Los Angeles Times: With 20 Million People Facing Starvation, US Foreign Aid Cuts Strike Fear

Proposed cuts to the US State Department and United Nations budgets coincide with severe famines underway. “Two years of drought and failed rains across much of Africa have affected 38 million people in 17 countries,” reports Robyn Dixon for the Los Angeles Times. “Without a massive donor injection of $4.4 billion, aid officials estimate, more than 20 million people face starvation and famine in Nigeria’s northeast, South Sudan, Somalia and Yemen.” Aid to the famine-struck areas is already insufficient, argues one Oxfam official. In 2016 the United States paid for 24 percent of the UN’s food program, 40 percent of the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and 22 percent of the UN Secretariat and 28 percent of UN peacekeeping operations in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Darfur, Mali and the Central African Republic. Humanitarian spending, unlike secretariat and peacekeeping spending, is discretionary. The Trump administration expects other countries to spend more for aid programs that prevent regional destabilization from countries in crisis. – YaleGlobal