Investigations reveal that witnesses in Tigray relief theft by senior United Nations agency officials, US top diplomat in Ethiopia and military suspect the World Food Programme (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.

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.

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. 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 US 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 tonnes 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 Prime Minister Ahmed 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 tonnes of wheat and 215,000 litres of food oil. Fiseha said seven people had been arrested and 186 suspects identified, but didn’t name anyone. He said in an interview 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.

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 five per cent in February 2023 to 11 per cent 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 per cent and 80 per cent 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 said 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 says it resumed food distribution as soon as the government implemented new safeguards. USAID called the aid suspension “a measure of last resort” with “very real and impactful consequences.”

Inside the WFP, the troubles in Ethiopia have triggered a major reassessment of the organisation’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 said 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 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?”

• A Reuters report