Humanitarian relief cuts could mean less help for residents of Gaza, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine and more countries, said the head of the United Nations.
Tom Fletcher, head of the United Nations Bureau for Humanitarian Affairs, told journalists with 300 million people who need aid, recent cuts to humanitarian aid funds cause a global “seismic shock.
“Many will die because this aid is dried up,” said Fletcher, the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and the Emergency Rescue Coordinator on Wednesday, during a press briefing at the United Nations in New York on Wednesday.
“Throughout the humanitarian community, programs are arrested at the moment,” said Fletcher. “The staff are released now. I think that 10% of NGO colleagues were dismissed in February, “he said, referring to people working for non-governmental assistance organizations.
Fletcher also spoke specifically about his recent visit last month in Gaza, saying that “supplies are clearly exhausted very, very quickly” in the middle of Israel’s renewed blocking on all foods, drugs, fuel and other products entering the strip.
“The fact that we do not get fuel means that incubators are deactivated, so it’s already real and will quickly become a humanitarian crisis,” he said.
Describing his visit to Gaza last month, Fletcher said that one of the “first shocking things I saw driving is the dogs crossing the rubble”.
“I do not think that nothing can prepare you for this,” he said, referring to the wandering dog show in Gaza in search of corpses of people trapped under bombed buildings.
A “humanitarian superpower”
Fletcher’s press conference intervened just a few days after the Secretary of State of the United States, Marco Rubio, announced that the United States had concluded that it would cancel 83% of the American Agency for International Development (USAID) programs in the world.
While the American cuts to help were the most drastic, Fletcher stressed that other countries have also reduced their emergency budgets.
“It’s not just the US government. I spend much more time than I expected other capitals of donors to try to consolidate the case for what we do, “he said.
“What I can say is that for years, over the decades now, the United States 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 specify the countries in particular aid, but at the end of February, the United Kingdom announced that it reduced its assistance expenses to increase the expenses of its soldiers. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government “would fully finance our increased investment in defense” by reducing aid expenditure from 0.5% of gross national income to 0.3% in 2027. According to the Guardian newspaper, British decreases amounted to around six billion pounds ($ 7.7 billion).
The change in defense aid would see that the United Kingdom would spend 13.4 billion pounds ($ 17 billion) more on the army each year from 2027, Starmer said.
Several other countries have also reduced aid spending, including the Netherlands right-wing government, which announced in November of last year that it would reduce its foreign aid budget by around one billion euros ($ 1.09 billion) over a period of five years.
Fletcher said that the United Nations humanitarian agency’s response to its reduced funding prospects would be to focus on “completely essential rescue work, in the most informed fields”, including Gaza.
But several organizations warn the repercussions could be more widely felt.
Last week, the World Health Organization warned that US discounts could make efforts to treat “the deadliest infectious diseases” in the world, tuberculosis.
Surveillance of Ebola in Africa is also threatened because the NGOs which had been funded by the USAID were forced to stop their work.
Health experts and assistance organizations have also warned that US funding for HIV / AIDS programs in many African countries could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths on the continent.