Maroc - NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 22/Dec 04:55

The global cost of selfishness

BY THE time you finish reading this piece, somewhere in the world, a child will have died an avoidable death from pneumonia. That analysis comes from impactcounter.com, a website that analyses the effect of (mostly) US policy decisions on global public health. It takes about three minutes to read 750 words, and the site estimates that the Trump administration’s decision to defund USAID – gleefully enacted by a ketamine-addled, billionaire car salesman – has added an extra 165,238 child deaths from pneumonia to the global toll, or 3.18 additional, avoidable child deaths per minute. The same site suggests the world will lose 467,729 children this year due to the massive cuts in US spending on foreign aid. Children who might have reasonably been expected to survive if the resources needed to treat diseases and conditions such as malaria, tuberculosis, and malnutrition had not been abruptly withdrawn. The impactcounter.com analysis suggests it costs up to US$200 on average to treat a child for severe malnutrition. It’s estimated that shuttering the USAID nutrition programme in 2025 will cost the world the lives of an extra 155,964 children – or a little less than the combined populations of Chaguanas and San Fernando. Two cities of children wiped out by one policy. If you don’t like that estimate, there was an analysis published in the Lancet back in July that estimated the global impact on child mortality of the USAID cuts at around 4.5 million additional deaths of children under five by 2030 – 900,000 per year, or roughly the population of TT minus Port of Spain and environs. For a more conservative figure, check out the Gates Foundation’s most recent Goalkeepers Report, which cites analysis suggesting the world will lose 200,000 more children to preventable conditions in 2025 than it did in 2024. Numbers aside, it’s clear that pretty much anyone who has tried to examine the issue of global child mortality rates has reached the same conclusion: they’re going up, for the first time this century. Progress. All over the developed world, investing in the general health and well-being of those less fortunate has fallen out of fashion. The OECD notes that official development assistance (ODA) dropped by nine per cent in 2024, and was projected to fall again this year. This is largely because the four largest ODA funders – France, Germany, the UK, and the US – all reduced their allocations in 2024 and announced further cuts for 2025. Last year was the first time since the mid-90s that those four countries cut their ODA budgets simultaneously. This year was the first time ever that they all announced consecutive annual ODA budget cuts. Despite political transitions from Biden to Trump in the US, Sunak to Starmer in the UK, Scholz to Merz in Germany, and a seemingly unending procession of doomed governments in France, the world’s biggest development aid funders seem remarkably united on one point: whether governing from left, right, or centre, they’re not all that interested in funding global public health improvements. And if you stop funding global public health improvement, then you can expect a global public health decline – starting with hundreds of thousands of vulnerable children. Part of the reason is, of course, the economic malaise that has gripped many of the world’s richest countries. Part of it is a focus on seemingly more pressing priorities. The EU just agreed to loan Ukraine US$105 billion to help it defend itself against continuing assault from Russia. And Russian aggression combined with an erratic American foreign policy under the Trump administration is forcing many European nations to invest more heavily in their own defence. For all its talk of cost-cutting, Trump’s government remains as happy to shower its own military and defence contractors in cash. Military hardware is not cheap. The radar currently hanging out at ANR Robinson airport can be estimated to cost around US$32 million (the US Marine Corps announced it had bought 30 units back in 2019 for a total cost of US$958 million). Fun fact: if you accept that it costs around US$200 to treat a child for severe malnutrition, and it’s currently estimated that close to 160,000 additional children will die from malnutrition in the next year because of USAID cuts – one US$32 million radar could fund live-saving malnutrition treatment for 160,000 children. So if you want to help some needy kids this Christmas, there’s a radar in Tobago you could usefully sell. The post The global cost of selfishness appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.