Ethiopia has chastised the US and UN World Food Programme (WFP) for stopping their food supplies to the nation. Legesse Tulu, a government spokesman, referred to the ban as “political” and said it “punishes millions of people” on Saturday. More than 15% of the people in the country are dependent on food help.
The US government’s humanitarian relief organization, USAID, announced the suspension of its food assistance on Thursday, criticizing a “widespread and coordinated detour operation.”
The WFP stated the following day that it was “temporarily suspending food assistance,” citing a “detour of food,” but that “nutritional assistance to children, pregnant and lactating women, school meal programmes and activities to strengthen farmers and herders in the face of external shocks” would continue without interruption.
At a press conference, government spokesman Legesse Tulu commented that the decision to halt food aid “punishes millions of people” and described it as “political”. It is unacceptable to hold the government solely accountable for embezzlement, he continued.
The Ethiopian authorities had informed us on Thursday night that a joint investigation was ongoing “to ensure that those responsible for the embezzlement are held to account” in a joint statement with USAID.
Due to the detour of some of this aid, which was “sold on the local market,” the American agency had already decided in May, concurrent with the WFP, to halt food assistance to the Ethiopian region of Tigray, which had only recently emerged in November from two years of conflict.
According to estimates by the UN humanitarian agency (Ocha) at the end of May, 20 million people, or 16% of Ethiopia’s 120 million residents, are dependent on food aid as a result of conflict and an unprecedented drought in the Horn of Africa that has forced 4.6 million people from their homes nationwide.
Nearly a million refugees, mostly from South Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea, reside in Ethiopia. Nearly 30,000 refugees from the violence in Sudan have sought safety in eastern Ethiopia since mid-April.
