Halt in US aid cripples global efforts to relieve hunger

Displaced Palestinians line up to receive food at a distribution centre in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on November 26, 2024, amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. (AFP/File)
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Updated 07 February 2025
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Halt in US aid cripples global efforts to relieve hunger

  • 500,000 tons of food aid in limbo in transit or storage — ex-USAID official
  • Aid organizations hobbled by loss of Famine Early Warning Systems Network

The Trump administration’s effort to slash and reshape American foreign aid is crippling the intricate global system that aims to prevent and respond to famine.
Struggling to manage hunger crises sweeping the developing world even before US President Donald Trump returned to the White House, the international famine monitoring and relief system has suffered multiple blows from a sudden cessation of US foreign aid.
The spending freeze, which Trump ordered upon taking office Jan. 20, is supposed to last 90 days while his administration reviews all foreign-aid programs. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said an exception allows emergency food assistance to continue.
But much of that emergency aid is at least temporarily halted as humanitarian organizations seek clarity about what relief programs are allowed to continue. Compounding the problem is Trump’s move this week to shut the US government’s top relief provider, the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
About 500,000 metric tons of food worth $340 million is in limbo, in transit or storage, as humanitarian organizations wait for US State Department approval to distribute it, said Marcia Wong, a former senior USAID official who has been briefed on the situation.
US-provided cash assistance intended to help people buy food and other necessities in Sudan and Gaza also has been halted, aid workers told Reuters. So has funding for volunteer-run community kitchens, an American-supported effort in Sudan to help feed people in areas inaccessible to traditional aid, these people said.
Humanitarian organizations have hit roadblocks in getting paid for emergency food operations. Questions about what programs have permission to continue have gone unanswered, because the people who normally field such inquiries – officials at USAID – have been placed on leave, at least six sources said.
The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), the US entity that produced regular food security alerts meant to prevent famine, also has been shut down. Its loss leaves aid organizations without a key source of guidance on where and how to deploy humanitarian relief
And the US government issued stop-work orders to two major manufacturers of nutritional supplements, diminishing the supply of life-saving food for severely malnourished children around the world.
“We are the one thing that nearly everyone agrees on – that little children who are starving and need emergency aid need help,” said Mark Moore, chief executive officer of Mana Nutrition of Georgia, one of the two suppliers ordered to stop producing supplements. “It is not hype or conjecture or hand wringing or even contested use of stats to say that hundreds of thousands of malnourished children could die without USAID.”
Shortly after this story was published, the US government notified Mana and the other manufacturer, Edesia Nutrition of Rhode Island, that the stop-work orders had been rescinded.
The US State Department did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

