World Food Programme

We are all hoping and praying that Tanzania gets a bit of rain also soon.

because then the penya and the other they tend to get a lot of rain during the el nino so they should be fine in there and i think i mean the other thing here that is a challenge is that it's not only a drought but it's also a period where fertilizer prices are just too high now you have farmers in malawi zimbabwe reducing the fertilizer usage which on its own weighs on the yields thereafter there's uh this dryness that is there so i think a combination of those things is what worries me and most critically i mean in the past we would have the World Food Organization helping.

But the U.S. administration has taken away the help through the U.S. aid that they used to provide there.

And I don't think these folks have the resources to actually step in in a big way in the region.

Because the continuity of support means a lot, especially these days.

Maybe you've heard of the World Food Programme here in Gaza.

They have reduced the support they are providing for about half a million people.

Uh, so this would affect a lot of people.

Because the continuity of support means a lot, especially these days.

Maybe you've heard of the World Food Programme here in Gaza.

They have reduced the support they are providing for about half a million people.

Uh, so this would affect a lot of people.

It makes her not seem like some sort of common sense consensus pick or whatever.

By the way, something else might get under Donald Trump's skin, which is that Beasley later after the governor's race thing led the United Nations World Food Program, which won a little award that you might have heard during his tenure.

It's the Nobel Peace Prize actually, so I just love that.

And I wanna make sure that he hears that fact.

Now, you run an organisation, I've run organisations, When your when your budget gets cut by 40 50 percent or more now, you're not just talking about cutbacks You're like that's a major restructure.

You need to think about everything you're doing Well worse than they'll suck if it was just about layoffs like what we've done that mostly made and restructured I mean that's bad, but you're affecting quite frankly a couple tens of people maybe but when you're talking about cuts in aid The World Food Programme, I think, mentioned that currently only 10%, I'll try to say this now without crying, that only 10% of where they need food to go to right now in Afghanistan is getting there because of the cuts.

10%.

I've got the figures on my phone, I don't want to reflect it now.

Those things, I mean, it's not something that I think about or I deal with, right? Multilateralism is very important, But when they start getting into more of the last mile or implementation of things, that it gets, you know, how startups can do things.

If we think of like going to Mars with like getting out of space and we're building AI and all of that, those things are like plane systems, cargo, right? So one of the biggest reasons criticism that I've always had is like the World Food Program is one of the multilateral sort of bigger UN institutions.

They bring a lot of money together and they can do that because they are a multilateral institution.

countries can give them money you know and other institutions can give them money they have the the reputation to do that which is great do fundraising create huge you know food and hunger um funds right let's get rid of hunger like this is just a bit too overdue at this point um but If you create a fund, if you do studies of food security globally and things like that, these are all amazing things.

And six months later, and in that process, Somehow, putting that $42,000 was really what triggered this.

Three weeks later, we're on Time Magazine, NPR, BBC.

Everybody is talking about Asil because the World Food Program is not there, UNICEF is not there, and so on.

And so then one of the best things I did, and it's one of the advice I'd give is if something is working, double down, because it's very rare.

But a lot of NGOs here depended on USAID.

And one of the things that perhaps is particularly critical is the World Food Programme.

World Food Programme still has an infant malnutrition project here, which was reached, I think the figure was somewhere in the region of 800,000 children were receiving aid.

The last I heard from that, I'm not sure what the current situation is, the last I heard, they'd have to cut that back by about 50%, precisely because...

The same with WHO, right? World Health Organization with U.S.

You know, the tents that almost 2 million people are living in, in 40% of what was the Gaza Strip, they don't protect you from the heat in the summer, and they certainly don't protect people from the cold in the winter.

The World Food Program was forced to stop delivering food at the Rafah Crossing because of lack of funding and also the UN has pulled away from the Rafah Crossing because they've claimed that it's not safe with Israel allowing in people.

Israel lets people come back to Gaza who left early on, but then some of them have been thrown immediately in prison.

I mean, it's horrible.