(elon musk ne fait pas dans le détail, il tranche dans le vif et il en a rien à foutre des soudanais de toute façon, il n'a pas trop d'empathie ce type et je pense que c'est un suprémaciste blanc, je dis cela sans poser de jugement, il suffit d'éviter de croiser leur route. Mais, bon, il faut aussi éviter de croiser la route des fondamentalistes islamistes, juifs, hindouistes et laïcs, il ne reste plus beaucoup d'espace pour vivre. note de rené)
How Trump's assault on USAID 'will lead to surging mortality' in Sudan
In warehouses across Africa, food shipped from the United States intended for the starving people of war-torn Sudan is sitting rotting, its fate unknown.
In Cameroon, Djibouti and elsewhere, rice, wheat, lentils, flour and beans that were on their way to Sudan are being air conditioned to keep from spoiling and sprayed to guard against bugs.
Since the Trump administration announced an immediate suspension of all foreign assistance, blocking ongoing aid programmes and freezing new funding, humanitarian workers around the world have been trying to work out exactly what this means for the millions of vulnerable people they are trying to keep alive.
On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Donald Trump's purge of the six-decade-old US Agency for International Development (USAID) was complete, and that 5,200 of its 6,200 programmes had been eliminated.
The remaining programmes, he said, would now be administered “more effectively” under the State Department and in consultation with Congress.
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For the international organisations providing life-saving humanitarian assistance with US funding, including UN agencies and Catholic Relief Services (CRS), which has already begun laying off staff, the situation is complicated by the so-called “waivers” the US government allowed for commodities the organisations had already paid for.
This is why, according to aid agency and Congress sources, food supplies are sitting dormant in African warehouses: the commodities have been paid for, but the organisations do not have the money to distribute them because that cash was supposed to come from the US government.
So instead of paying for the trucks and staff to deliver life-saving food, they are paying for ways to keep the food from going bad while they scramble to find the funds.
Banks, aware of the situation and far from convinced that Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) will retreat from their mission to slash and burn government spending, are not willing to put up the cash to cover costs in the immediate term.
Sudan's situation darkens
Sudan’s war, which began in April 2023, turned an already bad situation into the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, with over 12 million people displaced from their homes and two-thirds of the population in dire need of humanitarian assistance.
The removal of US aid is already drastically darkening this situation. Last year, the humanitarian community in Sudan needed $2.7bn to address the most urgent needs of 14.7 million people.
In the end, $1.8bn was received, with the US contributing close to half of it ($805.7m). On average, an estimated 4.4 million people across Sudan received some form of humanitarian assistance because of US funding. This year, fundraisers are seeking $4.16bn to reach 20.9 million people.
Both the army and its enemy, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which controls most of the vast western region of Darfur and parts of Kordofan, have struggled to find the funding or capability to provide for the needs of millions of people.
The war’s impact on agricultural production in key states like al-Jazira, Sennar and South Kordofan has been devastating for a country that, according to food security expert Timmo Gaasbeek, relied on farming to feed roughly two-thirds of its people.
In November, with US aid still intact, Gaasbeek wrote that “without an urgent ceasefire and a drastic increase in food aid, up to six million people could die within the next year and the spectre of widespread hunger looms for at least two more”.
Even the ability to predict and measure this famine will be severely hampered by the US funding freeze.
Fews Net, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, is a long-running data analysis tool created by USAID and the State Department that provided guidance on how best to deliver food aid. It is now, following Doge’s cuts, offline.
The Emergency Response Rooms
Since the beginning of 2024, US funding in Sudan has broken from traditional norms.
A chunk of its financial assistance goes, via international agencies and organisations, to a collection of mutual aid groups known as the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), which grew out of the resistance committees at the heart of Sudan's democratic revolutionary movement.
The concept of mutual aid - whereby communities organise to help those in need - is part of a left-anarchist tradition going back to the beginning of the 20th century and the Russian thinker Peter Kropotkin. But as a response to the ongoing crisis in Sudan, it had been embraced by both Democratic and Republican lawmakers in the US.
'It’s difficult to overstate how devastating the USAID cut will be for Sudan … because the US was Sudan’s largest humanitarian donor'
- Kholood Khair, analyst
Representatives of the ERRs were flown to Washington and New York, meeting with Samantha Power, the head of USAID under President Joe Biden.
Now, the ERRs, which have been nominated for the Nobel peace prize this year, find themselves with a 77 percent funding gap, according to Esraa Omer, programme and projects co-ordinator at the Khartoum ERR.
The ERRs exist at the neighbourhood, district and state level, coordinating with one another across Sudan, based on geography. “We fill the gap that was created by the exit of almost all aid workers and aid providers from Sudan,” Omer told Middle East Eye.
Volunteers in neighbourhoods across the country provide medical care by running hospitals and health centres, and food supply through the operation of community kitchens and the distribution of packages.
