Andy Harrington can’t get the image out of his mind: A group of mothers in South Sudan thrusting their babies in his direction, begging him to help them get food for their starving children.
For Harrington, executive director of Canadian Foodgrains Bank, that visit to a feeding centre in Aweil, South Sudan remains a “heartbreaking and distressing” memory.
The reason those mothers were so desperate is due to cuts to USAID funding by the Trump administration.
According to Harrington, hundreds of thousands of children in that country — which broke away from Sudan in 2011 — and neighbouring Sudan are in danger of malnutrition or starvation due to the closing of USAID-funded programs.
“It’s a pretty despairing time in South Sudan,” says Harrington, who was in South Sudan from March 8 to 16. “The reductions in USAID funding have caused catastrophic upheaval there and within the global aid system.”
About 1,100 feeding and nutrition centres have been closed because of the cuts. The one he visited was due to shut down the day he was there.
The cuts are “leading to an alarming increase in hunger at a rapid and devastating pace,” he said.
According to the Center for Global Development think tank, over half-a-million people in Sudan and South Sudan could die this year without U.S. funding for food aid. “I know that’s true,” Harrington. “We saw it. It’s happening now.”
Harrington recalled conversations with residents of the camp.
“They were in such despair,” he says, noting they were there when the last bags of grain from the U.S. were being distributed.
Stories like Harrington’s are being repeated around the world.
“[The aid] was turned off with no notice, all of a sudden,” he says of the cuts. “Some people travelled three days to camps only to discover when they arrived there was no more food. It was like a brick wall came down.”
While the Foodgrains Bank — a partnership of 15 churches and church agencies working together to end hunger — is doing what it can, “there’s no way we can backfill the need caused by the USAID cuts,” Harrington says. The U.S. previously supplied 50 per cent of global aid.
A $4 million grant from the Canadian government to the Foodgrains Bank for Sudan and South Sudan will allow the organization to provide food for 25,000 people for a year. “But we can’t do it all.”
Canada’s overall ability to meet the needs resulting from the American cuts is also limited. South Sudanese government officials “repeatedly asked us whether Canada could fill the gaps left by others’ departures,” he says. “The answer was no.”
Canada “could never have the capacity to do what USAID did,” Harrington says, adding that funding from USAID underpinned so much of the aid infrastructure in the developing world. “A lot of things are falling apart with it, logistics and transportation, for example.”
Although Canada cannot replace U.S. funding, there are things it can do. It can continue to provide food aid and emergency nutrition for children. And it can “resist the pull of nationalism” that causes countries to “retreat behind their borders,” Harrington says.
Canadians can also help by donating to aid groups that are active in the developing world, he says. The Foodgrains Bank has launched an appeal for Sudan.
Harrington disputes the characterization of some foreign aid critics that there is waste and fraud in the system.
“Canadian aid is one of the most accountable and transparent in the world,” he said, noting Canadian aid groups are subject to stringent rules, monitoring, transparency and audits. “Our accountability rules are stronger than any other country in the world. Our bar is very high.”
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