ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The number of people in the world facing hunger has stayed stubbornly high since the pandemic. At the same time, international support for food aid has been dropping. And then came the Trump administration's dramatic cuts to humanitarian assistance. Now, one of the world's largest humanitarian aid groups is planning to radically downsize. Reporter Gabriel Spitzer has the story.
GABRIEL SPITZER: An email went out recently to employees at the United Nations World Food Programme. The subject line said, workforce update. The memo said, job cuts are coming. The World Food Programme is the major international effort to fight hunger. Last year, the organization reports it served more than 100 million people. Five years ago, it won the Nobel Peace Prize. In the email obtained by NPR, WFP leadership said to expect staff cuts of 25- to 30% - about 6,000 jobs. They said the cuts will affect every level of the organization in every place they operate. Paul Spiegel directs the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University.
PAUL SPIEGEL: You know, I've been working in the humanitarian field for nearly 30 years now, and I've never seen such a situation before in these 30 years.
SPITZER: Donor countries in Europe had already been scaling back their contributions. The latest and most abrupt blow came this year when the U.S., the largest funder of the World Food Programme, canceled several hundred million in grants. Last year, the U.S. had contributed $4.5 billion to the WFP.
SPIEGEL: I understand the donor fatigue because there seem to be so many emergencies, but this is different, I think, and we're going to see enormous amounts of - sadly - increased numbers of deaths in these humanitarian settings.
SPITZER: The World Food Programme projects that next year, the organization will get less than half of what it needs.
HARALD MANNHARDT: In the past, there have been crises where funding has dried up for various reasons, but not on the sort of global scale that we're seeing now.
SPITZER: Harald Mannhardt is the World Food Programme's deputy country director in Afghanistan, where he says the funding cuts have been especially painful. In that country, the U.S. contributed $280 million through USAID last year. This year, the Trump administration canceled those contracts. According to the U.N., about half the Afghan population depends on aid for survival, and more than 3 million are on the brink of starvation. And yet, Mannhardt says, the WFP could not afford to keep up with the needs even before the latest U.S. cuts.
MANNHARDT: Whenever I've been visiting, over the last six months or so, distribution sites, there's a lot of people outside there asking why they can't be included in the programs. We're already only feeding half or less than half of who we should be assisting.
SPITZER: Policy experts say it's not just emergency assistance that will be affected, but also projects meant to make countries self-sufficient. Caitlin Welsh is director of food and water security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It's a bipartisan policy think tank. She says cuts planned at the WFP will also hurt countries over the long term, and a drop in support from the U.S. will only make things worse.
CAITLIN WELSH: So it's both types of assistance that the U.S. government is cutting - the emergency assistance for those in most need and the other types of assistance that's intended to make sure that people wouldn't need that assistance in the first place.
SPITZER: In a statement to NPR, a State Department spokesperson said that USAID has canceled only a small number of World Food Programme contracts, and that those were due to, quote, "concerns about funds benefiting terrorist groups like the Houthis and Taliban." The World Food Programme would not comment on its planned staffing cuts, but said in a statement it will prioritize its limited resources toward the 343 million people struggling with hunger and, increasingly, starvation.
For NPR News, I'm Gabriel Spitzer. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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