A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Tonight, thousands of people who work for USAID will be forced to go on leave as the Trump administration continues to gut the agency that provides humanitarian assistance all over the world. Now, this comes two weeks after the U.S. froze nearly all foreign assistance, including food. So how is that affecting the fight against hunger globally?
Eugene Cho joins us now. He's president of Bread for the World. It's a Christian organization based in the U.S. that advocates for policies to end hunger. Eugene, so how important is USAID to global food security?
EUGENE CHO: Well, thanks for having me. USAID is the largest and the most impactful humanitarian agency funded by U.S. taxpayers. It's the most impactful agency in the world, and so for it not to be working as intended is obviously going to have an impact on hunger globally. And I say this acknowledging that there are about 750 million people that experience hunger around the world, including 45 million children that suffer from something called wasting, which is the most dangerous form of malnutrition. We are very, very concerned.
MARTÍNEZ: So are you worried that lives are at stake here?
CHO: Absolutely. We know that lives will be in jeopardy. Soon, we'll learn more. But all the reports that we're hearing from our implementing partners are very dangerous stories because systems have been shut down, and people are unable to do the work that they were contracted to do through the USAID.
MARTÍNEZ: What is happening, then, to all the aid that was maybe in transit or put in storage in recent weeks? Is it just going to sit there?
CHO: There are stories about essential medicines that are expiring in the Democratic Republic of the Congo after a cash-strapped government contractor was forced to shut off its air conditioning. And so there's concerns about the lifesaving antibiotics and the antimalarial drugs. There's stories about certain food. This particular story comes from a woman named Gena Perry, who leads a human health program for the American Soybean Association, which is an industry trade group. And so there's 33,000 metric tons of soybeans and soy products, which is used to treat severe malnutrition in East Africa, other regions. And unfortunately, these shipping containers full of these materials, en route, have had to be diverted to warehouses, or worse - held at ports. Basically, there's no instructions on what they're supposed to do.
MARTÍNEZ: Eugene, the Government Accountability Office has recommended changes to USAID's global hunger initiative over the years. It noted lack of performance goals, problems with transparency. Are you at all sympathetic to the need for this oversight?
CHO: So Bread for the World - we are an advocacy organization. We don't receive a single dollar from the U.S. government. And so it's really important for us - for myself personally, as a fiscal conservative, I am very happy when there are conversations about more transparency, more efficiency. But to suggest that we have to shut down the entire system in order for that to take place is not only ludicrous. It's incredibly dangerous and, I would say, unfair because it happened literally overnight without warning.
MARTÍNEZ: Eugene Cho is president of Bread for the World. Eugene, thanks a lot.
CHO: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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