Donald Trump’s decision to sever food aid to Afghanistan will leave millions of the country’s poorest people vulnerable to famine this summer, a World Food Programme (WFP) official has told The Independent.
This week the Trump administration quietly reversed its decision to cancel vital food aid programmes to 12 countries via funding for the UN’s WFP, but Afghanistan and Yemen were not included in the U-turn.
It’s a devastating blow to aid programmes in Afghanistan, where a country ravaged by two decades of war and with its Taliban-run economy in ruins is heavily dependent on foreign humanitarian support. In 2024, the US provided 43 per cent of international humanitarian funding to Afghanistan.
Mutinta Chimuka, the WFP’s deputy country director for Afghanistan, said in an interview that the UN body learned US aid would not be restored to the country last weekend. She said it would affect core famine prevention programmes in both the lean summer months and the freezing winter, as well as preventing WFP from providing food packages to newly returned Afghan deportees from Pakistan and Iran.
“These cuts mean mothers will go hungry, children will go without treatment, and millions of Afghans returning to a country they barely know will be met with empty hands. We are being forced to abandon those who need us most,” she said.
She said the WFP team was already making difficult choices to distribute aid to vulnerable people in one village over another, and that such painful decision-making would only be exacerbated.
“This summer, WFP will no longer be able to deliver planned famine-prevention activities, leaving at least two million people without support during the lean season. More than two million returnees from Pakistan and Iran will arrive to find no support, despite having nowhere else to turn,” she said.
Afghan women and children – already the hardest hit by the hunger crisis – are likely to be at the greatest risk of malnutrition, illness, and death, the official said.
“As a result of [programme cuts], over 400,000 malnourished children and mothers will be denied treatment, even as Afghanistan faces the worst levels of child malnutrition in its history. Women-headed households, already among the most vulnerable, are now at even greater risk, with two-thirds unable to afford basic nutritious food,” Ms Chimuka said.
“I was recently in Herat where I met a young Afghan mother in a clinic and she is a beneficiary of WFP aid. In her tow, she had a four-month-old baby who was extremely tiny for its size. This is the situation of undernourished or malnourished women who get pregnant and then have babies who are also malnourished. Our critical aid was helping us break this generational cycle with tools which we no longer have,” Ms Chimuka said.
The WFP says US cuts will make it impossible for them to prepare food to distribute in advance of winter, when more than three million vulnerable people are expected to be snowed in and unreachable.
The drive to cut USAID funding has been led by Mr Trump’s billionaire adviser Elon Musk and his meme-inspired Department of Government Efficiency. The SpaceX chief executive has said he wants to dramatically reduce foreign assistance, calling the aid wasteful and misused in the advancement of liberal causes.
