Cuts to food aid put more than 3 million malnourished people at risk in Ethiopia

Food aid for Ethiopia is set to be cut in half in 2025 compared to just last year, with more than 3 million currently facing the loss of life-saving food assistance, according to the World Food Programme (WFP).

“This is not normal. We have not faced such a drop in our funding in a long time,” WFP Ethiopia spokesperson Claire Nevill told The Independent.

According to Nevill, WFP’s operations in Ethiopia have around thirty key donors, including USAID, who have – unlike in other areas – exempted Ethiopia from its programme of cuts. But aid cuts from other donors mean that Ethiopia is facing a funding gap of $222 million over the next six months.

Unless that new financing is urgently found nutrition support for the 3.6 million people that WFP currently supports in Ethiopia is under threat, said Nevill.

Earlier this week, WFP Ethiopia had announced the suspension of malnutrition treatments for 650,000 malnourished women and children due to funding problems. These treatments are a form of nutritional medicine – in the form of peanut paste or corn-soy porridge – that help bring malnourished people back to health over the course of weeks.

Speaking to The Independent, Nevill said that WFP has managed to source commodities to treat malnutrition, which should be on their way to Ethiopia from Djibouti in the coming days. These should be able to protect WFP’s malnutrition programmes “probably until the summer”, said Nevill.

But those treatments represent only a fraction of WFP’s operations in a country where 10.2 million people are coping with food insecurity. Other programmes include the provision of daily school meals to about 470,000 children, and the delivery of food assistance to populations totalling more than three million people over the first quarter of 2025.

The squeeze in funding means that ration cuts in food assistance are already the norm, with severely food-insecure Ethiopians receiving 80 per cent rations, and refugees receiving 60 per cent rations.

“Those are cuts to food levels already deemed the minimum possible food assistance for people,” said Nevill.

But even those food supplies look set to dry up if new support is not urgently found. “It looks like by June we might not be able to support the influx of refugees coming into the country,” said Nevill. “We are really badly in the red, and it looks like we won’t be able to maintain our current response.”

WFP is not the only organisation in the country feeling the squeeze, with Oxfam country director in Ethiopia, Yodit Zenebe Mekuria, telling The Independent that their programmes are also feeling the squeeze.

“People living through unthinkable circumstances have now been deprived of lifesaving food, water, medical and hygiene support,” said Mekuria. “As programmes are forced to halt and scale back, their suffering will grow exponentially as needs rise.”

Recipients of WFP nutrition support in Ethiopia include 22-year-old Segen and her 14-month-old daughter Kisauet, from Tigray. A subsistence farmer with no formal occupation, Segen described to WFP on a recent fact-finding mission how insufficient food during her pregnancy and subsequent low levels of breast milk had left Kisauet malnourished.

“There was wasn't enough food while she was inside my womb,” she said. “When she was born, she was 2kg. It was just scary to hold her, she was just tiny.”

The malnutrition treatments that the family has received - which are currently under threat from budget pressures - have been transformative.

“She has changed so much, I didn't think she would stand up and walk away as a human being at all,” said Segen. “Now I find her running around.”

32-year-old Desta and her 8 month-old daughter Capital also receive food aid rations and malnourishment treatment. They currently reside in a camp for internally-displaced people after losing their homes during the Tigray War, the two-year civil war in the country’s North that ended in 2022.

After the war ended, they were allowed to return home, but found soldiers living in their house, forcing them to remain in the camp, Desta said.

“We are in a very bad situation here. We were good [back in our old home], we had jobs, we had agriculture, but there is no work and no agriculture here,” she said.

“Here we just sit around. If we could get it, we would work,” she continued. “All we have is enough food.”

According to Nevill, the situation facing Ethiopia represents a “perfect storm of overlapping crises”.

Communities are still recovering from a prolonged drought which saw multiple seasonal rain failures across 2020-23, while the story of Desta and Capital attests to how much of the country is continuing to recover from the affects of war.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of refugees are fleeing into the country from neighbouring countries, including Sudan, while difficult economic conditions, including high inflation stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic aftermath, remain a problem.

Recent months have also seen several earthquakes internally displace tens of thousands of Ethiopians.

At the same time, crises in territories including Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, and Afghanistan have pushed food needs up globally, said Nevill, while many donor countries are now making the political decision to focus their spending more on domestic priorities.

The Horn of Africa is also one of the most climate vulnerable regions of the world, and is highly susceptible to challenges including prolonged droughts, devastating floods, and desertification.

The WFP would like to be investing in more climate resilience programmes to help support communities through the climate crisis, for example in pushing climate-resilient agricultural practices, or in developing novel irrigation schemes.

Around 30 per cent of spending in Ethiopia goes to such programmes, with 70 per cent going towards emergency responses.

“Humanitarian food aid should be a last resort, and we want to shift things even further towards helping people to strengthen their resilience in the face of climate shocks and ultimately build long term food security,” said Nevill. “But any reprioritisation of funding this year is currently looking very unlikely.”

This story is part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project