USAID squeeze: Trump’s cut-back of aid is a wake-up call for India
- Ignore political slugfests over USAID allocations. America’s self-harming aid cut-off isn’t a big worry for India either, but China filling that vacuum to gain clout could be. We must step up our global outreach.
Donald Trump seems to be in a tearing hurry to make America great again. No one should quibble with such a mission: the world needs a prosperous and stable US. But this should not come at the cost of the world’s poorest. Yet, that’s precisely what appears to be happening—as a fallout of the US President’s decision to immediately halt all programmes of the world’s biggest aid agency, USAID, pending a 90-day audit.
The overnight cessation of US development aid, whose biggest beneficiaries are some of the poorest people in Africa, South America and South Asia, puts lives at risk and threatens the funding of initiatives that deliver health, food and drugs to the needy.
Clinics providing life-saving HIV drugs in Africa have had to shut overnight. And, as we know from the 1980s, such infectious diseases can strike anywhere, even if the availability of cheap drugs—courtesy of generic drug-making countries such as India—makes the disease manageable.
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This week, Elon Musk, head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, admitted that the USAID programme for Ebola prevention was “accidentally cancelled," before it was restored. He spoke of this in the context of what he called a “need to move quickly if we are to achieve a trillion dollar deficit reduction by Financial Year 26."
No one can object to cutting government debt, but, as one specialist pointed out on Musk’s X, “It’s NOT true to say ‘one of (the) things we accidentally cancelled very briefly was Ebola prevention’ and that it was quickly restored… Because you’ve hobbled or directly dismantled the response structures needed to end Ebola outbreaks abroad and protect us here in the US."
Efforts to contain Ebola are just the tip of the iceberg. According to an internal memo obtained by the Associated Press and reported on Thursday, the Trump administration plans to end more than 90% of USAID’s foreign aid contracts and $60 billion in overall US assistance around the world.
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All of this leaves India with a looming problem. Not only because USAID programmes may face the chop in India, but because the sudden cessation of US aid has created a vacuum for China to try filling.
Beijing has made its ambition clear of rivalling America on global influence and has been eyeing emerging economies of the South. A US aid withdrawal will let it expand its footprint.
While its very own version of transactional aid, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), differs vastly from what the US and other Western agencies offer, it is backed by large lumps of money. Chinese aid through BRI is said to have exceeded $1 trillion since 2013.
What marks it out is that it has no liberal strings attached. In this, it mimics Western aid of the Cold War years, and has the same effect: it props up dictators and raises the risk of geo-political instability. By contrast, modern Western aid has lent towards strengthening democracy, the rule of law and human rights.
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Thankfully, India does have options in this scenario. It has a long history of people-to- people engagement in much of Africa. Its move to grant G20 membership to the African Union has been widely appreciated. And thanks to its generic drugs industry, it has won the goodwill of countries across the developing world.
India also has experience in sharing its democratic and technological achievements with these countries. We must build on this outreach now. Trump shouldn’t be the only one in a tearing rush.
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