Issue No. 8

The Consequences of Withholding Food Aid
 

Just 7 months after the Pretoria agreement, USAID Administrator Samantha Power announced in May 2023 that all USAID-supported food aid to Tigray was ‘paused’ until further notice. The controversial suspension followed the revelation that significant quantities of international aid was being systematically siphoned off and sold for profit. An investigation by the USAID and World Food Programme (WFP) uncovered over 7,000 metric tonnes of stolen wheat and 215,000 litres of food oil in Tigrayan markets.
 
Power declared that the pause would continue until stronger oversight measures were established, allowing future aid to reach vulnerable populations directly. Reportedly, nutritional supplements, safe drinking water, and agricultural support would still be provided. The US government also started discussions with federal and regional authorities in Ethiopia and Tigray to identify and hold accountable those responsible for the aid diversion. To date, however, the vast majority of the culprits remain unpunished.
 
At the same time, the WFP announced that it had launched a comprehensive investigation to establish the facts of reports of diversion and to strengthen its own control mechanisms. WFP also paused food distribution in Tigray, while acknowledging the region was left with some 84% of its population in ‘food crisis’ after the 2-year war and devastating blockade. But within weeks, Executive Director Cindy McCain stated that WFP would not be resuming aid distribution until the organisation was “absolutely sure” goods and cash arrived where they were intended.
 
One month later, both USAID and WFP extended their pause in food aid to include the rest of Ethiopia, affecting some 20 million people in need, roughly 1/6 of the country’s population. USAID has pointed to corruption in aid delivery systems involving senior federal and regional officials in 7 separate regions in the country as the primary cause for the wider suspension. The stolen wheat and other grains uncovered for sale in one market in Tigray were enough to feed more than 130,000 people. Eritrea is also believed to have been closely involved in the plunder.
 
While no one can dispute the importance of investigation into, accountability for, and enhanced safeguards against the widescale diversion of emergency food aid, the consequences of the USAID/WFP pause cannot have been fully considered in advance, given their gravity. As early as two months after the pause began, in late June 2023, Tigray’s Disaster Risk Management Commission reported that some 600 people in Tigray had perished due to hunger. And this number did not include those in western Tigray, where aid still has not reached, almost a year after the Pretoria agreement. Sporadic reports paint a grim humanitarian picture for the many thousands of Tigrayans that have been forcibly displaced there.
 
During the war, some 2.6 million people in Tigray were living with hunger, almost half the population. The conclusion of the war was meant to bring respite and humanitarian relief to the people of Tigray, but by January 2023, the UN reported that 1.5 million were still without humanitarian relief. Just 5,500 relief trucks reached Tigray between November 2022 and May 2023. Alarmingly in May it was estimated that 71% of all pregnant or lactating women were acutely malnourished. While aid may soon be resumed, again only to the reachable parts of Tigray, the knock-on health implications of this level of malnutrition are horrific.
 
By early July, directors of international non-governmental organisations, religious leaders and academics experienced in humanitarian affairs were warning that punishing vulnerable communities for crimes committed by others was unethical. By August, there were reports of more than 1,400 people having starved to death in Tigray since the pause, a period of just over 3 months. Reports of dozens of refugees dying from hunger in Gambella, and an unspecified number dying from starvation in Oromia further raise the total who have lost their lives between May and September in Ethiopia.

Then, in the second week of October, WFP announced that it had resumed some food aid in Ethiopia—to 900,000 refugees from Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea. This included cereals, vegetable oil and salt. USAID soon followed suit in supporting the needs of refugees in the country. WFP noted new organisational safeguards had been established, while USAID highlighted strengthened programme monitoring, reinforced commodity tracking, and improved registration processes in collaboration with the Ethiopian government. But aid for other food-insecure people in Tigray and other regions of Ethiopia has remained paused.

Thankfully, it is now expected that both USAID and WFP will soon resume food aid to Tigrayans and others who remain in dire need across the country, as well as to refugees. Nevertheless, holding the former perpetrators to account is also important, as is ensuring that future incidents of widespread diversion are handled in a far more humane way.