STOCKPILES ON HOLD

Conflict is driving large numbers of people into desperate hunger, and the US is the largest single donor of aid. It provided $64.6 billion in humanitarian aid over the last five years. That was at least 38 percent of the total such contributions recorded by the United Nations.
In 2023, almost 282 million people in 59 countries and territories experienced extreme food shortages that threatened their lives or livelihoods, according to the 2024 Global Report on Food Crises.
Even before the pause in US aid, the world’s famine-fighting system was under enormous strain, driven by conflict and political instability, as Reuters detailed in a series of reports last year. The halt in aid creates a two-pronged crisis for humanitarian organizations working to relieve severe hunger. It impairs the programs that aim to prevent mass starvation. More immediately, it hobbles programs meant to respond to crises and save lives.
Among the food aid in limbo around the world is almost 30,000 metric tons meant to feed acutely malnourished children and adults in famine-stricken Sudan, two aid workers there said. Some is sitting in hot warehouses, where it is in danger of spoiling, they said.
The food includes lentils, rice and wheat, one of the workers said – enough to feed at least 2 million people for a month. Some items have a quick expiration date and will be inedible by the end of Trump’s 90-day pause, this person said.
Aid groups are confused about which relief programs qualify for waivers from the spending freeze and if they’ll be able to obtain them – because most USAID staff have been placed on leave.
A LOST STEERING WHEEL
Longer term, the shuttering of FEWS NET stands to cripple the world’s ability to predict, prevent and respond to food insecurity crises.
Created by the US government in 1985 after devastating famines in East and West Africa, FEWS NET is funded by USAID and managed by Washington, D.C.-based Chemonics International. FEWS NET is charged with providing early warning to US policymakers about hunger crises that could require a humanitarian response. It uses data from federal agencies, scientists and other humanitarian organizations to produce a stream of reports on food security. USAID and humanitarian organizations used FEWS NET reports to decide where to send food aid.
Researchers who collect and analyze data on food insecurity and famine say FEWS NET is essential to world efforts to fight hunger. They say it can be more nimble and prolific than its UN-backed counterpart, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system (IPC), a global partnership that reports on food insecurity in dozens of lands.
In most areas where it works, the IPC requires consensus on its findings among local government authorities and representatives of other humanitarian bodies. This can result in political attempts to influence its work and can delay and impede its efforts to alert the world to a looming crisis,a recent Reuters investigation found.
FEWS NET doesn’t face those consensus-building requirements, and so is faster and more efficient, researchers say. In 2024, FEWS NET produced more than 1,000 food insecurity outlooks, alerts and other reports covering more than 34 countries. The IPC published 71 reports in 33 countries.
The IPC declined to comment on FEWS NET’s demise. The “implications for the initiative remain unclear,” said Frank ​​Nyakairu, a spokesman for IPC.
On January 27, Chemonics, which manages FEWS NET, received a stop-work order from USAID. Two days later, FEWS NET’s website went dark, eliminating public access to thousands of reports funded by American taxpayers.
“Ending FEWS NET is sort of like taking the steering wheel off the car,” said Andrew Natsios, a professor at Texas A&M University who headed USAID from 2001 to 2006. “Even if the car is working fine, if there’s no steering wheel, you don’t know where the car is going.”
FEWS NET has been a critical player in assessing food insecurity in most of the world’s worst hunger crises. An important conduit of data to the IPC and the global humanitarian system, its reports offered strategic analysis about how conflict and other problems impact food insecurity in specific places. It also pushed the IPC to act when the UN-backed body’s work became bogged down by politics.
Without FEWS NET, “the single most important component of the IPC system is knocked out,” said Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tuft University’s Fletcher School.
In December, Reuters reported that the Sudanese government maneuvered to delay an IPC famine determination in Darfur. FEWS NET, which had already concluded that famine was happening there, pushed for the IPC’s Famine Review Committee to convene, over the objections of Sudanese officials. In the end, the IPC committee agreed to announce that famine had struck Zamzam, a vast camp for internally displaced people in North Darfur.
But FEWS NET’s propensity to issue blunt assessments has also drawn fire in Washington. In December, FEWS NET published a report that projected famine by early 2025 in part of northern Gaza. After the report was issued, Jack Lew, US ambassador to Israel from October 2023 until January, wrote that it was “irresponsible” to issue such a finding. FEWS NET withdrew the report, stating that its alert was “under further review” and that it expected to update the report in January.
With the dissolution of its chief funder, USAID, FEWS NET employees say they are not optimistic about the organization resuming work.
Its apparent death leaves “a gaping hole” in reporting on humanitarian crises, said Chris Newton, an analyst specializing in early warning and food security at International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank. FEWS NET’s loss will hurt efforts to end famine in Sudan and prevent it in other hotspots and could lead to the collapse of a wide network of data providers, all crucial to understanding humanitarian risks globally, he said.
“Famine was disappearing from the world in the 2000s, and now its return will likely accelerate as we become increasingly blind to it, even as it becomes a more common tool of politics and war,” Newton said.


