{"id":17042,"date":"2025-10-17T16:13:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T23:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=17042"},"modified":"2025-11-15T22:50:56","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T06:50:56","slug":"issue-of-the-week-hunger-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=17042","title":{"rendered":"Issue of the Week: Hunger"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Back to News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Keith Blume and Clara Lippert, outside Russian bombed apartment building in Kyiv, Ukraine<\/em>, (c) 2025 Planet Earth Foundation, all rights reserved.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The End Of Civilization As We Knew It, Part Thirty Three<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The author of this post is sitting on a plane returning home to Seattle from Ukraine via Warsaw. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We take a break from Ukraine as the sole topic of the last two posts<\/a> and as the project we will be working on with film and images and interviews and experiences, intensely, for some time, in producing a documentary from this journey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, appropriately, we return to the issue that our work began with and has continued to be a critical part of for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

World Hunger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a searing part of this issue of crucial importance related to Ukraine as well, which we will get to later in this post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As written about and shown in our productions for years, the issue of world hunger<\/a> was chosen as our initial focus because hunger killed, and still does\u2013even though greatly reduced because of our work and the work of many, many others\u2013more people, mostly children, than anything. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And because it used to be the one thing that everyone agreed should be ended (they just needed focus on how it could be). It was the one non-polarizing issue, with strong support for programs to help, from Republicans and Democrats alike, that also had the benefit (or hazzard) of being interrelated with and necessary precondition to solving every other problem that threatened humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yesterday was World Food Day. Like all such days, once filled with real focus, it\u2019s a day now that passes without even being noticed by most people. A sign of our times. The complete collapse of our moral, ethical, community culture built on any meaning that had boundaries of behavior and action that could be counted on, in America and globally. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whose fault is that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of ours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whose responsibility to change?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of ours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The historical and sociological reasons for our current condition have been covered extensively by us and others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bottom line we refer to now is that without a guarantee of basic needs for all people, we are doomed as a species. So even if you don\u2019t care about anyone else, you need to act like you do if you want to survive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are you going to stop letting babies and children starve and die and be maimed and stunted by disease? We have talked often about child abuse, of which this a form. We will end it, or it will end us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When it comes to basic needs for survival, if you are going to let babies and children die and have their lives destroyed, then stop hiding and say it and defend why publicly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Good luck with that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You may believe that guaranteeing basic needs for all adults is a mistake for all the usual reasons put forth by the handful of people who own everything and have convinced others they are fleecing that they (and others less able and they believe less deserving than them) should be fleeced if they don\u2019t pull a rabbit out of a hat and find a job, if there is one, that pays more than it does, while a home can\u2019t be afforded by even the hardest working people, and so on. Government (which is to say all of us) shouldn\u2019t provide any security for basic needs for others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If so, you should give back your Social Security and Medicare and health care and not notice that there are or have been systems in American history with financial regulations, high taxes for the rich, who barely noticed and would even less with their extreme wealth today, functioning unions, good paying jobs, affordable housing and the biggest most prosperous middle class in history. And systems and policies in the world that have and do provide the combination of basic guarantees and work to achieve more, that are prosperous and democratic and sustainable, if always in need of adaptation to do better, as is the state of human affairs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But regardless of your views on what should or should not be guaranteed in terms of survival for adults, the simple fact is that babies and children have parents and caregivers and teachers and on and on\u2013adults they need to survive\u2013who can\u2019t be there for them with any certainty unless their survival is guaranteed as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is just shorthand, purposefully, to make a point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Start with the babies and children. Give them life or kill them, give them basic needs or deprive them and maim them and stunt their growth in every way. Billions