Aid cuts will do irreversible damage, warns UN development chief

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Foreign aid cuts by wealthy nations will do irreversible damage to global development systems that took decades to build, the head of the United Nations Development Programme has warned.

Achim Steiner, whose 10-year service as administrator of the UN’s main global development agency ends on June 16, told the Financial Times that the cuts by the US and European governments amounted to “a retreat from a commitment to investing together in development in our age”.

US President Donald Trump’s administration has in effect shut down the US Agency for International Development, and has reduced multiyear aid contracts by 92 per cent.

The UK in February slashed its foreign aid budget from 0.5 per cent to 0.3 per cent of GDP, far from the 0.7 per cent level to which developed nations have been nominally committed for decades.

Steiner said of the US: “The largest donor, in absolute terms, has disappeared from the international arena in large part.”

Achim Steiner warns the damage being done by development assistance cuts could be impossible to reverse, even if budgets were to recover later © Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

The UK, he added, had chosen “to essentially de-fund a tradition of engagement and being a strategic partner to many developing countries in the Commonwealth and beyond”.

Other rich nations had been following suit, he noted, including the Netherlands, Australia and Switzerland.

Steiner warned that the aid cuts were already having “life-threatening consequences” in many countries.

“You see our inability, for example, through [the World Food Programme], to continue to provide the rations that are needed in refugee camps around the world,” he said.

“You can also see that in the way that the UN at the moment is not able to step up in Sudan, where millions of people are internally displaced or have become refugees.

“And millions of people . . . with HIV/Aids — literally overnight, clinics are closing, supply chains are disrupted, and people are not receiving antiretroviral treatments.”

The UN itself is set to be hit hard by Trump’s spending overhaul. Washington’s new annual budget proposal, published on May 30, includes no funding for the UN’s core operations.

It would also terminate US funding for agencies including the UN Human Rights Council and the UN Relief and Works Agency, which supports Palestinian refugees.

The UN secretariat is now preparing to cut its $3.7bn budget by a fifth and cut about 6,900 jobs, Reuters reported on May 29, citing an internal memo.

That was only part of job losses that were set to reach “tens of thousands” across UN agencies, Steiner said.

“These are decisions that essentially weaken the institution and compromise its ability to be one of the backbones for international co-operation,” he said of the wider development assistance cuts.

He said the damage could be impossible to reverse even if budgets were to recover later.

“This kind of capacity is not something that you can just bring on tap with a project,” he said. “These are not things that you can just jump-start again.”