The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), which suspended food aid delivery in the Ethiopian area of Tigray in May due to misappropriation, said AFP on Tuesday that it has been “testing” the return of that aid since the end of July.
Read also: US cuts off food aid to Tigray, Ethiopia, citing illegal sales
Early in May, the WFP and USAID, the international arm of the US government, decided to halt food aid to the war-torn Tigray region before expanding their decision the following month to include all of Ethiopia because to “widespread and coordinated” diversion.
“On July 31, the World Food Program began testing and verifying enhanced controls and measures to deliver food aid in four districts of Tigray, to ensure that food aid reaches the most vulnerable people,” according to a statement sent to AFP, stating that it had “distributed 15kg pre-packed bags of wheat to just over 100,000 people eligible for aid”.
Additionally, the WFP reported that it had resumed registering recipients of food aid and had begun using “bag marking to enable precise tracking of foodstuffs.”
Without providing a timeline, the organisation intends to implement comparable policies in additional Tigrayan areas as well as in the Amhara, Afar, and Somalia regions.
In a response to AFP, USAID said on Tuesday that “U.S. food aid to Ethiopia remains suspended”, while assuring that it was working “in close collaboration with the WFP”.
The federal and rebel authorities in Tigray’s northern Ethiopian region engaged in a devastating battle there between November 2020 and November 2022.
Tigray and its six million residents were cut off from aid for a considerable amount of time during the conflict. Before the WFP and USAID discontinued it, aid distribution had gradually restarted.
The Ethiopian authorities criticized the suspension of food aid, claiming that it “punishes millions of people”.
Read also: Ethiopian government criticizes stoppage of food aid from USAID and WFP.
According to the UN humanitarian agency (Ocha) by the end of May, 4.6 million people have been displaced throughout Ethiopia as a result of wars and a historic drought in the Horn of Africa, which affects around 20 million people, or 16% of the 120 million Ethiopians.
Ocha estimated on Friday that many Tigrayans have been forced to skip meals as a result of the stoppage of food aid, and that some have even turned to prostitution to buy food.
Nearly a million refugees from South Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea reside in Ethiopia.
