US suspends food aid to Ethiopia over widespread theft
The United States on Thursday suspended all food aid to Ethiopia, citing “widespread and coordinated” theft of contributions in a country where at least 20 million people need donated food.
The United States is by far the largest aid donor to Ethiopia, with 120 million people, Africa’s second most populous country, so the impact of the suspension is likely to hit hard and fast.
Ethiopians are already reeling from the combined impact of civil conflict, climate change and locust swarms that devoured crops. The United States gave $1.5 billion in aid to Ethiopia, more than two-thirds of that in food, in the last fiscal year, which ended in September 2022. But U.S. officials said the scale of the embezzlement left them no choice but to halt deliveries until the system was dissolved.
“We have made the difficult but necessary decision that we cannot continue distributing food aid until reforms are made,” the U.S. Agency for International Development said in a statement. “It is our intention to resume food aid immediately once we have confidence in the integrity of the delivery systems.”
The statement does not say who stole the food. But a briefing paper from the Humanitarian and Resilience Donor Group, a group of foreign donors that includes USAID, blamed Ethiopia’s “federal and regional government agencies” for diverting the food to “military units across the country.”
The decision comes amid tense relations between the United States and Ethiopia, once a major US partner. Two years of civil war in the northern Tigray region between federal government forces and regional leaders, which ended with a settlement announced last November, resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and allegations of abuse by all parties.
Rights groups and Western officials accused Ethiopian troops of ethnic cleansing, mass rape and using food as a weapon of war during the campaign. In September 2021, President Joe Biden threatened severe sanctions that provoked a furious reaction from Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.
The United States Agency for International Development support already suspended to Tigray on May 3 after finding food aid there being diverted and sold in local markets. The World Food Program shut down its activities in Tigray in April after she too discovered that food aid was being diverted. USAID administrator Samantha Power promised a “deep review” of her programs in Tigray, where most of the region’s six million people depend on food aid.
Since late March, USAID staff have visited 63 flour mills in seven of Ethiopia’s nine regions, witnessing a “significant diversion” of US food aid, the donor group’s briefing paper said, describing a “coordinated and criminal plan” that Ethiopia’s “most vulnerable” citizens of life-saving aid.
US investigators also found evidence that food had been stolen from other countries as well, including wheat donated by France, Japan and Ukraine through the United Nations World Food Programme, Ethiopia’s largest food aid agency.
The decision to suspend all US food aid is likely to have major ramifications in Ethiopia, where several regions are currently struggling one of the worst droughts in the Horn of Africa in decades.
Substandard rain, locusts and internal conflicts have decimated the agricultural sector. At least 4.5 million head of cattle have also died according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN due to the decline of grassland and water in the regions of Oromia and Somalia.
The civil war and the Covid-19 pandemic have also worsened the economic situation in the country, leading to rising inflation and unemployment, shrinking safety nets and reduced foreign investment.