By Randy Alonso Falcon on April 19, 2025
“This is a total crisis. People are dying of hunger. They don’t have money to buy the medicines they need. They have stopped receiving health services and water. Everything has come to a standstill,” an international NGO worker operating in Sudan, which has been rocked by civil war since April 2023, told EFE.
The desperate measures of the billionaires in power in the United States are already having their first effects. The solution to the empire’s economic drift will never be to redistribute wealth for greater social justice, but to ensure that the fortunes of the most powerful continue to grow, while the rest, as we know, suffer.
The cuts ordered to foreign aid by the Trump administration, with the supposed aim of reducing government spending, are beginning to generate discouraging news in an increasingly unjust world.
The World Food Programme announced in late March that vital aid to millions of hungry people around the world is at risk following a 40% reduction in its funding for 2025.
“…We are facing a financial abyss with potentially fatal consequences,” WFP official Rania Dagash-Kamara told the media.
Many children will no longer receive vaccines and other basic health services due to funding cuts to UN agencies. Photo: UNICEF
The magnitude of the cuts combined with a record number of people in need of food aid ‘is leading to an unprecedented crisis for tens of millions of people around the world,’ the United Nations agency said in a statement. Among those most affected will be 33 million children suffering from severe malnutrition in countries such as Afghanistan, Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Yemen, which receive assistance from the WFP.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), for its part, said that the cuts announced by the United States, the United Kingdom, and other powers will limit its ability to reach millions of children in extreme need.
The agency’s executive director, Catherine Russell, said the cuts come “at a time of unprecedented need. Millions of children are affected by conflict, need to be vaccinated against deadly diseases such as measles and polio, and must receive education and stay healthy,” she said.
Health is not a right for the poor
The waste that the empire needs to cut to save itself will not be made in the military industry or the war machine. It will be paid for by the poor who have survived on the crumbs that Washington allocates to foreign aid.
At a press conference on April 10, Dr. Tedros Adhanom, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), reported that 75 percent of the international organization’s offices in more than 100 countries have reported disruptions in health services as a result of funding cuts in several countries, led by the United States, one of its main donors.
“The WHO has gathered information from more than 100 countries to understand the impact and the support they need to mitigate it [the situation caused by the cuts]. Nearly three-quarters of WHO offices in countries report disruptions to health services, and a quarter report the closure of health centers in their countries.”
A child is administered a polio vaccine in Gaza, a campaign supported by the WHO.
The WHO warned that severe funding cuts threaten decades of progress in the fight against tuberculosis, the world’s deadliest infectious disease. The most affected regions include Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Western Pacific, where national tuberculosis programs rely heavily on international support.
“Any disruption to tuberculosis services, whether financial, political or operational, can have devastating and often fatal consequences for millions of people around the world,” said WHO Global Tuberculosis Program Director Tereza Kasaeva.
The WHO Director-General further noted that “many of the gains made over the past 20 years in the fight against malaria are now at risk due to cuts in US funding for global health.”
The United States has been the largest bilateral donor in the fight against malaria for the past two decades.
“If the disruptions continue, this year alone we could see 15 million more cases of malaria and 107,000 deaths, which would be a 15-year setback in progress,” he explained.
The same is true for HIV, as the suspension of most funding for PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, caused the “immediate disruption of HIV treatment, testing, and prevention services in more than 50 countries.”
Disruptions to these programs could wipe out 20 years of progress and lead to more than 10 million additional cases of HIV and three million deaths related to the virus.
Similarly, vaccination networks for diseases such as measles, polio, and rubella in many developing countries are already suffering from the end of US contributions through USAID and other channels, the Ethiopian expert stressed.
Outwardly
To add to the woes, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has announced 20% staff cuts and a reduction in its operations in up to nine countries due to a lack of funding, partly affected by a decline in funds from the United States.
The office, which has a deficit of almost $60 million and is facing a ‘wave of brutal cuts’, will also reduce its presence and operations in countries such as Cameroon, Colombia, Eritrea, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Gaziantep (Turkey) and Zimbabwe, UN Humanitarian Affairs Chief Tom Fletcher said in a letter to the agency’s staff.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM), linked to the UN, also announced in mid-March a series of ‘adjustments’ to projects and staff to address the ‘unavoidable financial reality’ of the organization, a collateral victim of widespread funding cuts that have worsened since Trump’s return to the White House.
Specifically, it decided to reduce or directly cancel a series of projects around the world involving more than 6,000 workers. At headquarters, the workforce will be cut by 20 percent, resulting in the dismissal of 250 employees.
And while people are already dying around the world as a result of brutal US cuts to foreign aid, and thousands of professionals have been left unemployed in UN agencies and non-governmental humanitarian aid organizations that received US funding, Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who is responsible for cutting all these programs) has not hesitated to continue funding costly, failed and corrupt programs of interference against Cuba, including those aimed at defaming and persecuting Cuba’s noble and effective medical collaboration in dozens of countries around the world.
The United States is increasingly closing itself off in the selfishness that is part of the essence of its imperial philosophy. Saving what remains of the power of modern Rome, even if the rest of the world goes to hell, is the deepest thought and ruthless action of Trump and his clique of billionaires who, as if they weren’t already destroying the planet, are preparing with Musk for future colonization expeditions to Mars.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English