Food Aid Targeting in Ethiopia: A Study of Household Food Insecurity and Food Aid Distributions

Introduction For more than two decades, annual distributions of hundreds of thousands of metric tons of food aid have been channeled into safety net programs designed to alleviate the impact of food shortages in Ethiopia. Despite the massive size and duration of this effort, there remain many unanswered questions about its effectiveness and about its longer-term impact on the population it is designed to benefit. Recently, government and donor concern about Ethiopia’s increasing dependence on food aid, coupled with the implicit demand for greater accountability in its use, has spawned great interest and debate about how efficient the food aid targeting system is in ensuring that food reaches those who need it the most (Sharp 1997). A second, related fear is that large quantities of food aid, if poorly targeted, may depress market prices for food and may result in domestic production disincentives (Jayne and Molla 1995; Molla et al. 1997; Maxwell et al. 1994). Both of these concerns are expressed in Ethiopia’s National Policy on Disaster Prevention and Management (TGE 1993). This analysis note examines food aid targeting efficiencies and the determinants of food aid distributions in rural Ethiopia during the 1995-96 agricultural year. It is based on survey data from a nationwide, randomly selected sample of 4,166 farm households. The findings and conclusions presented here are intended to help inform ongoing debate in the area of food aid targeting. Food aid targeting is here defined as “restricting the coverage of an intervention to those who are perceived to be most at risk in order to maximise the benefit of the intervention whilst minimizing the cost” (Jaspars and Young 1995). Targeting errors of inclusion (distributions to food secure weredas and households) and errors of exclusion (no distribution to food insecure weredas and households) are estimated by comparing household-level food availability with household food aid receipts. Household-level food availability is measured as all inflows of food grains over the 1995-96 agricultural year (production, purchases, exchanges received) minus all food outflows (sales and exchanges given). Food aid receipts are measured at the household level by type of commodity, month received, and type of program (e.g., free food, food for work). Survey results show that, overall, 20.0% of farm households participated in food aid programs during the 1995-96 reference period. Free food distributions account for the largest share at 64.6% of food aid received by sampled households, with the remaining 35.4% being distributed through food-for-work programs.