News - Yemen: Foreign Minister Jamal Amer met on Tuesday in Sana'a with Pierre Onoura, the Resident Representative of the World Food Programme (WFP), and his deputy.

During the meeting, the Minister expressed dissatisfaction with the UN program's repeated importation of contaminated food due to poor transportation and storage conditions. He stressed that such actions turn aid into a means of endangering beneficiaries’ lives instead of supporting their survival.

The Minister emphasized the importance of preventing such serious violations in the future, ensuring that all food aid provided by the WFP complies with international standards and specifications and has adequate shelf life.

In response, the WFP representative and his deputy apologized sincerely for the incident and assured that it would not be repeated.

Onoura presented a report on the program’s action plan for the first quarter of 2025, its efforts to increase the number of beneficiaries in the upcoming year, and the implementation of the remaining elements of the 2024 action plan.

The Foreign Minister instructed the formation of a committee comprising members from the Ministry’s International Cooperation Sector, the Ministries of Social Affairs and Health, and the General Authority for Standards and Specifications. The committee is tasked with inspecting the contaminated food shipment, sorting it, and submitting a detailed report on its findings.

Since the beginning of the US-Saudi aggression on Yemen, which has led to widespread famine in many of the country’s provinces, the WFP has faced recurring criticism for providing spoiled or contaminated food aid to the Yemeni people. Despite its role in delivering humanitarian assistance, the WFP has repeatedly sent substandard and unsafe food products, exacerbating the dire conditions faced by the Yemeni population.

In 2022, the WFP sent a shipment containing 250,000 bags of spoiled flour to Yemen. This shipment did not meet the approved standard specifications and was promptly rejected by Yemen’s Supreme Council for Humanitarian Affairs, which called for the entire shipment to be re-exported. The Council emphasized that such shipments, which do not meet quality standards, put the lives of the beneficiaries at risk rather than providing essential help.

In addition to spoiled flour, there have been significant concerns over shipments of contaminated food products. In September 2021, the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation's General Department of Plant Protection, located in the port of Hodeidah, seized over 5,400 tons of green and dry peas that were infested with warehouse pests. This shipment, which was also provided by the WFP, was deemed unfit for human consumption due to its contamination and poor handling during transportation. The shipment violated the plant quarantine laws, as it was transported in worn-out, unclean containers that were not suitable for carrying food intended for human consumption.

This was not an isolated incident. Just two months earlier, another shipment of 1,768 tons of infected peas from Ukraine had been seized in Hodeidah, further highlighting the recurring problem with the quality of food aid being sent to Yemen by the WFP.