are being killed and stunted for life physically and mentally. If you can live with that, please leave earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you stay (the above is not a call to suicide for the sociopathic\u2013so unless you\u2019re among the handful riding away to the brave new AI world on Mars with Elon from the earth and humanity you\u2019ve destroyed, you will stay), the children will become adults costing infinitely more to society, to you, with all the costly problems they have in their suffering. And in the end they will be coming after you with pitchforks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh wait, that\u2019s right, it\u2019s a world now of nuclear weapons, and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So in that world, and as the prime example of the end of all civilized or even international, national and personal survival behavior, after the US election last November, Trump, the Republican congress (no real Republicans left but a handful, just cult followers of what David Brooks has described as a gangster enterprise), and the corporate titans (the richest one in particular) destroyed the entire global US aid system in place since World War Two. Officially organized as USAID by President Kennedy, it was strengthened by every Republican and Democratic president and congress since, especially after Jimmy Carter made ending hunger a priority after seeing our first film on hunger<\/a>. It was a bookend irony of all times not recognized by us when we covered Carter\u2019s state funeral<\/a>, that days later Trump would be sworn in on the same spot in the Capitol Rotunda.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And within days would literally be taking the food out of millions of babies\u2019 mouths and condemning millions to a miserable death.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What precious little is left of the remnants of USAID and other aid programs has been transfered to the state department, and the claim has been and is made performatively by the Trump administration, that no harm has been done. The administration claimed USAID has little to show since the end of the Cold War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, as John Adams (arguably the most important figure in the American Revolution\u2013and since what was commonplace knowledge is a black hole these days, your responsibility as a sentient being is to look up, learn and study what you don\u2019t know) reminded us: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFacts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not exactly a saying for our times, which underlines the irrefutable point of it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To point, just this last July, a study published in The Lancet<\/em> (one of the most reputable medical journals in the world\u2013the following is too important to wait for anyone to look it up as intoned above) estimated that 14 million people would die<\/em>, including 4.5 million children, in just the next five years because of the USAID shutdown. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the rise in population in the places most in need and historically served, the numbers of millions of deaths will rise exponentially. Probably far above a hundred million in two decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the psychopaths disguised as realists, this will not equate to a population offset by thinning the herd. All factors considered plus the dynamics behind population growth in the most impacted countries, this will add to population. Plus in any event, all this will be a match to light instability into a global bonfire. What goes around, comes around, with a fury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same study estimated that over 90 million lives<\/em> had been saved by USAID over the past two decades. Since the end of the Cold War that would be about 158 million lives saved<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, who could argue that saving 158 million lives was \u201clittle to show\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ambassador W. Robert Pearson was the ambassador to Turkey under President George W. Bush (the Republican president liberals and progressives most loved to hate in recent years, often called \u201cHitler,\u201d until Trump came along) and director general of the US Foreign Service from 2003 to 2006 (also during the Bush administration). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an article in American Diplomacy<\/em> in August, titled \u201cThe Destruction of USAID: How to Cause Innocent Deaths, Save Little Money, Betray Our Legacy and Help Our Adversaries\u201d<\/a>, Pearson wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The final destruction of USAID by President Trump in early July 2025 is the greatest strategic surrender of global American influence in the 80 years since the end of WWII.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Section titles such as Millions of Deaths \u2013 Microscopic Budgetary Gain<\/em> and Our Adversaries are the Winners<\/em> speak for themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the Cold War, USAID helped win it. When people in the \u201chuts and villages of the world\u201d\u2013as JFK famously spoke of in his immortal innaugural address in 1961\u2013thought of who was bringing them food, medicine and developmental help, it was America. It was pictures of JFK on the walls after his assassination for years in such places, not any Soviet leader. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

