Nina Larson
The United Nations warned Tuesday that dramatic funding cuts for aid, at a time of multiple crises, have created unparallelled gaps, leaving tens of millions going hungry.
The UN’s World Food Programme said it was facing a 75-percent shortfall in its funding, with dire and deadly consequences.
“The gaps are unprecedented,” Rania Dagash-Kamara, WFP’s assistant executive director for partnerships and innovation, told reporters in Geneva.
“Country by country, we are making brutal choices about who to reach.”
While there has been much focus on US cuts, Dagash-Kamara stressed that Washington remained WFP’s top donor.
The biggest shock to the system, she said, had been “the collective European pullback and cuts”.
“The cuts that we are seeing from the Europeans are I think where the largest gap for us is at the moment,” she said.
“That we would like to see redressed.”
Multiple famines looming
The WFP official stressed that cuts were being made to “life-saving work” at a time when multiple famines were looming.
“Malnutrition clinics are closing,” she said, warning that the world was conducting “a real-time experiment” by deciding to “pull out the support and let’s find out afterwards who is going to stay alive”.
Dagash-Kamara described a mother in Afghanistan who had walked four hours to a clinic with her children, only to be turned away.
“She is malnourished, her children are malnourished and we could not help her,” she said.
“When the system breaks as it is now, she fades away, and her children waste away.”
The deep cuts were coming while the challenges have been multiplying, including from the war in the Middle East, which has piled on logistical difficulties and hiked prices for aid deliveries in a range of countries.
The WFP has said it wants to reach 110 million people in the most acute need around the world this year, for which it would require $13 billion.
40% reduction in contributions
Dagash-Kamara pointed out that the agency had made the same funding requests a decade ago, but since then, “the need is double”.
With funding falling far short, “we are trying to reach a lot more people. And it is simply not doable”, she said.
She pointed out that the agency received $10 billion in contributions in 2024, but last year the amount had shrunk to $6 billion.
“That is a 40-percent reduction in contributions, and that is tens of millions of people that we are unable to reach as a result,” she said.
And so far this year, the agency has received just $2.9 billion.
Dagash-Kamara stressed that WFP had been “ruthlessly” streamlining its operations even before the wave of aid funding cuts to sweep the globe since US President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year.
But “we cannot optimise a 75-percent shortfall in our funding. We cannot buy the food needed nor can we pay to ship and distribute it,” she said.
The WFP, which on Tuesday appointed Sweden’s Carl Skau as its acting executive director to temporarily replace outgoing chief Cindy McCain, was instrumental in addressing two confirmed famines in 2025, in parts of the Gaza Strip and Sudan.
But this year, the world was looking at “famine-like conditions or credible risk in Sudan, in Somalia, in South Sudan, in Mali”, Dagash-Kamara warned.
And, she cautioned, “the likelihood is rising sharply, because famine is really the one thing we exist to prevent”.