Heathrow resumes operations as global airlines scramble after shutdown

Updated 58 min 14 sec ago
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Heathrow resumes operations as global airlines scramble after shutdown

  • Flights began to resume late on Friday
  • British Airways warns of ‘huge impact’ in coming days

LONDON: London’s Heathrow Airport resumed full operations on Saturday, a day after a fire knocked out its power supply and shut Europe’s busiest airport, causing global travel chaos.
The travel industry was scrambling to reroute passengers and fix battered airline schedules after the huge fire at an electrical substation serving the airport.
Some flights had resumed on Friday evening, but the shuttering of the world’s fifth-busiest airport for most of the day left tens of thousands searching for scarce hotel rooms and replacement seats while airlines tried to return jets and crew to bases.
Teams were working across the airport to support passengers affected by the outage, a Heathrow spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
“We have hundreds of additional colleagues on hand in our terminals and we have added flights to today’s schedule to facilitate an extra 10,000 passengers traveling through the airport,” the spokesperson said.
The travel industry, facing the prospect of a financial hit costing tens of millions of pounds and a likely fight over who should pay, questioned how such crucial infrastructure could fail without backup.
“It is a clear planning failure by the airport,” said Willie Walsh, head of global airlines body IATA, who, as former head of British Airways, has for years been a fierce critic of the crowded hub.
The airport had been due to handle 1,351 flights on Friday, flying up to 291,000 passengers, but planes were diverted to other airports in Britain and across Europe, while many long-haul flights returned to their point of departure.
Heathrow Chief Executive Thomas Woldbye said he expected the airport to be back “in full operation” on Saturday.
Asked who would pay for the disruption, he said there were “procedures in place,” adding “we don’t have liabilities in place for incidents like this.”
Restrictions on overnight flights were temporarily lifted by Britain’s Department of Transport to ease congestion, but British Airways chief executive Sean Doyle said the closure was set to have a “huge impact on all of our customers flying with us over the coming days.”
Virgin Atlantic said it expected to operate “a near full schedule” with limited cancelations on Saturday but that the situation remained dynamic and all flights would be kept under continuous review.
Airlines including JetBlue, American Airlines, Air Canada, Air India, Delta Air Lines, Qantas, United Airlines, British Airways and Virgin were diverted or returned to their origin airports in the wake of the closure, according to data from flight analytics firm Cirium.
Shares in many airlines fell on Friday.
Aviation experts said the last time European airports experienced disruption on such a large scale was the 2010 Icelandic volcanic ash cloud that grounded some 100,000 flights.
They warned that some passengers forced to land in Europe may have to stay in transit lounges if they lack the paperwork to leave the airport.
Prices at hotels around Heathrow jumped, with booking sites offering rooms for 500 pounds ($645), roughly five times the normal price levels.
Police said after an initial assessment, they were not treating the incident at the power substation as suspicious, although enquiries remained ongoing. London Fire Brigade said its investigations would focus on the electrical distribution equipment.
Heathrow and London’s other major airports have been hit by other outages in recent years, most recently by an automated gate failure and an air traffic system meltdown, both in 2023.


UNICEF calls on the Taliban to lift ban on girls’ education as new school year begins in Afghanistan

Updated 22 March 2025
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UNICEF calls on the Taliban to lift ban on girls’ education as new school year begins in Afghanistan

  • Afghanistan is the only country in the world that bans female secondary and higher education, with Taliban justifying ban
  • The ban has deprived 400,000 more girls of their right to education, bringing the total to 2.2 million, the UN agency says

