The United States has backtracked on emergency food aid cuts it announced for 14 countries, restoring assistance to six of them, the UN's World Food Program said Wednesday.
The UN agency, already struggling with financing woes, said Monday that the United States advised it Washington was eliminating emergency food aid to those 14 poor and otherwise troubled countries.
The WFP said the cuts amounted to a "death sentence" for millions of hungry or starving people.
But the United States has now reversed course and said it will continue sending food aid to Somalia, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Ecuador, a WFP program official told AFP.
Still, with aid now cut off for the other eight countries, "hunger will deepen, millions of lives will be lost, entire regions will be destabilized," the official said.
These eight countries are Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Niger, Yemen, Chad, Mali, Nigeria and Madagascar.
The WFP official said that in Afghanistan, for instance, food aid that is helping two million people could run out this year and more than 400,000 malnourished women and children will lose nutritional treatment.
"As hunger reaches record levels, continued support from the US is vital," WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain said Wednesday on the social media platform X.
The agency itself said on X that it thanks the United States for continuing food aid to some countries.
The Trump administration has largely gutted USAID, the main US humanitarian assistance organization. It previously had a yearly budget of $42.8 billion, which was 42 percent of all aid money disbursed around the world.
With AFP
Comments