The Guardian reported a couple of days ago that Head of UN’s humanitarian agency was frustrated by the amount of money being spent in the Iran war at a time when aid budgets are being cut.
Speaking at the UK’s Chatham House, Tom Fletcher, Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator and Head of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said: “For every day of this conflict, $2bn is being spent. My entire target for a hyper-prioritised plan to save 87 million lives is $23bn. We could have funded that in less than a fortnight of this reckless war. Now, of course, we cannot.”
At the same time he is wrestling with an aid funding crisis which he described as cataclysmic, amounting to a 50% cut in his budget, with something like a $10bn shortfall of his target of $23bn. This is driven not just by the US but also by international cuts to overseas aid as a result of ideology but also increasing demands from defence budgets.
He added: “The idea suddenly that it is OK to say, ‘We are going to blow stuff up, we are going to bomb you back to the stone ages, destroy your civilisation’ – normalising that kind of language is really dangerous. It gives more freedom to all the other wannabe autocrats round the world to use that sort of language and those sort of tactics, targeting civilian infrastructure and civilians in a way that completely breaches international law.”
Fletcher also said the war in Iran was having a ripple effect across the globe and forecast that, with food and fuel inflation reaching up to 20%, “we will feel the impact for years in sub-Saharan Africa and East Africa pushing way more people into poverty”.
Read the full story in the Guardian here.