USAID was a major collaborator in the global campaign to eliminate smallpox, which was eliminated as a disease in 1979.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It had killed 500 million to one billion people throughout history, including 300 million in the 20th century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is the only disease that has ever been completely eliminated\u2013by a vaccine, or hundreds of millions more would already have died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Along with PEPFAR, the program created by President George Bush, USAID was in the process of potentially eliminating HIV\/AIDS, saving millions of lives mainly in Africa. The funding has nominally been partly spared, but the impact when USAID was shut down was, and has been, catastrophic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the Cold War was in the process of ending, USAID played a crucial role in supporting movements and programs that supported democracy and stability in a crucial time of transition, helping to make and maintain America as the only superpower in the world, and spread global democracy peacefully more than at any time in history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Democrats have been feckless in terms of any sustained focus on this issue, even while talking about the crumbling of democracy. Yes, the term foreign aid has often not been all that popular. But specific support for ending hunger and disease and providing these kinds of basics for people in need around the world has always been popular with the American people. Talking about the results of the destruction of services for Americans, including those that prevented hunger in America for infants, children and mothers, and particularly the threat to health care for all Americans, has been useful. But the opportunity to continually keep eyes on the responsibility for maintaining America\u2019s security and moral place in the world instead of enabling dismantling it have been woefully wanting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And most responsible?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The majority of Americans who at least have the basics themselves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A majority of American adults may act like babies whose attention span doesn\u2019t go beyond the next want and feel-good cultural addiction and ideological knee-jerk reaction, but they\u2019re adults. And when they saw the headlines about USAID and the unprecedented damage to humanity it would cause\u2013death for millions and danger in a chaotic world\u2013they had an absolute responsibility to pay attention, and tell their president and senators and representatives to stop it, immediately, or this thing called political payback would hit them like a tsunami.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A related and insidious event that has occurred in the wake of US demolition of its aid programs is the substantial reduction of such programs by Western European NATO countries. These countries, such as the UK, which have been in the forefront of championing such aid for years, have done and are doing so because of insistance by the Trump administration that they spend more on defence related to NATO. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is worse than mixing apples with oranges. Increasing defense spending for NATO in the face of the Russian threat from the war in Ukraine and increasing provocations in Europe is definitely needed, ironically because the European nations have no confidence in being able to count on the very US administration insisting on it. But here\u2019s what you get from that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A moral migraine that never goes away. Increased instability and conflict in the nations suffering from hunger and poverty. Directly resulting in more desperate migrants coming to your countries. Creating financial strain and more importantly political polarization in your own nations as a result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But with Putin coming at you from one side and Trump breathing down your neck from another, there\u2019s no real choice, except of course to do what the US should do\u2013get more tax income from the super rich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the economics of scale on this issue are weighted 90-plus percent as a responsibility of the US, which should be behaving this way in its own interest in any event. If Europe is going to carry a heavier defense burden, then the US should be adding to aid programs, not destroying them, to make up for any cost to aid programs from Europe. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The US can easily afford it. The US has by far the largest GDP in the world. The national debt problem, which is real, has been caused by a number of things. The so-called DOGE project by Trump under Elon Musk saved virtually nothing in percentage by gutting USAID and other important services. The moral and national security costs of doing so are the definition of insanity. The money saved by trashing USAID couldn\u2019t even be meaningfully statistically measured by percentage in comparison to the tax cuts for the rich and super-rich in the first and second Trump administrations. We\u2019re talking trillions. And trillions to the national debt so a handful of people can own the rest of the wealth in the world they don\u2019t already. The billionaires and multimillionaires were already in tax heaven before this insane socialism for the rich happened. Trillions to the national debt and suffering to Americans in services lost and increased inequality beyond an inequality already unimaginable before. But when no one has really delivered for the working class, divisive rhetoric works for a while until reality becomes clear. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A widely praised proposal\u2013as just one example to make the point\u2013for ending the most extreme aspects of inequality and ending hunger and poverty in the world, is that all billionaires pay a 2% tax. They might turn scarlett red and have blood veins burst in their \u201cphilosophical\u201d outrage, but obviously, if someone picked their pocket of this infinitesimally small amount, they\u2019d never notice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But millions of children living instead of dying would.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Ukraine, and every other recent place globally visited, we\u2019ve been told of the devastating damage by the end of aid from USAID.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In February, the World Food Programme reported:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 As the war in Ukraine enters its fourth year, an estimated five million Ukrainians are facing food insecurity, with the greatest needs concentrated in areas near the frontlines. According to data collected by the UN World Food Programme (WFP), millions of people are resorting to coping mechanisms, sacrificing their own meals so their children can eat. Others are going into debt to buy sufficient food supplies to feed their families.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

