(Reuters) – It’s a simple but brutal equation: The number of people going hungry or suffering around the world is rising, while the amount of money the world’s richest countries are contributing to help them is falling.
The result: The UN says that, at best, it will be able to raise enough money to help about 60% of the 307 million people it expects will need humanitarian aid next year. This means that at least 117 million people will not have access to food or other assistance in 2025.
Its own data shows that the UN will also end 2024 having raised about 46% of the $49.6 billion it sought for humanitarian aid around the world. This is the second year in a row that the global organization has collected less than half of what it sought. These shortages have forced humanitarian agencies to make painful decisions, such as reducing food rations for the hungry and reducing the number of people eligible for aid.
The consequences are being felt in places like Syria, where the World Food Programme, the United Nations’ main food distributor, used to feed 6 million people. Rania Degache Camara, the organization’s associate executive director for partnerships and resource mobilization, said that in light of its aid voluntary projections earlier this year, the World Food Program had reduced the number it had hoped to help there to about one million people.
Daghash Camara visited WFP staff in Syria in March. “Their line was: ‘At this point we’re taking from the hungry to feed the hungry,'” she said in an interview.
UN officials see little reason for optimism at a time of widespread conflict, political unrest and extreme weather, all of which are fueling famine. “We have been forced to scale back appeals for those most in need of assistance,” Tom Fletcher, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, told Reuters.
Fiscal pressures and changing domestic politics are reshaping some rich countries’ decisions about where and how much to donate. One of the United Nations’ largest donors – Germany – has cut $500 million in funding in the period from 2023 to 2024 as part of the general belt-tightening. The country’s cabinet has recommended another $1 billion cut in humanitarian aid for 2025. A new parliament will decide next year’s spending plan after federal elections in February.
Humanitarian organizations are also monitoring what US President-elect Donald Trump proposes after he begins his second term next January.
Trump’s advisors did not say how he would deal with humanitarian aid, but he sought to reduce US funding in his first term. He has appointed advisers who say there is room to reduce foreign aid.
The United States plays the leading role in preventing and combating famine throughout the world. It has provided $64.5 billion in humanitarian aid over the past five years. This represents at least 38% of the total contributions recorded by the United Nations
Wealth sharing
The majority of humanitarian funding comes from just three wealthy donors: the United States, Germany and the European Commission. They provided 58% of the $170 billion recorded by the United Nations in response to crises from 2020 to 2024.
Three other powers — China, Russia and India — combined contributed less than 1% of humanitarian funding tracked by the United Nations during the same period, according to a Reuters review of UN contributions data.
The inability to close the financing gap is one of the main reasons why the global system to address hunger and prevent famine is under enormous pressure. The lack of adequate funding – coupled with logistical obstacles to assessing needs and delivering food aid in conflict zones, where many of the worst hunger crises occur – is straining efforts to provide enough aid to the starving. Nearly 282 million people in 59 countries and territories face high levels of acute food insecurity in 2023. Reuters is documenting the global hunger relief crisis in a series of reports, including from hard-hit Sudan, Myanmar and Afghanistan.
The failure of major countries to pull their weight in funding global initiatives has been a constant complaint from Trump. Project 2025, a set of policy proposals drawn up by Trump’s supporters for his second term, calls on humanitarian agencies to work harder to raise more funding from other donors and says this should be a condition for additional US aid.
During the election campaign, Trump tried to distance himself from the controversial 2025 plan. But after winning the election, he chose one of its chief architects, Russell Vought, to run the US Office of Management and Budget, a powerful body that helps determine presidential priorities and how to cover their costs. For Secretary of State, the highest-ranking US diplomat, he chose Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who has a record of supporting foreign aid.
The 2025 Project makes specific reference to conflict, the same factor that drives most of today’s worst hunger crises.
“Humanitarian aid supports war economies, creates financial incentives for warring parties to continue fighting, discourages governments from reforming, and supports malignant regimes,” the plan said. It calls for deep cuts in international disaster aid by ending programs in places controlled by “malign actors.”
Trump has appointed billionaire Elon Musk to co-lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a new body that will examine waste in government spending. Musk said this month on his social media platform X that DOGE would consider foreign aid.
The aid cuts sought by Trump in his first term have not been approved by Congress, which controls such spending. Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina and a close ally of Trump on many issues, will chair the Senate committee that oversees the budget. In 2019, he called Trump’s proposal to cut the foreign aid and diplomatic budget by 23% “crazy” and “shortsighted.”
Graham, Vogt, Rubio, and Musk did not respond to questions related to this report.
The Olympic Games and spaceships
So many people have been going hungry in so many places for so long that humanitarian agencies say fatigue is setting in among donors. Donors receive appeal after appeal for help, but they have limits to what they can give. This has led to growing frustration with major countries that they see as not doing their part to help.
