(Washington) The United States announced Wednesday to suspend “until further notice” its food aid to the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia, ravaged by years of conflict, due to the diversion of part of this help.
“We have made the difficult decision to pause all USAID food assistance to the Tigray region until further notice,” said the USAID Administrator in a statement. United States for Development and Humanitarian Assistance), Samantha Power.
And this because part of this aid has been “diverted and sold on the local market”, she adds.
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,” he said. She.
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, stressing that “millions of people live in acute food insecurity”.
This break comes six months after the signing on November 2 between the Ethiopian federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) of a “Cessation of Hostilities Agreement” ending two years of brutal war. and murderous.
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 deprived of assistance for a long time. Humanitarian aid is now reaching the region, but remains insufficient when around 90% of its population depends on it.
Northern Ethiopia “has become more accessible”, but the aid does not reach “the required scale”, underlined the UN humanitarian agency (Ocha) in early April.