India, Oct. 30 -- Famine relief is meant to save lives, but a shipment can carry a lot more than just food. According to the Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute, a weed is believed to have entered Ethiopia by accident through food aid shipments. The plant is spreading rapidly, causing a drop of up to 90% in forage production in some areas.

In the 1980s, Ethiopia relied on foreign aid, with the United States being one of the contributing nations. The scale of the effort is apparent in a 1987 paper from the U.S. Agency for International Development that sits in the State Department's historical record. Dated October 30, 1987, it says the Ethiopian government and the United Nations estimated that approximately five million people would require...