Scoop: US halts some Yemen aid, plays diplomatic hardball with Houthis

The Biden administration is withholding tens of thousands of tons of wheat destined for hungry people in northern Yemen, part of a hardball diplomatic effort to help the United Nations compel the region’s ruling Houthi rebel movement to ensure that aid is delivered to those most in need, according to several humanitarian and diplomatic sources. The move is aimed at strengthening the World Food Programme’s leverage in stalled negotiations with the Houthi leadership over the agency’s proposal to redirect food deliveries to districts with the highest levels of acute hunger. A senior official with the Rome-based food agency told Devex it may have to pause its aid operations if it can’t secure an agreement with the Houthis. It comes just three years after the U.S. and the U.N. suspended assistance, citing the Iranian-backed Houthis’ interference in aid delivery and theft of U.N. food. “We are still distributing” food in northern Yemen, said Corinne Fleischer, WFP’s regional director for the Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Europe, who traveled to Yemen early last month in an unsuccessful effort to secure an agreement. “But if, you know, we don’t come to a conclusion in our negotiations with the Houthis … we will have to pause.” The crisis is playing out against a backdrop of longstanding allegations by the U.S. State Department, U.N. investigators, and human rights advocates that the Houthis have diverted international aid to their followers, aiding the recruitment of soldiers, and indoctrination of young girls and boys, while denying assistance to the families of youngsters who refused to serve in the military. Some observers fear the Houthis have harnessed food distribution to radicalize the country’s population and transform an extremist Shia movement into a regional force with ambitions well beyond the country’s border. “There is significant and compelling evidence that the Houthis have weaponized food aid to put pressure on families to send children to become soldiers,” said Gregory Johnsen, a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, who was contracted to co-author a report for the U.S. Agency for International Development that addresses child recruitment. The Houthis employ a “carrot and stick” approach, Johnsen added, rewarding families that contribute to the war effort with food baskets and threatening to withhold it from those that don’t. “This is not something new in Yemen. It’s not really news,” Baraa Shiban, a Yemeni researcher who once previously served as an adviser to the Yemeni embassy in London, told Devex. “They engage in public recruitment from schools, mosques, and neighborhoods and one of the ways they have managed to do this is by trading humanitarian aid.” Houthi loyalists serve as gatekeepers, or supervisors, in most neighborhoods in northern Yemen and are responsible for recruiting youngsters into indoctrination camps and the military, Shiban said. “The supervisors have a huge amount of control over the aid coming into almost all neighborhoods.” “The aid agencies can’t implement programs or projects, they can’t implement anything if the supervisors don’t approve their presence.” WFP’s Fleischer countered that the agency has imposed a “very robust monitoring system” and that “we have no reports now of food not reaching the intended beneficiaries.” The current standoff, she claimed, is largely driven by a dramatic cutback in donor assistance that is forcing the food agency to do more with less in Yemen and other conflict zones around the globe. “We are in direct touch with the beneficiaries. If there was food not reaching them at scale we would know and we would make them stop,” she said. “We do 15,000 site visits every year. We call about 15,000 beneficiaries every month to verify that they have received the food and the full quantity of food and then we have this toll-free hotline where we receive up to 20,000 calls a month.” “This is actually about having an operation that is in sync with our funding prospects that we have,” she added. “We’ve been living and we’ve been organizing a ‘hands-to-mouth’ for at least three to four years.” But Fleischer acknowledged that a critical component of the U.N. tracking system — the use of biometrics to identify aid recipients — has been terminated. The move to shutter the program followed demands by the Houthis to turn over data on beneficiaries to the government. “We can’t continue with the biometrics because we simply cannot trust the authorities with personal identity information,” Fleischer said in a phone interview with Devex. USAID declined to comment on whether it was withholding food aid to Yemen or whether it had evidence that food aid was being stolen or diverted by the Houthis. A spokesperson for the aid agency said “WFP is a critical partner of USAID and we are supportive of ongoing WFP efforts focused on helping food assistance reach the most vulnerable Yemenis.” ‘We will prioritize the starving people’ Yemen’s Houthi Shia minority seized control of the northern capital of Sanaa in September 2014, forcing Yemen’s internationally recognized president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, to flee the capital in early 2015. That same month, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and several other Arab countries entered the war in a failed campaign to drive the Iranian-backed Houthis from power, setting the stage for a protracted war that transformed Yemen into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. The U.S. — which backed the Saudi-led coalition — has since ended military support for the Saudis. The current food crisis came to a head in August, when USAID ordered the MV African Piper and the MV African Kestrel cargo ships to dock in ports in Singapore and Fujairah, on the coast of the United Arab Emirates. The two vessels — each carrying 30,000 metric tons of wheat bound for WFP in Yemen — are being held pending an agreement on access. USAID declined to comment on the shipments, but a U.S. official said that 60,000 metric tons of wheat “was a fraction of our overall food assistance to the country.” “Food distribution is ongoing at the moment and not currently impacted by movements of future food shipments,” a USAID spokesperson said. The diplomatic standoff has severe humanitarian implications for one of the world’s lowest-income countries, one that depends on foreign imports for the vast majority of its food — some 83% of Yemenis daily caloric intake is imported. When former President Donald Trump’s administration decided more than three years ago to halt food assistance in Houthi-controlled territory, it faced intense political resistance from the U.S. and major international charities. In August 2020, CARE, the International Rescue Committee, Mercy Corps, the Norwegian Refugee Council, Oxfam, and Save the Children USA issued a written appeal to reverse course. “What we learned from 2020 is that what works is a coordinated approach by donors and aid agencies that is targeted; in other words where we only suspend programs when we can’t