In a move that’s sure to have a significant impact, the United States has suspended all food aid to Ethiopia due to what it calls “widespread and coordinated” theft of the donations. The U.S. is the largest donor of aid to Ethiopia, with around 120 million people, making it Africa’s second most populous country. At least 20 million people in the country need donated food due to a combination of civil conflict, climate change, and locust swarms that devastated crops. Last fiscal year, which ended in September 2022, the United States gave $1.5 billion in aid to Ethiopia, with food making up more than two-thirds of that budget.
American officials stated that the scale of misappropriation leaves them with no option but to cease aid deliveries until the system has been fixed. The U.S. Agency for International Development said in a statement, “We made the difficult but necessary decision that we cannot move forward with distribution of food assistance until reforms are in place. Our intention is to immediately resume food assistance once we are confident in the integrity of the delivery systems.”
The reasons behind the food theft were not revealed in the statement. However, Humanitarian and Resilience Donor Group, a group of foreign donors that includes USAID, claimed that Ethiopian “federal and regional government entities” had diverted the food to “military units across the country.” This decision comes amid severe tension between the United States and Ethiopia, with President Joe Biden threatening sweeping sanctions last year, and the country’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed reacting furiously to the proposal.
The United Nations World Food Program, the largest food aid organization in Ethiopia, has also discovered that food aid was being diverted. It paused its operations in Tigray in April 2021, while the U.S. Agency for International Development had already suspended aid to Tigray on May 3. These discoveries have prompted Samantha Power, USAID administrator, to promise “a thorough review” of the programs in Tigray, where most of the region’s six million people rely on food assistance.
Since late March, the USAID has visited 63 flour mills in seven of Ethiopia’s nine regions and witnessed a “significant diversion” of American food aid. The donor group’s briefing document described a “coordinated and criminal scheme” that deprived Ethiopia’s “most vulnerable” citizens of lifesaving assistance. American investigators have also found evidence that food from other countries had been stolen, including wheat donated by France, Japan, and Ukraine through the UN World Food Program. Ethiopia is currently enduring one of the worst droughts to sweep the Horn of Africa in decades, with several regions affected by below-average rainfall, locusts, and internal conflict. This crisis has decimated the agricultural sector, with at least 4.5 million livestock animals also perishing due to a lack of grazing areas and water in the Oromia and Somali regions aside from the civil war and the COVID-19 pandemic that have further exacerbated the economic situation in the country, leading to rising inflation and unemployment, shrinking safety nets, and decreased foreign investment.
