The World Food Program has started distributing food aid in Ethiopia's war-scarred Tigray region in a test of new monitoring measures, the United Nations agency said on Tuesday. WFP and U.S. aid agency USAID halted food aid to Africa's second-most populous country in June after discovering that supplies were not reaching those in need, raising fears that millions of Ethiopians would be left in desperate straits. "On July 31, the World Food Program started testing and verifying enhanced controls and measures for delivering food assistance in four districts of Tigray," it said in a message to AFP. A spokesperson for USAID, the U.S. government's main international aid agency, told AFP that U.S. food assistance in Ethiopia remains paused. "We are committed to resuming food assistance as quickly as possible once we can be confident our assistance is reaching the most vulnerable that it is intended for," the spokesperson said.

Source: Ethiopian News August 08, 2023 21:12 UTC