Aid workers warn ‘people are dying and they're going to continue dying' as funding cuts hit

The Guardian

14-03-2025

Cuts to food assistance by the US, Britain and others are already leading to more people starving to death around the world, experts have warned.
As the United Nations and other agencies try to understand just how badly President Donald Trump's announced 83% cut in funding to USAid will affect the world's most vulnerable people, the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) has said its aid provision in Somalia is being reduced, after last month's estimate that 4.4 million people in the east African nation will be pushed into malnutrition from April because of drought, global inflation and conflict.
This follows the WFP halving food rations for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and a similar cut in rations for refugees in Kenya, which sparked protests last week.
Elizabeth Campbell, director of ODI Global Washington, a thinktank focused on inequality, said the cuts '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,' she said. 'There is no other donor or group of donors who can fill that void, certainly not in the short term.'
Aid workers also fear that successful malnutrition and cash-assistance programmes may be sacrificed to focus more on food packages as a result of the sudden funding shortages and pressure from the US government, which sees political benefits in buying up surplus domestic produce for food aid.
The world had 281.1 million people facing high levels of severe food insecurity in 2023, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) most recent report, but the 'stop work' orders issued by the US government in January have probably pushed millions more into hunger.
As well as the cuts increasing malnutrition, aid workers are concerned that they will also affect the ability to treat them because of the closure of health clinics. According to the FAO, there are 36 million acutely malnourished people, including 10 million with severe malnutrition.
The situation has been compounded by cuts to the UK aid budget from 0.58% of the UK's gross national income to 0.3% – a cut of about £6bn – to pay for increased defence spending.
There are also concerns other donor countries may follow suit as they step up spending on arms, including Germany – the second-biggest overseas aid donor – where the incoming chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has pledged a significant increase in defence spending.
Rein Paulsen, FAO's emergencies director, said food aid was now being directed to only a limited number of the most extreme immediate cases.
'About 200 million people in severe need – who are just one small shock or stress away from being in extreme need – are left behind,' he said. 'The support being provided is focused on the very short term, aimed at keeping people alive for the coming weeks or months.'
One aid worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said their organisation was already seeing the effects of the 'life-killing' cuts, with beneficiaries in Somalia forced into debt to buy food and a halt to a nutrition programme for breastfeeding mothers and children.
Meg Sattler, of Ground Truth Solutions, which surveys recipients of aid, said malnourished children in Somalia were now dying as a result. She said her organisation had documented aid deliveries stopping in Darfur – the worst-hit region of Sudan's civil war – and families having the cash payments they relied on stopped.
'The reality is people are dying and they're going to continue dying,' said Sattler.
There is significant uncertainty about how the aid sector will respond to cuts by the US, Britain and most other European countries, and also concern that cash assistance and longer-term nutritional support could be sacrificed for a greater focus on in-kind assistance.
Over the past 20 years there has been a growing move away from direct delivery of aid – such as sacks of grain being imported and distributed by an international organisation – to giving people small cash payments to allow them to make decisions for themselves and their families.
The approach has proved highly successful and also keeps a better balance for economies as people can buy their food locally, supporting traders and markets, instead of having to walk, often for many miles, to collect heavy sacks of imported rations from distribution centres. Cash payments now make up more than a third of WFP's food assistance, amounting to $2.8bn in 2023.
This year the UN appealed for $47bn (£36bn) for humanitarian needs, with food security accounting for a third of those requirements. In its call to support five regional refugee response programmes for 2024 – for Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Sudan, South Sudan and Syria – the UN said it would be targeting at least 20 million refugees.
Paulsen said 85% of the UN's humanitarian aid went on in-kind food and cash payments. He said that even in crisis zones, emergency agriculture could help prevent hunger more efficiently than direct food aid, with FAO assistance helping to produce $2.7bn worth of food in 2022 for a cost of $470m, and gave people more predictable and nutritious sources of food. Paulsen said such projects with farmers meant that 50 million people would not need emergency aid.
But there are fears that the US will now revert to the outdated policies of aid delivery, especially in shipping grain.
The US already buys up surplus produce from its farmers and distributes it as aid. In 2022, USAid spent $2.6bn procuring 1.8m tonnes of goods from US producers – including sorghum, maize, beans, rice and vegetable oil.
Campbell said the political motivation was likely to win out over what had proved to deliver the best results. 'They have to have a market and a place to put their excess wheat and the way they have been doing it is that the US government was 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 said.
Alexandra Rutishauser-Perera, head of nutrition for Action Against Hunger, said the aid sector was again in 'emergency mode' to feed people in crisis, after setbacks from Covid, a series of conflicts and the climate crisis. Aid agencies would increasingly need to rely on fundraising from the public and from private donors to provide the more comprehensive programmes on malnutrition and food security, she said.
While the shift towards cash assistance was seen as progress, many in the global south wanted to see international agencies go much further, empowering governments and local organisations, which are too often not consulted on their own communities.
Dr Rattan Lal, an Indian-born scientist who was awarded the 2020 World Food prize for his work on soil fertility, said there should be no shortages of food anywhere in the world, but that people needed to be given the ability to produce their own.
'Famine is really a human-made tragedy,' he said. 'Food insecurity and malnutrition is not because we are not producing enough. It is a problem of poverty, access, war, political strife and other social-economic issues.'
He said sub-Saharan Africa, where food insecurity was high, had the land and conditions to become self-sufficient but investment was needed to help agriculture thrive.
'We need action to ensure everyone can produce locally. What has happened in US politics now will happen again and again, and the solution is be self-sufficient,' he said.
Degan Ali, the Somalian-born co-founder of the Network for Empowered Aid Response (Near), of civil society organisations from developing countries, said other than in situations where government rule had broken down, emergency aid should be organised locally.
She said that international aid groups had grown and taken on the role of governments, disempowering instead of assisting them, including in Somalia.
'You haven't created any food self-sufficiency, any systems where people don't need you any more. You haven't helped people go back to their farms, rebuild their farms, get out of these camps and go back to farming,' she said.
'Part of reinventing the new system is to say we're done with the old aid model, where we balloon international organisations and the UN agencies. The system is so broken because there's no incentive to scale down. There's no incentive to say: 'I don't need the money, go give it to the government, give it to local organisations.''