ISLAMABAD: The UN children’s agency on Saturday urged Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers to immediately lift a lingering ban on girls’ education to save the future of millions who have been deprived of their right to education since the Taliban returned to power in 2021.
The appeal by UNICEF comes as a new school year began in Afghanistan without girls beyond sixth grade. The ban, said the agency, has deprived 400,000 more girls of their right to education, bringing the total to 2.2 million.
Afghanistan is the only country in the world that bans female secondary and higher education, with the Taliban justifying the ban saying it doesn’t comply with their interpretation of Sharia, or Islamic law.
“For over three years, the rights of girls in Afghanistan have been violated,” Catherine Russell, UNICEF executive director, said in a statement. “All girls must be allowed to return to school now. If these capable, bright young girls continue to be denied an education, then the repercussions will last for generations.”
A ban on the education of girls will harm the future of millions of Afghan girls, she said, adding that if the ban persists until 2030, “more than four million girls will have been deprived of their right to education beyond primary school.” The consequences, she added, will be “catastrophic.”
Russell warned that the decline in female doctors and midwives will leave women and girls without crucial medical care. This situation is projected to result in an estimated 1,600 additional maternal deaths and over 3,500 infant deaths. “These are not just numbers, they represent lives lost and families shattered,” she said.
The Afghan Taliban government earlier this year skipped a Pakistan-hosted global conference where Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai condemned the state of women’s and girl’s rights in Afghanistan as gender apartheid.


Germany approves $3.25 billion in new Ukraine military aid

Updated 22 March 2025
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Germany approves $3.25 billion in new Ukraine military aid

  • The amount comes on top of four billion euros in Ukraine military aid already planned in Germany’s budget for 2025
  • A further 8.3 billion euros were earmarked for Kyiv for 2026 to 2029

BERLIN: Germany on Friday approved three billion euros ($3.25 billion) in new military aid for Ukraine, just days before planned US-brokered talks with Moscow and Kyiv on a limited truce.
The money is earmarked for defense equipment for the country fighting Russian forces, including munitions, drones, armored vehicles and air-defense systems.
The parliament’s budget committee gave the green light for the funds, which had been on hold for months amid discord in the coalition government of outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
But the final adoption on Friday of a major new spending package that also eased Germany’s strict debt rules for defense outlays gave the government new room for maneuver.
President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked Germany for the new aid in a post on X, saying it would provide “exactly what Ukraine needs most — what saves Ukrainian lives.
“This means contracts with the German defense industry will now be signed for future — a significant step toward building long-term security guarantees,” Zelensky said.
“It is also a recognition that Ukraine’s army will become even stronger after the war ends, and Germany is committed to contributing to that.”
Greens MP Britta Hasselmann, whose party has strongly pushed for Ukraine aid, expressed relief the new billions were being released, “albeit late.”
She called it “a strong signal to Ukraine, a signal that is absolutely necessary for peace and security in Europe.”

The new money comes on top of four billion euros in Ukraine military aid already planned in Germany’s budget for 2025.
A further 8.3 billion euros were earmarked for Kyiv for 2026 to 2029.
Government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit has said the latest package would include units of the German-made Iris-T air-defense systems that had yet to be built and would be delivered over the next two years.
Germany has been Ukraine’s second-largest supplier of military aid after the United States, contributing some 28 billion euros so far since Russia launched its full-scale invasion over three years ago.
But the situation has changed dramatically since US President Donald Trump reached out to Russia’s Vladimir Putin to end the war and suspended military aid to Ukraine. He also cast doubt on America’s commitment to NATO.

Russia and Ukraine on Friday traded accusations of massive overnight attacks, three days before both sides will hold talks with US officials in Saudi Arabia on how to halt the war.
Both countries have said they agree with a 30-day pause in strikes on energy targets, though they have continued their aerial attacks unabated.
Each has repeatedly accused the other of breaking the truce, which has not been formally agreed.
Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz, whose party won February elections, has pushed through a spending package worth hundreds of billions to bolster Germany’s armed forces and infrastructure and to keep backing Ukraine.
Merz’s conservatives are in coalition talks with the SPD of Scholz, who has also vowed that Germany would keep supporting Kyiv.
Ukraine “can rely on us and we will never leave it on its own,” Scholz said at a European Council summit late Thursday.
“It will also need a strong army in times of peace, and it must not be put in danger by any peace agreement.”
 