Jan Egeland was a humanitarian affairs officer at the United Nations from 2003 to 2006 and now heads the Norwegian Refugee Council, a non-governmental relief organization. Egeland said it was “crazy” that a small country like Norway could be among the largest funders of humanitarian aid. Although its 2023 gross national income is less than 2% of the size of the US national income, Norway ranked seventh among governments that gave donations to the United Nations that year, according to a Reuters review of UN aid data. It provided more than a billion dollars.
Two of the five largest economies – China and India – have donated a small fraction of this amount.
China ranked 32nd among governments in 2023, contributing $11.5 million in humanitarian aid. It has the second largest gross national income in the world.
India ranked 35th that year, receiving $6.4 million in humanitarian aid. It has the fifth largest gross national income.
Egeland noted that China and India have invested much more in the kind of initiatives that attract the world’s attention. Beijing spent billions to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, and India spent $75 million in 2023 to land a spacecraft on the moon.
“How is there not more interest in helping children suffering from hunger in the rest of the world?” Egeland said. “These are not developing countries anymore. They are holding the Olympics… and they have spaceships that a lot of other donors could not have dreamed of.”
Liu Bingyu, spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said that China has always supported the World Food Programme. He pointed out that it feeds 1.4 billion people within its borders. “This in itself is a major contribution to global food security,” he said.
The Indian Ambassador to the United Nations and its Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to questions related to this report.
To analyze giving patterns, Reuters used data from the United Nations Financial Tracking Service, which records humanitarian aid. The service primarily catalogs funds allocated to UN initiatives and relies on voluntary reporting. It does not include a list of aid diverted elsewhere, including an additional $255 million that Saudi Arabia announced this year through its own aid organization, the King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Centre.
Restrictions and delays
When aid does arrive, it is sometimes late and is subject to conditions, making it difficult for humanitarian organizations to respond flexibly to crises.
Aid tends to arrive “when animals are dying, people are moving, and children are malnourished,” said Julia Stets, director of the Institute for Global Public Policy, a Berlin-based think tank.
States has helped conduct several UN-sponsored evaluations of humanitarian responses. She led one after a drought-induced hunger crisis ravaged Ethiopia from 2015 to 2018. The report concluded that although famine was averted, funding came too late to prevent a significant rise in severe acute malnutrition among children. Research shows that malnutrition can have long-term effects on children, including stunted growth and decreased cognitive abilities.
Further frustrating relief efforts are the conditions that powerful donors place on aid. Donors dictate details to humanitarian agencies, even where the food will be sent. They sometimes limit funding to specific UN entities or non-governmental organizations. They often require spending some money on branding, such as displaying donor logos on tents, toilets and backpacks.
Aid workers say such allocations have forced them to cut rations or aid altogether.
The United States has a long-standing practice of placing restrictions on almost all of its contributions to the World Food Program, one of the largest providers of humanitarian food aid. According to World Food Program data reviewed by Reuters, more than 99% of US donations to the WFP have carried restrictions in each of the past 10 years.
In response to a question about the conditions for the aid, a spokesman for the US Agency for International Development, which oversees US humanitarian spending, said that the agency works “in accordance with the commitments and standards required by Congress.”
The spokesman said that these standards aim to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of humanitarian aid, and the conditions of aid are intended to maintain “an appropriate amount of oversight to ensure the responsible use of US taxpayer dollars.”
Some current and former officials at donor organizations defend their restrictions. They point to the theft and corruption that plague the global food aid system.
In Ethiopia, as Reuters explained, huge amounts of aid have been diverted from the UN World Food Programme, partly due to the organisation’s lax administrative controls. An internal WFP report on Sudan identified a range of problems in the organization’s response to the severe hunger crisis there, Reuters reported earlier this month, including an inability to respond appropriately and what the report described as “anti-fraud challenges.”
Jens Laerke, spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said the United Nations has a “zero tolerance policy” toward “interferences” that disrupt aid, and is working with donors to manage risks.
Martin Griffiths, who resigned from his position as UN humanitarian relief coordinator in June, said that solving the broader challenges facing the United Nations in fundraising will require a change in its business model. “Clearly what we need to do is have a different source of funding.”
In 2014, António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations and then head of its refugee agency, proposed a major change that would impose fees on UN member states to fund humanitarian initiatives. The UN budget and peacekeeping missions are already funded through the fee system. This funding would provide humanitarian agencies with greater flexibility to respond to needs.
The United Nations considered Guterres’ idea in 2015. But donor countries preferred the current system, which allows them to decide on a case-by-case basis where to send contributions, according to a UN report on the proposal.
Laerke said the United Nations is working to diversify its donor base.
“We cannot rely solely on the same group of donors, despite their generosity and our appreciation for them,” Lark said.
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