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-per-cent 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. — AFP
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