OVER the past year, sharp aid cuts have forced the closure of soup kitchens in war-riven Sudan, led to medicine shortages across sub-Saharan Africa, and resulted in reductions in food rations in places such as Somalia and Haiti. A new study published Monday in the Lancet puts a number on the potential human toll as the global humanitarian system cracks apart, projecting an extra 9.4 million deaths by 2030 if the current trends persist. The study amounts to an early picture of how funding reductions from the United States and other Western countries could undo decades of health gains, leading to upsurges in HIV/AIDS, malaria and hunger across the developing world.
The State Department said in a statement that “some recent ‘studies’ are rooted in outdated thinking, insisting that the old and inefficient global development system is the only solution to human suffering. This is simply not true.” “Rather than helping recipient countries help themselves,” the statement said, “the old system created a global culture of dependency, compounded by significant inefficiency and waste. This has prompted development donors everywhere – not just the United States – to reconsider their approach to foreign aid.” Many poor countries say they’d prefer investment and trade to reliance on handouts.
But replacing a massive support system built up over decades is also perilous, many development experts say. For now, many poorer nations – particularly those with the most fragile governments – are stuck with getting fewer resources than before. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said global development aid was set to drop between 9 and 17 percent in 2025, following a 9 percent decline in 2024.
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Countries in sub-Saharan Africa could see decreases of up to 28 percent. The study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Spanish government, analyzes a scenario in which international aid falls by 10.6 percent per year after 2025. This reflects the average development aid cuts from 2024 and 2025.
The study did not lay out which factors or diseases would lead to the increase in mortality. But health experts are particularly worried about HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis – diseases whose tolls were curbed after coordinated global efforts. “It is the dismantling of an architecture that took 80 years to build,” said Rajiv Shah, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation and the leader of USAID for five years under President Barack Obama. “The scale of the cuts and the scale of the reduction far outstrips the scale of philanthropy to step in and solve the problem.”
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