WFP continues to provide food and cash assistance to nearly 1.5 million Ukrainians each month, mostly in the frontline regions. Despite these efforts, more than half of the people in the Kherson region in the south face severe hunger, and, two out of every five individuals face hunger in Zaporizhzhia as well as the Donetsk region in the east.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a report two days ago, \u201cUN\u2019s World Food Program warns donor cuts are pushing millions more into hunger<\/a>,\u201d WFP said it expects to receive 40% less funding this year, largely due to slashed outlays from the U.S. under the Trump administration<\/a>, which \u201ccould amount to a death sentence for millions of people facing extreme hunger and starvation\u201d, said WFP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the UN, 14.6 million people in Ukraine need humanitarian aid, 5 million are internally displaced and a third of the population faces food insecurity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NGOs based in and outside of Ukraine providing food and other humanitarian aid have reported drastic reduction in their ability to provide services as a result of USAID shutting down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Action Against Hunger reports:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CONSEQUENCES OF THE U.S. FOREIGN AID FREEZE IN UKRAINE<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Ukraine marks three years of war, the U.S. government\u2019s suspension of international aid has caused Action Against Hunger to stop distributing cash to families displaced near the front line. Humanitarian operations in the region were already functioning with limited resources and struggling to access frontline areas.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just a week and a half ago, we met with and interviewed on video three extraordinary women in Kyiv who had leading roles in two major NGOs dealing with providing humanitarian needs for 2.8 million internally displaced persons from Russia\u2019s war of aggression in Ukraine, and the abduction, trafficking or forced attempts to erase Ukrainian identity of 1.6 million Ukrainian children by Russia. At this point we\u2019re not naming people or organizations we dealt with in Ukraine while we wade through countless hours of video to produce a documentary on the above. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among those needing emergency help are those who live through their homes being destroyed by Russian air strikes or are driven from their homes by Russian air strikes and brutal occupation of Ukrainian territory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At one point in the interviews of all three of the above Ukrainian women who have lived through the Russian air attacks along with nearly all civilians in Ukraine almost daily for three and a half years, we asked the question: What has the impact been of shutting down USAID? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Heads and faces and eyes moved in dismay and depression. It came out of nowhere. Sudden. Never seemingly possible. And it has been disastrous for the wounded and suffering people they serve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What were the top ten countries receiving support from USAID (last report from fiscal year 2024) when it was shuttered?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ukraine, Democratic Republic of Congo, Jordan, Ethiopia, West Bank and Gaza, Sudan, Nigeria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and South Sudan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other two worst wars in the world in terms of hunger, civilian deaths and suffering are Sudan (the worst)<\/a> and Gaza, in which hunger and starvation have been rampant and a ceasefire hopefully gives the opportunity to alleviate the horrible suffering there (we are skeptical about the prospects for many reasons to be covered in the future).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we said a while back, everything is changing.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the wrong way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it needs to stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Four days ago, after arriving in Warsaw from Kyiv, we went to the site, museum and memorial at Treblinka, the Nazi extermination camp. It was the second largest death camp in the Nazi Final Solution. Auschwitz was the largest, but there were many who worked as slave labor there before being killed, hence more survivors when the camps were liberated. Treblinka had one purpose. Killing upon arrival. Nearly one million of the six million died there. As haunting an experience as there could be in the universe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ve all seen images of babies dying or severely malnourished, diseased, and if lucky enough to be saved, with many hurdles to come. They look like the images of the inmates at the death camps, those dead and piled to be burned and those who barely were alive when liberated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Nazis have been seen as the archetype of evil, which they were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what