What the End of Aid Looks Like

The United States and other countries are cutting humanitarian relief. Our reporter went to Somalia to see the impact.

When the Trump administration shuttered U.S.A.I.D., it was the beginning of the collapse of the international relief system. Other rich countries quietly cut their own aid budgets. One official told my colleague Peter Goodman that we’re now entering “the post-aid era.”

It was only a matter of time before the world felt the effects during a major crisis. We’re now seeing two. An Ebola outbreak in central Africa may have been compounded by aid cuts that have forced clinics to close. The war in Iran has led to soaring costs for food, fuel and fertilizer. The people hurt are the most vulnerable, who no longer have a safety net.

Peter recently traveled to Somalia to see the impact up close. Today he writes about why the consequences of dismantling humanitarian aid are likely to be felt far beyond that country’s borders.

A catastrophe in Somalia (By Peter Goodman)

In more than three decades of journalism, I have seen my share of tragedies, from the Indian Ocean tsunami to wars in Iraq and Cambodia. But what I saw and heard recently in Somalia shocked me.

I spoke to a couple who had fled their drought-ravaged home carrying their 3-year-old on their backs. They walked for nine days toward what they’d envisioned as a refuge — a cluster of international relief organizations near the Ethiopian border. When they got there, they learned that the aid groups had abandoned the area. When I met them, they were subsisting on one daily meal of porridge and weeds pulled from the riverbanks.

I talked to a woman holding her 2-day-old son as she recounted the story of his birth: She first went to a local health clinic that had been funded by UNICEF. It was locked. UNICEF has closed 205 of its 800 clinics in Somalia as it’s lost funding. The woman resorted to begging her neighbors for the fare for a motorized rickshaw to a hospital. She lay in the back, bumping over dirt roads for half an hour.

The gutting of the international humanitarian relief system began more than a year ago, when the Trump administration dismantled U.S.A.I.D. Britain and Germany have pulled back, too, under pressure from Washington to spend more on defense.

The situation in Somalia was already tenuous. Then came the war in Iran.

Somalia is heavily dependent on imports for food, fertilizer and fuel. With shipping effectively halted in the Strait of Hormuz, prices for those critical goods have roughly doubled. In scores of poor and unstable countries, hunger is increasing as the cost of food rises.

We’re seeing the first real test of how a global shock like the war will play out in what one relief official described as “the post-aid era.”

- Author: Katrin Bennhold, The New York Times

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