The hard choice between starvation and hunger

The United Nations and its agencies, especially the World Food Programme (WFP), which deals with aid to people in conflict zones and other places in need of food, are unable to raise sufficient funds to rush food to people who need it most.

The statistics are grim. According to the UN, 307 million people need humanitarian aid, but it can cater to only 60 per cent of those in need. That leaves 117 million people who will not get aid through the UN.

In 2024, it could raise only 46 per cent of the $49.6 billion it needed for humanitarian aid. In Syria it will be able to reach out to only a million of the people who need help. Six million are the displaced people in the just-ended Syrian civil war.

The country will take years before it can take care of the millions of refugees, who are now being pushed back to Syria, especially from Turkey, with the end of the political turmoil. The countries that are in need of humanitarian aid are South Sudan, Ethiopia and Afghanistan, apart from Syria.

Referring to the situation in Syria, WFP’s assistant executive director for partnerships and resource mobilisation Rania Dagash-Kamara said, “We’re at this point taking from the hungry to feed the starving.”

The three main donors for humanitarian aid are the United States, Germany and the European Commission. Between 2020 and 2024, the three have contributed 58 per cent of the humanitarian aid which totalled $170 billion.

Germany had reduced its contribution by $500 million between 2023 and 2024, and the outgoing cabinet has recommended that there should be a further reduction in humanitarian aid by $1 billion in 2025 as Germany is going through a period of economic stress and the experts are stressing the need for tightening of the belt.

The US remains one of the largest donors of aid having contributed $64.5 billion in the last five years, which is 38 per cent of the total funding of the UN. According to the UN, Russia, China and India contributed only 1 per cent. China had contributed $11.5 million and is ranked 32nd among contributors and India has given $6.4 million and is placed at the 35th rank.

Jan Egeland, head of Norwegian Refugee Council, and former UN humanitarian chief between 2003 and 2006, says Norway is the seventh largest humanitarian aid donor with $1 billion contribution. He reminds that Norway’s economy is less than 2 per cent of the US in size. Egeland asks, “How come there is not more interest in helping starving children in the rest of the world?” and he points a finger at China and India.

He says that China has spent $75 million for holding Olympics and India is sending spaceships to the moon. Reuters, the news agency, says that it did not get any response from India’s Ministry of External Affairs. Meanwhile, Li Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washngton, said that China has always helped the WFP, and said that China fed 1.4 billion people within its own borders, and “This is itself is a major contribution to world food security.”

According to Project 2025, said to be the economic blueprint for President-elect Donald Trump, but which Trump has not yet acknowledged, the US would increase its contribution if more countries also contribute to humanitarian aid. The document also argues that humanitarian aid in some of the conflict zones is being diverted by the involved parties, and questions the monitoring of aid supply of WFP. These are problems that cannot be brushed aside, but the plight of the hungry and starving millions cannot be held hostage to implementation problems.