Tigray, 05 July, 2023 / 9:53 pm (ACI Africa).
The Secretary General of Caritas Internationalis (CI) is calling on the World Food Programme (WFP) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to resume food aid to the needy in Ethiopia, where a section of the population is “starving to death”.
On June 9, WFP announced the move to suspend food aid to the Horn of Africa country claiming that the “donations were being diverted from people in need.” A day earlier, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had made a similar announcement.
Earlier, in May, relief agencies had suspended food aid to the Tigray region citing “widespread and systematic” diversion of food meant for hungry people.
In a Monday, July 3 statement, CI Secretary General, Alistair Dutton, says, “People are starving to death. In recent weeks, hunger has killed hundreds of people in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region as a result of food shortage. This is neither humane nor moral.”
While theft of food and corruption around distribution of aid should not be tolerated, and while there is need for thorough investigation, including putting in place robust accountability mechanisms to prevent future aid diversion, “innocent people cannot be the ones that suffer in the meantime,” Mr. Dutton has been quoted as saying.