Trump pulls security clearances for Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton

Updated 22 March 2025
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Trump pulls security clearances for Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton

BRIDGEWATER, New Jersey: US President Donald Trump on Friday took away security clearances for former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others in his latest move against his Democratic opponents.
The Republican president, who has also revoked the security clearance for former President Joe Biden, defeated Clinton in the 2016 presidential election and Harris in last year’s election.
“I have determined that it is no longer in the national interest for the following individuals to access classified information,” Trump said in a late Friday memorandum that also included former Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
While the revocations may not have immediate impacts, it is another sign of the growing political rift in Washington as Trump seeks revenge on his perceived enemies.
The memorandum was issued hours after Trump arrived at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf property for the weekend.
Trump also targeted Republican former Representative Liz Cheney, a sharp Trump critic, former Biden White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Fiona Hill, a Russia expert who served on his National Security Council during his first term.
Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer in Washington who represents whistleblowers, and Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican lawmaker who is a sharp Trump critic, were among several others who had their security clearances revoked.
He had already revoked the security clearance for Biden, denying the former president to the traditional access to US intelligence.
Former US presidents have traditionally received intelligence briefings so they can advise incumbent presidents on national security and foreign policy.
In 2021, Biden revoked the security clearance for Trump, who was then a former president.


Canada’s new PM says Trump will want trade talks as Americans suffer from trade war

Updated 22 March 2025
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Canada’s new PM says Trump will want trade talks as Americans suffer from trade war

  • Carney said talks with Trump will not happen “until we get the respect we deserve as a sovereign nation”
  • Trump kept up his near-daily attacks on Canada on Friday, repeating that the country should be the 51st state

TORONTO: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Friday US President Donald Trump will ultimately respect Canada’s sovereignty and be ready for comprehensive trade talks because Americans are going to suffer from Trump’s trade war.
Carney said talks with Trump will not happen “until we get the respect we deserve as a sovereign nation. By the way, this is not a high bar.”
Trump kept up his near-daily attacks on Canada on Friday, repeating that the country should be the 51st state and that the US keeps Canada “afloat.”
“When I say they should be a state, I mean that,” the American president said.
Carney met with Canada’s provincial leaders at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa for trade war talks.

 

Carney, sworn in last Friday, still hasn’t had a phone call with Trump. Trump mocked Carney’s predecessor, Justin Trudeau, by calling him Governor Trudeau, but he has not yet mentioned Carney’s name.
The new prime minister said he wants a comprehensive discussion on trade and security with the Americans and not a one-off tariff discussion.
“In the end, Americans are going to lose from American trade action and that’s one of the reasons I am confident that there will be that discussion with the appropriate amount of respect and the breadth,” Carney said. “I am ready for it anytime they are ready.”
Trump put 25 percent tariffs on Canada’s steel and aluminum and is threatening sweeping tariffs on all Canadian products as well as all of America’s trading partners on April 2.
Carney became Prime Minister after winning a Liberal Party leadership race triggered by Trudeau’s decision to step down earlier this year. He’s expected to trigger the process for early parliamentary elections this Sunday, with a vote expected Wilon April 28.
The governing Liberals appeared poised for a historic election defeat this year until Trump declared trade war and upended Canadian politics.
The almost daily attacks on Canada’s sovereignty have infuriated Canadians, who are canceling trips south of the border and avoiding buying American goods when they can. The surge in Canadian nationalism has bolstered Liberal poll numbers.
Carney said in an effort to diversify trade the premiers of Canada’s provinces agreed work on a plan to develop a national trade and energy corridor. He said after some discussions about the response to the tariffs, the premiers turned their sights to “nation building” to build things faster than ever before.

 

That includes finding ways to better move energy and critical minerals. They also talked about moving quickly to eliminate trade barriers between provinces and with the federal government.
Carney also said Ottawa is also going to waive the one-week waiting period to get employment insurance for people whose jobs are cut because of the tariffs, and temporarily allow Canadian businesses to defer income tax and sales tax payments to help boost their liquidity.