PARIS (AFP) – More than 14 million of the world’s most vulnerable people, a third of them small children, could die by 2030 because of the Trump administration’s dismantling of U.S. foreign aid, research projected on Tuesday.
The study in the prestigious Lancet journal was published as world and business leaders gather for a United Nations conference in Spain this week hoping to bolster the reeling aid sector.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had provided over 40 percent of global humanitarian funding until Donald Trump returned to the White House in January.
Two weeks later, Trump’s then-close advisor — and world’s richest man — Elon Musk boasted of having put the agency “through the woodchipper”.
The funding cuts “risk abruptly halting — and even reversing — two decades of progress in health among vulnerable populations”, warned study co-author Davide Rasella, a researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal).
“For many low- and middle-income countries, the resulting shock would be comparable in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict,” he said in a statement.
The researchers also used modeling to project how funding being slashed by 83 percent — the figure announced by the U.S. government earlier this year — could affect death rates.
The cuts could lead to more than 14 million avoidable deaths by 2030, the projections found.
That number included over 4.5 million children under the age of five — or around 700,000 child deaths a year.
For comparison, around 10 million soldiers are estimated to have been killed during World War I.
A recently updated tracker run by disease modeler Brooke Nichols at Boston University estimates that nearly 108,000 adults and more than 224,000 children have already died as a result of the U.S. aid cuts.
That works out to 88 deaths every hour, according to the tracker.
After USAID was gutted, several other major donors, including France, Germany and the UK, followed suit in announcing plans to slash their foreign aid budgets.
These aid reductions, particularly in the European Union, could lead to “even more additional deaths in the coming years,” study co-author Caterina Monti of ISGlobal said.
But the grim projections are based on the current amount of pledged aid, so could rapidly come down if the situation changes, the researchers emphasized.
Dozens of world leaders are meeting in the Spanish city of Seville this week for the biggest aid conference in a decade. The United States, however, will not attend.
“Now is the time to scale up, not scale back,” Rasella said.