SPECIAL REPORT-UN food agency failed to act as U.S. aid was looted in Ethiopia

By Giulia Paravicini and Steve Stecklow

Oct 18 (Reuters) – On a scorching March afternoon last year, an American aid worker was sitting on a stool in 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.”

A HISTORY OF FAMINE

Ethiopia drew world attention as it struggled with famine in the 1970s and 1980s. Hundreds of thousands died as a result of starvation caused by drought and conflict. The hunger crisis was publicized by “Live Aid,” a trans-atlantic concert in 1985 that featured major rock stars and raised an estimated $100 million.

In the last three decades, Ethiopia made remarkable progress, especially in agriculture. Droughts and poor harvests no longer resulted in famines. But the country hasn’t been immune to what’s now the main cause of famine globally: war.

Ethiopia waged a brutal border war with neighboring Eritrea from 1998 to 2000. The countries signed a peace deal in 2018 that later earned Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, the Nobel Peace Prize. Then, in November 2020, Abiy went to war with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which had once ruled Ethiopia and still controls the Tigray region. Eritrea sent troops to back Abiy and, with the Ethiopian army, occupied most of Tigray.

The war, which ended in November 2022, killed tens of thousands and left millions hungry, making it one of the world’s deadliest conflicts in recent times. Though the fighting is over, hunger continues, with millions of Ethiopians still requiring food assistance, according to the UN.

The aid diversion uncovered in Tigray last year wasn’t the first such episode in Ethiopia. Theft and redirection of food and other foreign assistance have been occurring for several years, diplomats and aid officials say.

Just months after the war in Tigray broke out in November 2020, aid was being stolen.

In March 2021, two senior aid workers said they traveled to Adigrat, in Tigray, where they witnessed a distribution of food aid by Ethiopia’s Joint Emergency Operation Program, a food-assistance program funded by USAID. Instead of seeing people receiving the food, they saw sacks of USAID-donated grain being loaded into vehicles and donkey carts.

The vehicles had Eritrean license plates and were apparently headed to Eritrea, one of the aid workers said. The other worker reported the incident to WFP and USAID officials.

The Eritrean government denied its military received diverted food aid. “Why would we … steal paltry items donated to others?” a government official said in response to questions.

Also in 2021, a senior UN official saw multiple trucks with Eritrean license plates being loaded by uniformed Eritrean soldiers with what he believed was WFP food aid leaving Ethiopia and crossing into Eritrea. The official told Reuters that he reported what he observed to both the WFP and USAID. A diplomat corroborated that the official shared the information with the two aid organizations.

In another case, witnesses suspect the WFP of direct involvement in diverting food. In 2022, WFP officials instructed truck convoy leaders to drop aid off in areas in Tigray and Amhara where no aid recipients were present, according to two people familiar with the matter. One convoy of 20 aid trucks was sent to an area near Sheraro in Tigray, which at the time was occupied by Eritrean troops and had no aid recipients, they said.

QUESTIONABLE NAMES

Aid workers and diplomats describe a humanitarian system ripe for exploitation, with Ethiopian officials, not relief agencies, determining who needed help and who didn’t. Over the years, they said, the officials padded aid beneficiary lists with hundreds of thousands of questionable names.

In many countries, the WFP identifies and registers people who need food. In places including South Sudan, it uses biometric information, such as fingerprints, to guard against fraud. But in Ethiopia, until early last year the WFP relied on long handwritten lists of people provided by central and regional governments, according to five aid workers.

One described how Ethiopian authorities would provide lists of about 100,000 names. The WFP hired typists to input the names into spreadsheets, which exposed thousands of duplicates. The worker suspected that the governing authorities inflated the lists with redundant names so that they could skim the excess aid.

The WFP’s internal report lays out similar claims. It says that according to the WFP country director at the time in Ethiopia, the national government “had inflated the beneficiary numbers and that this was a major contributing factor to the alleged food aid diversion in the country.” It quotes him as saying: “The whole issue of food diversion…is linked to inflated numbers.”

The former WFP country director, Claude Jibidar, declined to comment on the quote.

Ethiopia’s relief agency said the government must lead humanitarian efforts as it’s responsible for its citizens, but denied any “systemic intent to inflate the beneficiary lists.” The Tigrayan government said it didn’t rule out that beneficiary lists sometimes were inflated.

‘INDUSTRIAL LEVEL’ DIVERSION

After Ethiopia signed a peace deal with the Tigrayans in November 2022, access to the region, which had been restricted, began to reopen. It was on one of USAID’s first visits back, in March 2023, that one of its workers spotted the wayward red truck.

USAID quickly began investigating. Its employees visited 63 flour mills and markets in seven Ethiopian regions from March to May 2023, according to the internal USAID presentation seen by Reuters. Its findings – including photographic evidence of mills “stuffed full of donor-funded food aid” – were shared with the European Union, Britain and other major donors.

The preliminary probe uncovered “industrial level” diversion in Tigray and other regions, the presentation states, with both the Ethiopian and Tigrayan armies “routinely” using donor-funded food assistance. One unidentified mill manager told USAID that his facility processed “enough donor-funded wheat” for the Ethiopian national army to feed 20,000 soldiers a month.