is the difference morally with millions of babies and children starving and being stunted every year, when the resources to change this were and are readily there, and humanity lets this go on? And then the most reliable solution to the emergency part of this and in many ways the sustainable development beyond this, which has saved countless millions of lives, is consciously ended, instantly, unimaginably, by a new American president, congress not even asserting its own constitutional duties, undermining democracy while being architects of human slaughter on a new scale, and the American people enabling it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ongoing annihilation of the desperate of humanity, singling them out because they are the most desperate of humanity. The most expendable in service of a facade of saving money for a further tax cut for the richest people in history by far. A new form of pure evil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But hey, don\u2019t listen to us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Listen to the pope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You, know, the new guy on the global scene, the American pope, Leo XIV.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yesterday, Pope Leo spoke at the Food and Agricultural Organization<\/a> (FAO) in Rome on World Food Day about world hunger and accompanying poverty, disease and war. It was covered in all the major media worldwide. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leo has moved slowly, still at the start of his pontificate, in being a public presence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was no reticence yesterday. He clearly decided that this was the moment to address hunger and all issues related to it as the heart of evil in the world and to pull no punches in demanding that it must be ended as the urgent responsibility of everyone<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

. . .<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEighty years after the establishment of the FAO, our conscience must once again challenge us to face the ever-present tragedy of hunger and malnutrition. Putting an end to these evils is not solely the responsibility of businesspeople, civil servants or political leaders. It is a problem that we must all work together to solve: international agencies, governments, public institutions, NGOs, academic institutions and civil society, not to mention each individual, who must see the suffering of others as their own.\u201d \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis crisis should immediately engage our attention and lead us to redouble our individual and collective responsibility, awakening us from the fatal lethargy in which we are often mired.\u201d \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAt a time when science has extended life expectancy, technology has brought continents closer together and knowledge has opened up previously unimaginable horizons, to allow millions of human beings to live \u2013 and die \u2013 in the grip of hunger is a collective failure, an ethical aberration, a historical shame.\u201d \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe cannot aspire to a more just social life if we are not willing to rid ourselves of the apathy that justifies hunger as if it were background music we have grown accustomed to, an unsolvable problem, or simply someone else\u2019s responsibility. We cannot demand action from others if we ourselves fail to honor our own commitments.  By our omission, we become complicit in the promotion of injustice.\u201d \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow can we explain the inequalities that allow a few to have everything and many to have nothing? \u2026 Ukraine, Gaza, Haiti, Afghanistan, Mali, the Central African Republic, Yemen and South Sudan, to name just a few places on the planet where poverty has become the daily bread of so many of our brothers and sisters?\u201d \u2026hunger is a collective failure, an ethical derailment, a historic offence. \u2026 do future generations deserve a world that is incapable of eradicating hunger and misery once and for all? \u2026hunger is not humanity\u2019s destiny but its downfall.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

. . .<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following are three extraordinary articles in The New York Times and Associated Press today on the unprecedented horrors caused by the destruction of USAID and destruction or reduction of other aid programs, such as the FAO and the World Food Program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first lengthy article is a master class in the evil of this destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last is another heartbreaking take on the same evil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second is a fully immersive shaming to all Americans and all people in the world who are not doing everything they can. People who have lost all means of support by losing the aid to be caregivers returned to do the caregiving work for nothing, while they have nothing, in response to the most horrible suffering being caused. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They are the human beings. We who have caused and abetted this are the desperate souless ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here are the articles:<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Malyun Ali Ibrahim and her baby daughter at an emergency feeding center in Baidoa, Somalia, last month.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

America\u2019s Retreat From Aid Is Devastating Somalia\u2019s Health System<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Hunger and the diseases that stalk small children have surged in Somalia after the U.S. slashed its aid to the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Listen to this article \u00b7 12:01 min Learn more<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n