Water supply, sanitary equipment, women’s “dignity kits” and protection against gender-based violence are also provided. And when civilians are wounded and trapped by the fighting, ERR volunteers perform evacuations.
Omer said that almost four million people had been reached by ERRs. While the mutual aid groups get funding from their communities and the Sudanese diaspora, “many of the projects we are doing are funded by USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance", Omer said.
The immediate funding freeze means that the ERRs are currently only operating 324 of the 1,460 community kitchens they had been running across Sudan. Omer said that this had left 1.8 million famine-affected people without access to food.
“That is huge,” Gaasbeek, the food security expert, told MEE.
“If a kitchen serves 500 households, them losing 1,100 means close to 3 million people, so the 1.8 million estimate seems realistic,” he added. “It will lead to displacement and surging mortality in a few weeks.”
A separate ERR source, who set up the Old Omdurman ERR and now advocates for ERRs in the US, told MEE that the work of the mutual aid groups had stopped completely in al-Jazira state and in the Darfur cities of el-Geneina and el-Fasher, which is under a brutal RSF siege.
The source said that the ERRs were operating three dialysis machines in West Kordofan, none of which are working anymore. She said that this week a community kitchen was attacked by the RSF, whose fighters raped and killed one of the women volunteering there.
“Usually, we would have been able to evacuate our volunteers, but we can’t do that right now,” the source said, citing the impact of a drastic loss of funding. In Khartoum state, she said, another volunteer had been raped and thrown from the third floor of a building.
Doge devastation
“It’s difficult to overstate how devastating the USAID cut will be for Sudan, not just because Sudan is the world’s largest humanitarian crisis but also because the US was Sudan’s largest humanitarian donor,” Kholood Khair, founder of Confluence Advisory, a Sudanese think tank, told MEE.
Without the predictable, sustainable US funding, Khair said, the mutual aid groups will only be able to rely on Sudanese abroad, a system “which is already stretched, because everyone I know in the diaspora is supporting more families than they ever have done”.
'[The funding freeze] will lead to displacement and surging mortality in a few weeks'
- Timmo Gaasbeek, food security expert
Ahmed said she has been using her own money to fund projects. In the US, she is meeting with politicians and trying to fundraise for the ERRs.
A Congressional source told MEE that there are plenty of Republican lawmakers who want to see aid funding for Sudan restored, and that American civil servants are "of course" at odds with Musk and Trump’s agenda.
There is even local economic incentive for humanitarian support: in Kansas, for instance, farmers were selling wheat bound for Sudan.
Many of the cuts could be subject to legal proceedings, with Musk’s Doge hoping that it has broken things quickly enough to avoid getting stuck in court, the Congressional source said.
Peter Marocco, Trump’s acting deputy administrator for USAID, even insisted in a behind-closed-doors meeting last week that Marco Rubio had individually reviewed every single one of the thousands of aid contracts.
Marocco has also said that he and his staff are considering bringing criminal referrals against employees of USAID.
Europe and Ukraine
The wider global picture will make finding other sources of funding difficult for Sudan.
Khair noted the EU and UK were also cutting their aid budgets to spend more money on defence in response to Washington refusing to keep supplying Ukraine.
“We are seeing a double whammy here, where countries that could step in are diverting their money to defence, also because of Trump’s policy in Ukraine. Millions of people in Sudan will be bearing the brunt of these changes in Washington,” she said.
There are, Khair said, “very valid concerns about how the aid system works, how prolific it is, how much it is propping up different sectors, particularly health, in different countries and letting the state off the hook”. It has also, of course, been a way for the US to exert control over large swathes of the world.
“The USAID freeze has exposed this dependency,” Khair said.
Gaasbeek said that recent Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) gains - the army has taken over most of Khartoum and other parts of central and southern Sudan from the RSF - “could lead to some economic recovery”.
“If it is possible to get the big wheat mills in Bahri, north of Khartoum, working again, that may lower bread prices and encourage larger commercial food imports,” he said.
Tess Ingram, spokesperson for Unicef, the UN children’s agency, told MEE that “our work was severely underfunded already before these cuts and these cuts will be making it even harder to provide vulnerable children in Sudan lifesaving supplies and services”.
She said that the agency was “analysing every suspension letter to determine the overall impact on children".
"While we do it, we keep going - like previous years when we were underfunded, we must be able to explore alternative funding opportunities, new partners and the support of the public has never been more critical,” she said.
Beyond the impact on health, food, water, sanitation and much more, there is the impact the cuts will have on the social cohesion of a country torn apart by war.
Khair said that US funding for the ERRs had allowed the mutual aid groups to “sew back the social fabric that the war has been ripping apart”.
Without the aid, that social fabric will be immediately altered, Khair said, and there will be a lot of pressure on both the army and the RSF to provide for people.
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