The presentation cites one alleged scheme in which the Ethiopian government appeared to be diverting U.S. food aid to private mills to make flour for Tigrayan soldiers following the peace agreement. A photograph of shipping records also showed that the Tigrayan army sent one mill about 3,000 tons of wheat in USAID sacks.

Ethiopia’s relief agency called USAID’s findings an attempt “to smear the Ethiopian army.” The Tigrayan government called the findings that its military used donor-funded food “preposterous” and “totally false.”

Tigrayan authorities also conducted an investigation into the diversion of food aid uncovered last year. Their conclusions are cited in the WFP’s report, which says the Trigrayans found that a wide range of actors – including businessmen, city leaders, soldiers and leaders of Abiy’s political party – engaged in stealing aid. Abiy’s spokesperson had no comment.

General Fiseha Kidanu, a senior official who led Tigray’s investigation, said in a local television interview in June 2023 that the diversion involved the theft of more than 7,000 tons of wheat and 215,000 liters of food oil. Fiseha said seven people had been arrested and 186 suspects identified, but didn’t name anyone. He told Reuters that a report on the investigation will soon be made public.

Ethiopia’s relief agency denied large quantities of food aid had been diverted by the Ethiopian army or the federal government. It said the government conducted its own investigation and took “robust” measures to prevent future mishandling of humanitarian supplies.

‘A VERY CHALLENGING TIME’

Based on their initial findings, USAID officials determined in April 2023 that it was no longer feasible to continue distributing food aid in Ethiopia until measures were implemented to ensure it actually reached the hungry. Food aid deliveries were suspended for months.

The impact was swift. A survey of about 5,100 households in Tigray found that the percentage facing severe hunger jumped from 5% in February 2023 to 11% in August 2023, according to the Tigray Nutrition Cluster, a humanitarian-aid network whose partners include USAID. The increase was driven in part by the “temporary halt of humanitarian distribution,” the study said.

Erdey Assefa, head of Yechila Primary Hospital, in central Tigray, said that after the aid cutoff, between 75% and 80% of mothers screened at the hospital were severely malnourished. The aid suspension “was a very challenging time,” he said. “Those who were in a moderate condition started to fall into a severe stage.”

People in camps for internally displaced people told Reuters they resorted to eating spiky cactus leaves to survive. Some had to sell possessions to buy food or medicine. At one camp in Adigrat, a community leader said five people died of starvation during the suspension and 120 people suffered extreme malnutrition.

“I sold a cooking pot and two blankets donated by the Red Cross to buy 25 kilos of maize so that my family could eat,” said Tsige Teklebirhan, a mother of four who lives in the camp.

The WFP told Reuters it resumed food distribution as soon as it implemented new safeguards. USAID called the aid suspension “a measure of last resort” with “very real and impactful consequences.”

THE WFP CLEARS ITSELF

Inside the WFP, the troubles in Ethiopia have triggered a major reassessment of the organization’s worldwide systems and processes. It says it has improved how it verifies that donated food gets to people who really need it with better tracking and monitoring. In Ethiopia, this includes GPS tracking for the WFP’s fleet of 500-plus trucks, more field monitors and a digital registry of families who are “food insecure.”

The WFP inspector general’s office focused its investigative report only on Tigray. A WFP spokesperson said the office has ongoing investigations in two other regions. The 25-page report on Tigray largely absolves the Ethiopian government and WFP’s own employees of responsibility in the diversion of aid.

The report acknowledges diversions and looting occurred in Tigray. But it found “insufficient evidence” of “large-scale” diversion of food aid. The inspector general’s office found that Ethiopian and Tigrayan government officials inflated beneficiary lists, causing the WFP to supply too much food aid. But the report stops short of accusing them of complicity in theft, saying there wasn’t enough evidence “to conclude that such action was deliberately carried out to divert humanitarian aid.”

In clearing itself of any wrongdoing, the WFP said it “found no indications” that its employees “were implicated in any fraudulent activity, corruption, collusion or theft.”

But the report did find fault with the hungry, singling them out as the main culprits.

Aid-diversion incidents were largely driven by food-aid recipients, the report says. The hungry resold some of their rations and obtained extra food fraudulently by registering their families multiple times, the report claims.

Some aid recipients in Ethiopia told Reuters they do sometimes sell some of their food rations, but out of desperation. “I got aid because I have health conditions,” said Leelity Gebreegizabher, a single mother of two in a camp in the town of Shire. “A local official helped me to get 15 kilos of food so that I could sell some of it to buy medicine.”

Abune Tesfaselassie, the bishop of Adigrat, said he felt “so frustrated” to learn from Reuters that the WFP report pins the diversion scheme on the hungry.

“They are living a tough life,” he said. “How can they be blamed by the international aid organizations?”

(Reporting by Giulia Paravicini and Steve Stecklow. Additional reporting by David Lewis. Edited by Peter Hirschberg.)

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