When I was growing up, it wasnt unusual to find something on my dinner plate that wasnt very appetizing. Nevertheless, my parents had a simple mantra they repeated whenever I refused to eat something I thought was gross. Eat it! Think of all the starving children. Then, if I still refused, I sat there at the dinner table until it was gone.
Actually, it worked! As an adult, I clean my dinner plate; even though I understand it doesnt much help anyone else. Perhaps it does make me aware of how precious food can be, not to be wasted.
And Ive seen with my own eyes some of those starving children in other countries; and in our own. I know what hunger looks like. So it makes me angry, along with Republican Sen. Moran of Kansas, when $340 million in food aid sits at ports in the U.S., waiting on the President Donald Trump and Elon Musk to free it to feed starving people in other lands.
Sen. Moran said, Time is running out before this lifesaving aid perishes. Food stability is essential to political stability, and our food aid programs help feed the hungry, bolster our national security and provide an important market for our farmers, especially when commodity prices are low.
USAID makes up less than 2% of the total federal budget. But we are also the worlds largest source of foreign assistance, funding projects in some 120 countries to fight epidemics, educate children, provide clean water and feed the hungry. The stop-work order of the Trump administration has seen nurses laid off and clinics closed in 25 countries, and food for the starving wasting at the dock. Field hospitals in Syria, a region devastated by years of war and a 2023 earthquake, have laid off 300 staff and shuttered 12 hospitals. HIV patients in Africa are finding locked doors at clinics established to rein in the global AIDS epidemic.
Im hearing from friends involved in work with USAID for many years. Here is one voice from the front lines, laid off with about 100,000 of her colleagues.
I’ve worked on USAID-funded projects on-and-off for decades. Projects I’ve contributed to include those in sexual and reproductive health and rights, family planning, maternal and child health, immunization, HIV prevention and treatment, refugee health, TB prevention and treatment, child marriage, supply chain and commodity provision, gender-based violence, female genital mutilation, program monitoring and evaluation, health system strengthening, data use for decision making, etc. I marvel at the incredible people with whom I have met and worked, including colleagues and health care providers and patients/clients in developing countries around the world. The stories are legion. If I had to pick just one tiny example of the good that U.S. foreign health care assistance has accomplished in my personal experience, I would cite the nurses with whom I worked years ago in rural Malawi. In the course of providing training for them in contraceptive methods, I left them with a copy of the key WHO resource on the topic. The information to them was new and revelatory. They told me later that they kept the volume on a clinic bookshelf so all had ready access to it, and that it was so precious, they treated it ‘like an egg.’”
“How many lives were saved and improved by this one group of nurses having access to this essential information? It would be impossible to calculate the direct and indirect impacts of this single activity. Multiply this by many hundreds of thousands of people and projects elsewhere in the health sector and you begin to see the enormous force for good that can come from U.S. foreign aid and the people dedicated to delivering it. The effects of this defunding will be nothing short of catastrophic.”
Its important to consider another aspect of USAID mentioned by Sen. Moran national security. We spend somewhere around $50 billion annually on aid to countries around the world. That is about the same amount we presently plan to spend each year over the next decade on nuclear weapons. It is quite likely under the Trump administration the aid will freeze and the nukes will heat up. I ask you, which contributes most to human security? Feeding people who are hungry and giving medicine to the sick or holding certain death over someones head?
USAID is also a lifeline to some aspects of rural food production. Kansas, Sen. Morans state, is a prime example. Large quantities of food aid are produced there. There are economic consequences at home to our halting food aid abroad.
But all of these consequences of halting aid seem ever more evil to me, when I see the decision makers using the aura of Christianity. How could it be any clearer!
If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. Or, Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.
If the president cant hear the words be merciful, I dont expect him to take feeding the hungry seriously, either. And why would the richest man in the world even consider woes? Hes in his element; power and privilege!
Its up to all of us to honor the calling.
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