Agriculture minister John Steenhuisen says US President Donald Trump’s abrupt cut in foreign aid is a wake-up call to countries that have relied on US support to help feed their populations.
“We need to become far more resilient,” he said on the sidelines of the Nutrition for Growth summit in Paris last week.
The two-day summit gathered representatives from governments, philanthropic foundations, the private sector and civil society to mobilise financial and political commitments to combat malnutrition. It was the first meeting of its kind since the US slashed humanitarian and development aid.
Many European countries have also scaled back on foreign assistance as they move to step up defence spending.
While the reductions in foreign aid announced recently by the UK (40%), France (37%) and the Netherlands (30%) are set to take place over several years, there will nevertheless be a sharp drop in nutrition funding this year, scientists warned in the journal Nature last week.
Shrinking aid budgets will cut off support to 2.3-million severely malnourished children in low and middle income countries, and lead to 369,000 deaths that could have been prevented, according to their estimates.
While SA does not rely on foreign aid to support its domestic interventions to tackle malnutrition, it is nevertheless at risk because an increase in hunger in neighbouring countries is likely to trigger increased migration, said Steenhuisen.
“We’ve seen a huge uptick, particularly along the Lesotho border, of stock and crop theft as well as people who are hungry coming over the border to seek food,” he said.
“Food insecurity also leads to conflict. When you have conflict that displaces people, those people take refuge in other countries, and SA as a larger economy will always end up as a place where they go,” he said.
“We also need a wake-up call about how we move food around the continent. Currently it’s cheaper for the World Food Programme (WFP) to import grain from Mexico to places like the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo] than to import it from Zimbabwe, Zambia or SA, largely because of the terribly poor infrastructure,” he said.
The WFP said on Friday it faces a 40% drop in funding this year compared to 2024, and warned that 58-million people were at risk of losing vital support in 28 of its most critical programmes, half of which are in Africa. They include programmes in Mozambique, Malawi, DRC and Kenya, among others.
The threats posed by the reduction in global aid were raised by many speakers at the summit, including Unicef executive director Catherine Russell, who drew attention to the heightened risks for women and adolescent girls.
“Over the last few decades, the world has made significant progress in reducing child malnutrition all over the world. Today we’re facing a funding crisis that threatens to roll back our progress, and women and adolescent girls are unfortunately going to bear the brunt,” she told delegates.
“Around the world women and girls eat last, and they eat least,” she said, noting that 60% of the world’s malnourished people were female.
The summit had by Friday mobilised pledges for $27.55bn from the private sector, philanthropic foundations, development banks and governments to fight food insecurity.
In contrast to the 2021 Japan summit, where the US pledged $13bn, the Paris summit received no commitment from the US.
Host nation France has committed €750m over the next five years of which €100m will be directed to Africa via the Agence Française de Développement.
• Kahn attended the summit as a guest of the French government.
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