An article in World Politics Review reveals new details about the state of foreign aid globally. While it is often assumed that the Trump administration is solely responsible for wreaking havoc on the system of international humanitarian aid following its brutal funding cuts last year, the author of the article reports that Europe has also been slashing aid. The EU cut its foreign aid budget by 13.8% for 2025, while individual member countries in Europe cut an average of 10%, according to recently released figures. These are reportedly the biggest cuts in a single year on record. Combined with the cuts from the U.S., this is having a major impact on poorer countries.
Anurita Bains, UNICEF’s associate director for HIV and Health and a 25 year veteran on the front line of AIDS prevention, recently outlined the almost immediate consequences of cuts to aid programs across the Global South. “Pharmacies ran out of essential medicines. Health workers were laid off. Systems that had taken decades to build began to unravel in a matter of months,” she wrote in a report.
A study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health analyzed the effects of foreign aid cuts more generally, estimating that reduced funding from the EU and the U.K. could result in as many as 11.5 million preventable deaths by the end of the decade, World Politics Review reported. One of the authors, Gonzalo Fanjul, told The Guardian in an interview that while “much of the debate focuses on Trump and his administration … our estimates suggest that Europe’s shifting spending priorities will prove equally devastating for some of the most vulnerable communities in the world.” The ongoing collapse in health systems in nations that previously relied on this funding is already having significant consequences—consequences that could affect the rest of the world, as, for example, with the Ebola outbreak in the DRC.
It’s not lost on the experts in this field that the steep drop off in foreign aid has taken place alongside Europe’s efforts to massively scale up its defense spending. As the author of the article writes, “slashing aid budgets to stock up on weapons is a short-sighted strategy. It risks creating a whole new set of threats and vulnerabilities that no amount of tanks, bombs or bullets will be able to mitigate.”
In addition, author John Boyce incisively notes that Europe’s foreign aid strategy saw “profound policy shifts” long before the Ukraine war even began in 2022—shifts which were a response to the large increase in migration to Europe around the mid-2010s. Boyce quotes from a 2023 Oxfam report which found that more European aid is “directed towards activities that hinder migration” from poorer countries, yet which is quite despicably labeled as “cooperation.”
EIR’s Roundtable, “Solve the Immigration Crisis with Development,” will take up a real solution to both the foreign aid and immigration crises this Friday, July 31.
