Source: Reuters

The town of Sheraro in the war-scarred Ethiopian region of Tigray, sipping traditional roasted coffee, when a red truck filled with sacks of grain came into view.

The 50-kilo bags were stamped USAID – short for the U.S. Agency for International Development, the world’s largest donor of food assistance. The grain was supposed to help some of the millions of people in Tigray who depend on food donations to survive.

But instead of heading to its intended destination – a camp filled with starving people – the red truck was moving in the wrong direction. The USAID worker, joined by several colleagues, decided to follow it.

USAID officials say they soon learned that thousands of tons of donated grain were being diverted to commercial mills and markets throughout Ethiopia. The chance discovery shocked USAID, which announced the bare outlines of the alleged scheme in May 2023 and said it had launched an investigation. The United Nations World Food Program – a major distributor of food aid and a key USAID partner in feeding the hungry in Ethiopia and globally – said it, too, would investigate.

The aid giants suspended food aid distribution throughout Ethiopia as they examined the matter, disrupting supplies to millions of hungry people for at least five months. They have yet to release findings or name suspects.

Yet humanitarian-aid workers and U.S. officials believe the caper marked one of the biggest thefts and diversions of food aid ever documented. While the total loss may never be known, a Tigrayan official has said that more than 7,000 tons of wheat were stolen – enough grain to feed more than 450,000 people for a month.

Cindy McCain, the head of the WFP, said in a public statement at the time that the UN body had “zero tolerance for theft or diversion.”

But a Reuters investigation found that the WFP was aware food aid was being stolen in Ethiopia for several years, and repeatedly failed to act. Aid was being funneled to the Ethiopian and Tigrayan armies as well as to the black market, according to an internal USAID slide presentation viewed by Reuters.

The WFP was warned by its own staff and other aid organizations as early as 2021 about food diversion occurring throughout the country, four UN workers and diplomats told Reuters. They said the WFP chose to look the other way amid the civil war then tearing the country apart: It feared the Ethiopian government might retaliate by limiting the number of trucks delivering aid to embattled Tigray.

The WFP told Reuters it lacked sufficient details to comment on those incidents of food diversion. An official with the Ethiopian Disaster Risk Management Commission, the country’s relief agency, denied the government would have limited the flow of aid into Tigray

Some U.S. officials privately accuse the UN food body of being untrustworthy. An internal WFP investigative report, seen by Reuters, cites a May 2023 cable from Washington’s top U.S. diplomat in Ethiopia at the time: “The scale and depth of diversion” in areas where the WFP managed food relief “calls into question WFP’s ability to be a faithful and principled” partner for distributing food in Ethiopia.

USAID employees discovered that donated food was being diverted across the country in a “systematic” way and on an “industrial level,” according to the presentation of the agency’s preliminary investigation, which covers the period March to May 2023. The Ethiopian military was regularly redirecting donor-funded wheat to private mills to be turned into flour for its soldiers, the presentation said. And “predatory racketeers” were manipulating the hungry into selling them their rations.

In its internal report, the WFP acknowledges aid was diverted to markets and mills on a large scale after it had delivered the food to its local partners for distribution to the needy. But it found no evidence that the organization itself was responsible. Instead, the report points to the civilians who were the intended recipients of the aid. The “diversion was primarily driven by beneficiaries” in Ethiopia, who sold some of their food rations, the January 2024 report says.

The food theft in Ethiopia shows how a global system designed to tackle hunger and prevent famine – comprised of UN agencies, non-governmental humanitarian groups and donor countries led by the U.S. – can be subverted by corruption, lax administrative controls and local government misrule. That system is already under enormous strain. Last year, nearly 282 million people in 59 countries and territories faced high levels of acute food insecurity. They included more than 36 million children under 5 years old who were acutely malnourished.

Stopping the distribution of food was a disaster,” said Abune Tesfaselassie Medhin, the bishop of the Catholic diocese of Adigrat, a city in Tigray. “People were dying, the health of children and elders worsened … It is a sin.”

This story, the first comprehensive account of the aid theft and its consequences for Ethiopians, is based on previously unreported findings of the WFP investigation and USAID’s preliminary probe. Reporters also interviewed more than 20 people familiar with the case, including U.S., UN and Ethiopian officials, diplomats and aid workers.

Who masterminded the food diversion scheme remains a mystery. USAID and the WFP are continuing to investigate.

In response to questions, the WFP said it takes “measures to investigate and prevent” the misuse of food assistance when it “detects the illegal sale of large quantities of humanitarian supplies.”

Ethiopian and Tigrayan officials denied their militaries received diverted food aid. The Tigrayan government said aid recipients often “contributed” to what it called its “citizen army.”

One outcome of the scam is clear: The scandal has left a rift between USAID and the WFP, the two giant humanitarian organizations that partner to provide life-saving food aid to millions of the world’s hungriest. USAID plans to phase out the WFP as its food distributor in Tigray and the rest of northern Ethiopia over the next nine months or so, turning to other aid groups instead, USAID officials told Reuters.

Both USAID and the WFP said they remain valued partners. USAID said its decision to use other aid groups in northern Ethiopia was based on “cost efficiencies” and “lower projected needs.”

“The diversion of food was a disgrace,” Andrew Mitchell, who served as Britain’s minister for Africa until July, told Reuters. “You can’t expect American taxpayers to go to the aid of starving people if those same taxpayers are then informed that the money has been stolen by the soldiery.”

The WFP continues to face food diversion and other crimes in Ethiopia, an internal document shows. The WFP’s “Monthly Incident Report” on Ethiopia for August reported 39 cases, including allegations of aid diversion, theft, the extortion of beneficiaries and the discovery of donated food for sale in local markets. WFP told Reuters these were “minor incidents” and didn’t indicate “large-scale diversion.”

U.S. Senator James E. Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, called the diversion of food aid “intolerable.”

“This system denied millions of people access to lifesaving aid while enabling corrupt officials and armed combatants to serve their own objectives,” he told Reuters. “Those responsible for diversion must be held accountable.”

www.thedotnews.com