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UN secretary-general António Guterres has asked EU leaders not to request rebates from the New York-based body this year in order to help offset a halt in US contributions that have forced it to slash its operations.
The plea occurred on the eve of a summit of EU leaders in Brussels on Thursday, three officials told the Financial Times.
It comes as the UN’s top humanitarian official said that the budget crisis caused by the Trump administration meant it was being forced to take “life and death choices about where we can best save lives”.
US President Donald Trump has slashed international aid funding, imperilling chunks of the UN’s work which relies on Washington for more than 20 per cent of its budget.
Contributors, such as the EU and its member states, can request their unspent money back — rebates which Guterres pleaded against. The programmes most affected by the US funding cuts include support for about 1mn displaced Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, Guterres told EU leaders, according to the officials briefed on his talks.
UN spending this year would be lower than 90 per cent of the planned budget due to the uncertainty over US funding, according to an internal document seen by the FT.
“In addition to anticipated delays in the approval of bills by the US government, the level of funds might also be a concern,” the UN’s financial department wrote last month, urging officials to “adopt a slower spending pattern”.
Tom Fletcher, the UN’s under-secretary for humanitarian affairs, told the FT that the US had been a “humanitarian superpower for years”.
“Hundreds of millions of lives have been saved because of US funding,” he said. “And suddenly now we’re having to completely redesign our programmes.”
“We’re making brutal choices, life and death choices about where we can best save lives,” Fletcher said.
He said that humanitarian co-ordinators in each country had made plans on which programmes to cut back on. “We’ll give the advice by the end of the week . . . which programmes to scale back and whether there are programmes that we need to stop altogether.”
Some countries were more affected than others by the US cuts, he said, mentioning the Democratic Republic of Congo, where two-thirds of the funding came from Washington.
Fletcher, whose office oversees the entire humanitarian effort across UN organisations, said that almost half of the humanitarian appeals had been funded by the US. “We were massively dependent on, with hindsight overdependent, on one donor.”
He said that the issue of funding was “a much bigger problem than just Washington”, as many European countries including the UK and Sweden were redirecting funds from humanitarian efforts to defence in the context of the threat posed by Russia.
“There’s a very direct trade-off, for example, in the UK, that’s what you hear,” Fletcher said, adding that there were signals that France would reduce contributions, as well as potentially Germany once its new coalition government is formed.
He said that although those cuts were not being made for “ideological reasons” like in the US, “they hurt just as much”.
Fletcher said he hoped the UN would reach more than half the 116mn people they supported last year, despite almost half of their funding previously coming from the US. “It’s got to be more than that.”
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