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Food costs may continue to rise in crisis-prone countries, but Germany is set to cut its 2023 contribution to global humanitarian assistance and crisis prevention by about $400 million.
According to data compiled by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), food costs are 13. 1% higher than at the same time last year.
A giant of Germany’s progression expenditures is accounted for in the budget of its Federal Foreign Office (FFO) and the Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). The cabinet submitted a draft budget to the country’s parliament on August 5. The first reading is scheduled for 7 September.
According to the proposal, the overall budget of the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs could be reduced by 710 million euros, or about 716. 4 million dollars. Meanwhile, the fundamental allocation for German defense will remain solid in nominal terms until 2026, but a special fund of one hundred billion euros to modernize its army approved by the German parliament in June. The fund will be spent within five years and will be used to ensure that Germany meets its NATO commitment to spend 2% of its GDP on defense, which is noted as a critical legal liability in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been authorized to allocate 3,000 million euros in 2022 to humanitarian aid and crisis prevention. The Food Program would likely decline. According to an announcement posted on the German parliament’s online page, the Federal Foreign Ministry could end up with just €2. 52 billion for its humanitarian and crisis prevention programs.
The German government has been a consistent and generous voluntary donor to many UN agencies, and budget cuts can disrupt their consistent donations. (In addition, Germany is one of the largest donors to the UN general budget, on a test scale approved by the General Assembly of the ONU. La first rating for the 2019-2021 budget is as follows: United States, 22%, China, 12% consistent, Japan, 8. 564% consistent and Germany, 6090% consistent. Overall, these reported contributions fund approximately 49 in line with the United Nations one hundred in line with the rules).
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees earned $228. 6 million from Germany in 2022. Part of this investment came from the BMZ, and the draft spending proposal indicated an amount of €1. 3 billion for the ministry.
The main elements of the budget, prepared by Finance Minister Christian Lindner, were first presented to the German cabinet on March 24, a month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and not all cabinet members did.
“The war in the world’s breadbasket has a dramatic impact on global nutrition,” Development Minister Svenja Schulze, a member of Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party, was quoted as saying by the DW news service, or Deutsche Welle. Even before the war broke out,” he said, “the covid pandemic has hit poorer countries, increasing the burden on their health systems and economies. And all this has added to the climate crisis, which is affecting the poorest countries in the world. harder, with droughts, storms, floods and poor harvests.
Although the values of food, fuel and oil are starting to fall globally, they did not achieve their titles at this time last year. Meanwhile, foreign development agencies have not gained more investment to cope with the emerging costs in many of the conflict problems they find themselves in. work. For example, the value of millet, a staple cereal in Niger, rose more than 50% after Russia’s full-blown war against Ukraine began on February 24, 2022.
“What we have noticed with Ukraine and other crises this year is that desires have increased dramatically and, so far, investment has not been high enough to meet those desires,” UNHCR spokeswoman Olga Sarrado Mur told PassBlue. savings assistance will be reduced or stopped, cutting off an important livelihood for the displaced. “
The Federal Foreign Ministry’s budget cuts are expected to affect not only the various UN development and humanitarian aid agencies, but also Germany’s peacekeeping contributions, although the German document does not specify whether it is UN peacekeeping. (This UN budget is independent of its overall functioning. )although it is also mandatory and based on GDP). The German Ministry of Foreign Affairs was authorized to make bills of 969. 67 million euros to the “United Nations and the external sphere”. According to the draft budget for 2023, this amount was reduced to €822. 2 million, a difference of €147. 47 million.
In total, expenditures on United Nations budgets and peacekeeping would increase from €4070 million to €3430 million, or €640 million.
In an email reaction to PassBlue in August, Holger Dreiseitl, the German project’s spokesperson to the UN in New York, said that in 2020, Germany had allocated more budget to multilateral organizations to deal with the pandemic, but that this higher spending is an expected decrease in 2023.
“Germany remains fully committed to supporting the United Nations and its agencies in their important work to promote sustainable progress and fight global crises,” its email read. “It would be misleading to read the 2023 draft budget, which has entered the parliamentary review process. “, as an exception to the multilateral progressive cooperation demonstrated by Germany”.
In July, some aid agencies operating in the Sahel region of West Africa told PassBlue that they were struggling to find cash to provide emergency assistance to vulnerable populations in the region. Aid to Ukraine, they said, made it difficult to offset emerging food and energy costs in the world, adding up in Africa.
“While the focus is on some of the world’s biggest crises in Syria, Afghanistan and, more recently, Ukraine, other emergencies, many of them in Africa, have failed to attract the same attention or resources. The United Nations, adding Ethiopia, Uganda, Iraq, Yemen, Colombia and others, are vulnerable to a lack of long-term funding; 43 according to the percentage of the other people UNHCR serves live in those countries,” said Olga Sarrado Mur, UNHCR’s communications officer.
While other Western powers are following Germany’s lead, the UN firm said it feared far-reaching effects: more malnutrition and a rise in gender-based violence, child marriage, labour exploitation and tensions and unrest.
Since energy costs are very likely to rise in Europe during the winter if the war in Ukraine continues, Germany is expected to concentrate much of its aid on the domestic market. It has already announced a first package of EUR 50 billion for its citizens. cash that you can’t make to be taken to other parts of the world.
This article was updated on 8 September to better reflect German budget allocations for peacekeeping.
Damilola Banjo is a journalist for PassBlue. She holds a Master of Science from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a Bachelor’s Degree in Communications and Language Arts from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He worked as a manufacturer for NPR’s WAFE station in Charlotte, North Carolina. ; for the BBC as an investigative journalist; and as an investigative journalist for Sahara Reporters Media.
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