deliver in a principled way,” said Scott Paul, Oxfam America’s associate director for peace and security. The U.N. food agency currently provides food assistance to some 9.5 million Yemeni civilians, Fleischer said, but a funding crunch has forced it to dramatically reduce the size of the daily ration provided for each family to about 700 kilocalories, or some 40% of what is considered an adequate nutritional food basket. In an effort to ensure the survival of those facing the most severe levels of acute hunger, WFP has proposed cutting the number of aid recipients to 6.6 million and ramping up the size of their daily rations. “We will prioritize the starving people and not give to those … who are also hungry, but who are less starving,” Fleischer said. “We know which ones are the districts where emergency hunger is highest … and this is the discussion we are having. The Houthis are not in agreement.” “We’re concerned under the current arrangement and given current funding levels, the neediest in Yemen aren’t getting a sufficient food ration,” a U.S. government official told Devex. The Houthi leadership — which rules 70% to 80% of the 34 million population — has rejected the proposal on the grounds that it could foment a backlash from residents of communities cut off from aid. “The authorities are very clear and they’re actually making a valid point: If we reduce our assistance to, you know, 3 million people in the north that will create tension in communities and they are worried about not being able to contain the security of our staff and our partners,” Fleischer said. “We do need to come to a smarter program, we do need to prioritize the people that are most hungry,” she added. “We’ve tried with the authorities to come to a smaller smarter program, where we prioritize, you know, the most hungry people and in line with our funding.” ‘Children are dying right now’ The Yemen standoff comes at a particularly sensitive time as U.N. and USAID face decreasing budget lines along with increasing scrutiny of the integrity of their aid operations, after revelations of aid theft in several African missions. According to figures provided to Devex by WFP, in 2021, WFP’s $2.2 billion food program was largely fully funded but it fell short by more than $300 million the following year, accounting for 84% of its needs. So far this year, only 40% of WFP’s Yemen operations are funded, with $1.17 billion in contributions, compared with $2.95 billion in estimated needs. Earlier this year, USAID froze funding to its large aid operation after the revelation that Ethiopian authorities were selling WFP food on the commercial market. Devex also revealed that U.N. investigators uncovered systemic aid theft in camps for Somalia’s internally displaced people. The case resulted in the European Union pausing funding to WFP’s operations there, according to a follow-up story by Reuters. “The Houthis continued to benefit from confiscation of state resources, taxes on the business sector, and diversion of humanitarian assistance,” the State Department claimed in its 2022 Human Rights Report. The U.N. panel of experts, which was established by the U.N. Security Council in 2014 to monitor sanctions violations in Yemen, “documented cases in which families were threatened with removal from the beneficiaries list if they refused to allow their children to join Houthi forces. “The Panel received evidence of abuse, harassment and continuous obstruction by the Houthis of a specific humanitarian organization to change its policy,” the panel reported. “The abuse included physical violence, arbitrary arrests and detention, denial of visa entry, expulsion of senior staff, restrictions on movement of personnel and supplies, and interference with activities and choice of service providers.” “The Houthi group uses the humanitarian aid provided to Yemenis by the international community as a weapon to starve Yemenis and as [a] means to attract and recruit children,” the Mayyun Organization for Human Rights wrote in an August 2021 report. It claimed that low-income families were effectively forced to barter their children in exchange for aid and other perks, including tax breaks on water, schools, and rent. “Monthly relief supplies are exchanged for the children’s conscription and enrollment in ‘cultural’ courses. After completing the courses, children are usually hauled off to combat training camps,” according to a recent report, entitled Child Warrior by the rights group, which was released in September 2023. The report covers the period from July 2021 to December 2022. “According to citizen testimonies, growing societal refusal to give up their children to war promoted the Houthi group to blackmail destitute families with their monthly allotment of food,” the report states. In the summer of 2019, WFP suspended some aid to Yemen, citing the Houthis rampant theft of food. “Let me be crystal clear; children are dying right now because of this,” David Beasley, then executive director general of WFP, told the U.N. Security Council in 2019. “But like in every war, there are those who stand to make a profit and they will do everything to obstruct and delay … no one associated with the United Nations should stand idly by while this happens.” To restore funding, the Houthis agreed to a number of U.N. safeguards, including a biometric system that enabled the food agency to track aid to each individual recipient. But WFP was compelled to halt the biometric registration program in January 2023, “after Houthi authorities raided the offices of one of WFP’s third-party monitoring partners, arresting some of its staff and charging the company’s director with alleged crimes, carrying the possibility of a death sentence,” a WFP spokesperson told Devex in an emailed response to questions. “We would not want to resume biometric registration without assurances for the safety of WFP and partner employees and the protection of beneficiary data.” WFP is now trying to undertake a more granular so-called reregistration and retargeting program to determine who is in the greatest need of assistance, and the Houthis have agreed to a pilot program for retargeting aid, Fleischer said. However, it remains unclear how extensive the pilot program is and whether it has already begun operating. “Yemen is undoubtedly one of the most difficult humanitarian environments in the world to operate and there is no way that anybody can guarantee that 100 percent of aid reaches those most in need,” the WFP spokesperson told Devex. “When reports or allegations of diversion are received, we take swift action to ensure food reaches intended beneficiaries without interference. WFP donors and partners understand the risks and we have a strong record of managing and mitigating these risks effectively and preventing famine from taking hold in the country.” The U.S. government official said Washington is “supportive of WFP efforts to retarget. These efforts have been coordinated with and are widely supported by the U.N. and other donors.” Update, Oct. 13, 2023: This article has been updated to include an additional comment from a USAID spokesperson.