The head of the U.S. Agency for International Development has announced more than $1 billion in new funding to address the global food security emergency, malnutrition, and agricultural development, while also criticizing Russia’s president for his role in the crisis and calling on China to step up.
The agency will provide a “surge” of nearly $1.2 billion “to meet the immediate needs faced by the people of Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia” — funding that is partly new money, with some coming from a drawdown of the Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust — said Samantha Power during a lengthy speech in Washington on Monday. The USAID administrator will also travel to that region later this week, she said.
The money will be used in a number of ways: to provide food staples to those who need them, to give cash assistance for food purchases, and to expand mobile health and nutrition teams to offer vaccines, treatment for the ill, and clean water and sanitation kits. The funding will also cover child protection services, as well as counseling and medical support for survivors of sexual assault.
The outlay will be programmed this fiscal year, according to a USAID spokesperson. The announcement came on the heels of a letter to Power from a group of lawmakers criticizing the slow rollout of food aid.
On Monday, she also revealed $90 million for development assistance in the Horn of Africa, pending Congressional approval, which will come from the $760 million that lawmakers approved as part of a supplemental funding bill for Ukraine. USAID’s funding for longer-term agricultural development will focus on distributing drought-tolerant seeds, using technology and precision farming to maximize fertilizer usage, and tackling food loss and waste.
USAID has also partnered with GoFundMe.org to raise individual and corporate donations to address the global food security crisis. The new Global Food Fund will distribute money to nonprofit organizations that provide humanitarian relief in response to the food security crisis.
Nutrition gains
In addition to addressing food security in the short and longer term, USAID will also give $200 million to UNICEF for child malnutrition globally. The funding will go specifically to purchasing and scaling the distribution of ready-to-use therapeutic food, or RUTF — a highly effective intervention.
Power said that a group of foundations and philanthropic donors are contributing $50 million and announced an effort to mobilize an additional $250 million by the time of the United Nations General Assembly in September to further scale RUTF.
That support should translate into treating about 2.4 million children, which would make it the “largest leap in coverage on record” and the “most significant commitment that has ever been made to treat severely malnourished children,” Power said.
RUTF is an enriched paste that is simple to administer at home and has been shown to reduce child wasting within weeks. Among severely malnourished children who get an RUTF packet three times a day for six weeks, about 90% recover — roughly equivalent to the amount who die without the treatment — Power said.
William Moore, the CEO of the Eleanor Crook Foundation, one of the philanthropic donors contributing to the effort, said the funding would be historic and “the next year is poised to be the most transformational year in the history of wasting treatment” since RUTF was invented in 1996. Power credited Moore with helping convince her to scale U.S. funding for RUTF, she said.
Diplomacy?
Not pulling any punches, Power repeatedly called out Russian President Vladimir Putin in her speech and criticized China for an insufficient humanitarian response, while at the same time calling on other nations to step up their efforts to address the food security crisis.
“Through his actions, he [Putin] is also waging a war on the world's poor,” she said, adding that things are going to get worse. “Putin will tell you that Western sanctions are to blame, even though we purposefully created carve-outs for Russian fertilizer and food. But the truth never deters Putin from espousing its opposite.”
Countries must step up, as the U.S. has, in the global response, Power said, calling out those who have been cutting back aid budgets or seeking to redefine what qualifies as aid. She asked other countries to do what the U.S. has done and provide funds outside of their approved budgets to meet current gaps, especially those benefiting from high commodity prices.
“The generosity marshaled toward the people of Ukraine must also be directed to the less visible victims of Putin's war, to those bearing the brunt of the cascading effects of his terror,” Power said.
A “road map” for global food security, launched by the U.S. at the U.N. in May, now has more than 100 signatories, but some countries — namely China — are absent from that list, she said.
China should sign on, remove export restrictions on fertilizer, and release some of its grain reserves to humanitarian entities such as the World Food Programme — decisions that would “powerfully demonstrate the country’s desire to be a global leader and a friend to the world’s least developed economies,” Power said.
And China has been more generous in past crises, she added. The country donated $34 million to WFP’s response during the 2017 drought in the Horn of Africa, but in 2022 it has only contributed $3 million for WFP’s global response. By contrast, the U.S. has provided $3.9 billion to WFP this fiscal year, Power said.
About the author
Adva Saldinger@AdvaSal
Adva Saldinger is a Senior Reporter at Devex where she covers development finance, as well as U.S. foreign aid policy. Adva explores the role the private sector and private capital play in development and authors the weekly Devex Invested newsletter bringing the latest news on the role of business and finance in addressing global challenges. A journalist with more than 10 years of experience, she has worked at several newspapers in the U.S. and lived in both Ghana and South Africa.
