Tom Fletcher, the head of the United Nations office for humanitarian affairs, has told reporters that with 300 million people in need of assistance, recent cuts to humanitarian aid funds are causing a “seismic shock” globally.
“Many will die because that aid is drying up,” Fletcher, the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, said at a news briefing at the UN headquarters in New York on Wednesday.
“Across the humanitarian community, programmes are being stopped right now,” Fletcher said. “Staff are being let go right now. I think 10 percent of NGO colleagues were laid off in the course of February,” he said, referring to people working for nongovernment aid organisations.
Fletcher also spoke specifically of his recent visit last month to Gaza, saying “supplies are clearly running out very, very fast” amid Israel’s renewed blockade on all food, medicine, fuel and other goods entering the strip.
“The fact that we’re not getting fuel in means that incubators are being switched off, so this is real already, and will quickly become a humanitarian crisis again,” he said.
Describing his visit to Gaza last month, Fletcher said one of the “first shocking things I saw driving in is the dogs going through the rubble”.
“I don’t think anything can prepare you for that,” he said, referring to the spectacle of stray dogs in Gaza looking for dead bodies of people trapped beneath bombed-out buildings.
A ‘humanitarian superpower’
Fletcher’s news conference came just days after United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the US had concluded it would be cancelling 83 percent of US Agency for International Development (USAID) programmes worldwide.
While the US cuts to aid have been the most drastic, Fletcher pointed out other countries have also been slashing their relief budgets.
“It’s not just the American government. I’m spending a lot more of my time than I’d expected in other donor capitals trying to shore up the case for what we do,” he said.
“What I can say is that over years, over decades now, the US has been a humanitarian superpower and that US funding has saved hundreds of millions of lives,” he added.
Fletcher, a former British ambassador to Lebanon, did not elaborate on which countries had cut aid specifically, but at the end of February, the United Kingdom announced it was cutting its aid spending to increase spending on its military. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government would “fully fund our increased investment in defence” by reducing aid spending from 0.5 percent of gross national income to 0.3 percent in 2027. According to The Guardian newspaper, the UK cuts amount to some six billion pounds ($7.7bn).
The change from aid to defence would see the UK spending 13.4 billion pounds ($17bn) more on the military every year from 2027, Starmer said.
Several other countries have also cut back on aid spending, including the Netherlands’ right-wing government, which announced in November last year it would cut its foreign aid budget by about one billion euros ( $1.09bn) over a five-year period.
Fletcher said the UN humanitarian agency’s response to its reduced funding prospects will be to focus on “utterly essential life-saving work, in the areas of direst need”, including Gaza.
But several organisations are warning repercussions could be more widely felt.
The World Health Organization last week warned US cuts could set back efforts to treat the world’s “deadliest infectious disease”, tuberculosis.
Ebola surveillance work in Africa is also under threat as NGOs that used to be funded through USAID have been forced to stop their work.
Health experts and aid organisations have also warned that US funding cuts to HIV/AIDS programmes in many African countries could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths on the continent.
