Experts warn that cuts to food assistance by the United States, Britain, and other countries are already causing more people to starve to death around the world.
As the United Nations and other agencies try to figure out how badly President Donald Trump’s announced 83% cut in funding to USAid will affect the world’s most vulnerable people, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) has announced that its aid provision in Somalia will be reduced, following last month’s estimate that 4.4 million people in the east African country will go hungry starting in April due to drought, global inflation, and conflict.
This comes after the World Food Programme (WFP) reduced food rations for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh by half and for refugees in Kenya by a similar amount, sparking protests last week.
According to Elizabeth Campbell, director of ODI Global Washington, a think tank focused on inequality, the reduction “will mean high malnutrition rates, starvation, and death”.
“The United States was by far the biggest global humanitarian donor, especially to the food sector, outstripping almost all other donors combined,” said Mrs. Obama. “There is no other donor or group of donors who can fill that void, certainly not in the short term.”
Aid workers are also concerned that successful malnutrition and cash-assistance programs would be lost in favor of food packages due to unforeseen financial shortfalls and pressure from the US government, which sees political benefits in purchasing surplus domestic produce for food aid.
According to the most recent UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimate, the world had 281.1 million people facing high levels of severe food insecurity in 2023, but the US government’s “stop work” orders issued in January likely plunged millions more into starvation.
Aid workers are concerned that the cuts will not only increase malnutrition but will also limit their ability to cure them due to the closing of health centers. According to the FAO, 36 million people are acutely malnourished, with 10 million experiencing severe malnutrition.
The issue has been exacerbated by cuts to the UK aid budget from 0.58% of GDP to 0.3%, a Ā£6 billion reduction to pay for increasing defence spending.
There are also concerns that other donor countries, such as Germany, the second-largest international aid provider, would follow suit by increasing defense spending, as the new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has stated.
According to Rein Paulsen, FAO’s emergencies director, food help is currently being allocated to just the most extreme and immediate instances.
“About 200 million people in severe need – who are just one small shock or stress away from being in extreme need – are left behind,” added the minister. “The support being provided is focused on the very short term, aimed at keeping people alive for the coming weeks or months.”
One charity worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, claimed his group was already experiencing the effects of the “life-killing” cuts, with clients in Somalia forced into debt to buy food and a nutrition programme for breastfeeding mothers and children halted.
Meg Sattler of Ground Truth Solutions, which conducts surveys of charity clients, stated that malnourished children in Somalia are already dying as a result. She stated that her organization had witnessed relief deliveries ceasing in Darfur, the most severely affected region of Sudan’s civil war, as well as families losing access to cash payments.
“The reality is people are dying and they’re going to continue dying,” Sattler told reporters.
There is enormous ambiguity about how the aid industry will respond to cuts by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the majority of European countries, as well as concerns that financial assistance and long-term nutritional support may be abandoned in favor of a larger emphasis on in-kind aid.
Over the last 20 years, there has been a shift away from direct distribution of help, such as bags of grain imported and distributed by an international organization, and toward giving people small cash contributions to allow them to make decisions for themselves and their families.
The technique has been tremendously effective and maintains a healthier economic balance by allowing people to buy their food locally, supporting traders and markets, rather than having to trek long distances to fetch large sacks of imported rations from distribution hubs. Cash contributions currently account for more than a third of WFP’s food aid, totaling $2.8 billion in 2023.
This year, the UN requested $47 billion (Ā£36 billion) for humanitarian aid, with food security accounting for one-third of the total. The UN announced in its call to assist five regional refugee response programmes for 2024, targeting at least 20 million refugees in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Sudan, South Sudan, and Syria.
According to Paulsen, 85% of the UN’s humanitarian relief was in the form of cash and in-kind food. He stated that even in crisis zones, emergency agriculture might help prevent hunger more efficiently than direct food aid, with FAO assistance helping to produce $2.7 billion worth of food in 2022 for a cost of $470 million, while also providing people with more dependable and nutritious food sources. According to Paulsen, such programs with farmers would eliminate the need for 50 million individuals to get humanitarian relief.
However, there are fears that the United States will again revert to old aid delivery procedures, particularly in terms of grain shipping.
The United States currently buys surplus produce from its farmers and distributes it as charity. In 2022, USAid spent $2.6 billion on 1.8 million tonnes of items from US producers, including sorghum, maize, beans, rice, and vegetable oil.
Campbell predicted that political motive would prevail over what had shown to produce the best results. “They needed a market and a place to store their excess wheat, and the way they did it was by buying it and giving it away for free.
“I think to the extent that US humanitarian food-assistance support continues, it is highly likely that it will be in kind,” she told reporters.
Alexandra Rutishauser-Perera, head of nutrition at Action Against Hunger, said the humanitarian industry was once again in “emergency mode” to feed people in crisis, following setbacks from Covid, a series of conflicts, and the climate crisis. Aid agencies would increasingly rely on public and private donations to provide more comprehensive malnutrition and food security programs, she added.
While the change to monetary assistance was viewed as progress, many in the global south wanted international agencies to go much further, strengthening governments and local organizations that are frequently ignored in their own regions.
Dr Rattan Lal, an Indian-born scientist who won the 2020 globe Food Prize for his work on soil fertility, believes there should be no food shortages anywhere in the globe, but people must be given the power to grow their own.
“Famine is really a human-made tragedy,” the politician remarked. “Food insecurity and malnutrition do not result from insufficient production. Poverty, access, war, political strife, and other social-economic challenges are all contributing factors.
He stated that Sub-Saharan Africa, which suffers from widespread food insecurity, has the land and circumstances to become self-sufficient, but that investment is required to make agriculture grow.
“We need to take action so that everyone can create locally. What has happened in US politics will happen again, and the remedy is to be self-sufficient,” he stated.
Degan Ali, a Somalian-born co-founder of the Network for Empowered help Response (Near), a coalition of developing-country civil society organizations, believes that emergency help should be organized locally, except in cases when government rule has broken down.
She claimed that international aid organizations had developed and taken on the function of governments, disempowering rather than supporting them, particularly in Somalia.
“You haven’t established any food self-sufficiency or systems in which people no longer want your services. You haven’t helped folks return to their farms, rebuild them, get out of these camps, and resume farming,” she remarked.
“Part of designing the new system is stating that we are done with the old aid paradigm of ballooning international organizations and UN agencies. The system is so flawed because there is no incentive to scale back. There is no incentive to say, ‘I don’t need the money; go donate it to the government or local organizations.'”