Washington and the World Food Program (WFP) announced Wednesday, May 3, to suspend “until further notice” their food aid to the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia, ravaged by years of conflict, denouncing the diversion help.
“We have made the difficult decision to pause all USAID food assistance to the Tigray region until further notice,” the USAID Administrator said in a statement. for Development and Humanitarian Aid), Samantha Power. And this because part of this aid was “diverted and sold on the local market”, she adds.
For its part, the WFP, based in Rome, says it has decided, according to a press release, on a “pause in the distribution of food in Tigray, which will not resume until the WFP can ensure that this aid vitale does indeed reach its intended recipients”. The U.S. government has raised the matter with Ethiopian authorities as well as local authorities in Tigray who “expressed their willingness to work with us to identify those responsible and hold them to account,” the statement said. USAID.
“Acute food insecurity”
However, the organization specifies that this does not concern nutritional supplements, the distribution of drinking water and support for agricultural activities in the region. The amount of food aid involved was not specified, but the United States is the largest humanitarian contributor to Ethiopia. “This diversion once again strikes an innocent civilian population,” the statement continued, noting that “millions of people are living with acute food insecurity.”
The break comes six months after the Ethiopian federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front signed a “Cessation of Hostilities Agreement” on November 2, ending two years of brutal and deadly war. On Tuesday, the United States welcomed in a press release the “significant progress” made in the implementation of this agreement even if the challenges remain numerous.
During the conflict, Tigray and its six million inhabitants were long deprived of assistance. Since then, “84% of the region is experiencing a food crisis”, according to the WFP. Northern Ethiopia “has become more accessible”, but the aid is not reaching “the required scale”, underlined the UN humanitarian agency (OCHA) in early April.
