UN Forced To Cut Food Aid To Millions Due To Funding Crisis

Owing to a crippling funding crisis, the United Nations has been forced to cut food, cash payments and assistance to millions of people in many countries. The funding crunch has seen its donations plummet by about half as acute hunger is hitting record levels, according to a top official.

At least 38 of the 86 countries where WFP operates have already seen cuts or plan to cut assistance soon including Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and West Africa, Carl Skau, deputy executive director of the World Food Programme, told a news conference.

He said WFP was aiming for between USD 10 billion and USD 14 billion, which was what the agency had received in the past few years. WFP’s operating requirement is USD 20 billion to deliver aid to everyone in need. Skau said, “We’re still aiming at that, but we have only so far this year gotten to about half of that, around USD 5 billion.”

According to Skau, humanitarian needs were going through the roof in 2021 and 2022 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine and its global implications. “Those needs continue to grow, those drivers are still there,” he said, “but the funding is drying up. So we’re looking at 2024 (being) even more dire.”

Skau said that the largest food and nutrition crisis in history today persists. In 2023, 345 million people continue to be acutely food insecure while hundreds of millions of people are at risk of worsening hunger.

He said further that conflict and insecurity remain the primary drivers of acute hunger around the world. The other factors are climate change, unrelenting disasters, persistent food price inflation and mounting debt stress all during a slowdown in the global economy.

Even as WFP is looking to diversify its funding base, Skau also urged the agency’s traditional donors to step up and support them through this very difficult time.

When quizzed about why funding was drying up, Skau said it would be more relevant to ask the donors about this. “But it’s clear that aid budgets, humanitarian budgets, both in Europe and the United States, (are) not where they were in 2021-2022,” he said.

In March, according to Skau, WFP was forced to cut rations from 75 per cent to 50 per cent for communities in Afghanistan facing emergency levels of hunger. Also, it was forced to cut food for 8 million people 66 per cent of the people it was assisting in May.

At present, it is helping just 5 million people, he said.

In Syria, Skau said, 5.5 million people who relied on WFP for food were already on 50 per cent rations. In July, the agency cut all rations to 2.5 million of them. Where the Palestinian territories are concerned, WFP cut its cash assistance by 20 per cent in May; in June, cut its caseload by 60 per cent, or 200,000 people, he said.

In Yemen, Skau said, a huge funding gap will force WFP to cut aid to 7 million people and that could happen as early as August. According to Skau, in West Africa, where acute hunger is on the rise, most countries are facing extensive ration cuts. Among those particularly affected are WFP’s seven largest crisis operations: Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad, Central African Republic, Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon.

Skau said cutting aid to people who are only at the hunger level of crisis to help save those literally starving or in the category of catastrophic hunger means that those dropped will rapidly fall into the emergency and catastrophe categories. This would mean that we will have an additional humanitarian emergency on our hands in the near future.

Stressing that ration cuts are clearly not the way to go forward, Skau urged world leaders to prioritise humanitarian funding and invest in long-tern solutions to conflicts, poverty, development and other root causes of the current crisis.