The plant is spreading rapidly, causing a drop of up to 90% in forage production in some areas. Famine relief is meant to save lives, but a shipment can carry a lot more than just food.
A weed is believed to have entered Ethiopia by accident through food aid shipments, according to the Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute .
The Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute says the weed, known scientifically as Parthenium hysterophorus, is believed to have been introduced accidentally in food aid shipments. Thus, neither source proves that U.S. food aid introduced parthenium to Ethiopia in the 1980s. In the 1980s, Ethiopia relied on foreign aid, with the United States being one of the contributing nations. Agency for International Development that sits in the State Department’s historical record. The paper also detailed what the U.S. had approved so far. The distribution was to be handled by four American private voluntary organizations. It never mentions parthenium. Still, it gives us an idea of how much food was coming into the country at that time. So where does parthenium come in? The institute does not identify the country that sent the food and does not give a year. What we can say is fairly simple. In the late 1980s, large amounts of relief food were moving into Ethiopia, and a government institute believes food aid is how this weed got here. That’s a good place to start a story, but it is still a belief and not an established fact. Every day the world moves food, plants and goods across borders, and tiny seeds can hitch a ride unnoticed. That doesn’t mean the sending of aid was a mistake. It does, however, suggest that checking what comes with supplies and spotting new plants early are some habits worth having.
The scale of the effort is apparent in a 1987 paper from the U.S. Dated October 30, 1987, it says the Ethiopian government and the United Nations estimated that approximately five million people would require emergency assistance in 1988. That relief would involve some 950,000 metric tons of imported food. That was 115,000 metric tons of emergency food, valued at $37 million, including transport, storage, and handling costs. Weeds are not mentioned in the 1987 paper. The 1987 paper says people were starving and the U.S. quickly acted to help.
