Targeting of food aid in rural Ethiopia : chronic need or inertia?

It determines both how food aid is allocated across rural regions, reflecting the targeting criteria of the federal government, and how aid is allocated within regions, reflecting the decisions of local authorities and NGOs. Major findings are as follows: (1) Very large disparities in incomes and assets exist across rural households in Ethiopia. Targeting of food aid to the poorest of the poor remains an important objective in food aid programs. (2) A large share of Ethiopia"s poorest people are not located in the poorest weredas (local administrative units), so that targeting only relatively poor weredas would miss a large percentage of needy people. Nonetheless, identifying and including the poorest weredas for food aid distribution is an important element of a well-targeted food aid program. (3) At the national level, food aid was only to some extent targeted according to income. Poorer households and poorer weredas had higher probabilities of receiving food aid than households or weredas with higher per capita incomes. But this varied considerably across regions. (4) There were very large targeting errors of exclusion. The amount of food aid distributed in 1995/96 was inadequate to meet the needs of households under the 25th per capita income percentile. (5) Distribution of free food was generally more effectively targeted according to household income than was food for work (FFW). However, there were wide variations in targeting across regions. Free food was most effectively targeted to the poor in Amhara Region, and least effectively targeted in the South. FFW was targeted to the poor most effectively in Tigray, but was almost totally unrelated to household per capita incomes in Amhara and the South. There are difficulties in accommodating the dual objectives of FFW, which include development objectives as well as hunger alleviation. (6) Significant differences existed in the amounts of per capita food aid allocated regionally; these differences were not related to observable household and wereda characteristics. Weredas in Tigray Region were more likely to receive both free food and FFW than were households in other regions. (7) The single most important factor associated with who received food aid in the survey year was who received food aid in the past. This was true at both the wereda and household levels. Also, the current spatial allocation of food aid correlated highly with the regions of greatest need during the 1984/85 famine in Ethiopia. The study concludes that there is a degree of inertia in the allocation of food aid geographically over time. This spatial inertia, which may stem from a variety of causes, has so far been ignored in both the theoretical targeting and the policy-related food aid literature. Implications for programming, policy, and research are noted in conclusion.