response to what it called “the widespread theft of donations”.

Abiy Ahmed, prime minister of Ethiopia, was last week celebrating receiving the prestigious Agricola Award from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, at which he spoke about his country’s advances in agricultural production and its ability to achieve “zero hunger”.

Mehari Taddele Maru, a professor at the European University Institute, wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “The irony of the international order has reached a new level now with the FAO . . . awarding the head of the regime in Addis Ababa, where thousands, particularly farmers in Tigray and Amhara, are dying of starvation.”

Alex de Waal, an expert on the Horn of Africa at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, said: “A whole series of factors have come together to create a national food crisis in Ethiopia that is probably as bad or worse than the situation in 1984 that led to the terrible famine.”

“We could see half a million people or more dying of starvation in the coming year if there isn’t prompt action,” he told the BBC.

Mitchell said Ethiopia’s unfolding crisis was in danger of being overshadowed by wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan and by other hunger crises in Yemen and Somalia. In 1984, the world waited too long and it could not afford to repeat that mistake, he said.