ADDIS ABABA: The World Food Programme said Tuesday that it was suspending support for 650,000 famished women and children in Ethiopia because of a lack of funding.
The UN company warned they were among 3. 6 million people in Ethiopia who would no longer have access to food aid in the coming months without serious new financing.
” WFP is being forced to halt care for 650,000 famished women and children in May due to insufficient money,” it said in a speech.
” WFP had planned to approach two million mothers and children with life-saving feeding support in 2025,” it added.
The WFP, like additional support firms, has been caught in the sights of revenue cuts by US President Donald Trump, who signed an executive order freezing all foreign support for three weeks immediately after his inauguration in January.
It comes as many European countries have even reduced support spending.
More than 10 million people are facing hunger in the west African country of around 130 million, the UN company said.
Ethiopia is also recovering from a brutal civil war between national forces and separatists in the northwestern region of Tigray between November 2020 and November 2022 that killed at least 600,000 people.
Around one million people, a fifth of Tigray’s people, are also displaced.
There are also continuing military problems in Ethiopia’s two most popular areas, Amhara and Oromia, that have displaced hundreds of thousands.
The WFP warned that the murder was disrupting charitable activities, restricting its capacity to “reach over half a million susceptible people in the region”.
Ethiopia is also seeing a surge of migrants from neighbouring Sudan, gripped by civil war since April 2023, and South Sudan, much marred by volatility.
The WFP added that money and food aid for up to one million immigrants may also stop in June “if more money is not received and the number of individuals fleeing murder in South Sudan continues”.
Ethiopia, a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa, is likewise facing severe drought, especially in its Somali area on the frontier with Somalia.
Funding deficit
Amid the growing needs, the WFP said it was facing a shortfall of$ 222 million for the April-September time in Ethiopia.
” I think this is an important time to remind the world and our donors and others that the charitable position in Ethiopia is not very good, and it’s really going to crumble,” Zlatan Milisic, a WFP region director, told AFP.
Last week, the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development ( OECD ) said development assistance was already dropping worldwide before the USAID cuts.
It said assistance fell by 7. 1 cent between 2023 and 2024, the initial decline in six decades, as many countries slashed their finances.
