This week’s warning from Unicef is stark. Without immediate action, children under five will die in their tens of thousands in the coming year as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The UN agency estimates that an additional 6.7 million children will become dangerously under-nourished unless at least $2.4bn can be mobilised. The risk is that 10,000 more children a month will die.
Hunger is not confined to poor countries: the call for 1.5 million more children in England to get free school meals is evidence of that. Ministers ought to act at home. But acute hunger is a much more acute problem in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia. What’s more, Unicef is far from alone in pointing out the vulnerability of the world’s poorest people to coronavirus. The World Bank is pencilling in the first increase in poverty in two decades. The International Monetary Fund says deep recessions in advanced countries are having a marked impact of remittances – worth $360bn in 2018 – into low income and fragile states.
All of which poses an obvious question. Does it make sense, at a time when every multilateral body and every aid organisation is hoisting red flags about the likely effects of Covid-19 on the weakest and most vulnerable, for the UK government to be abolishing a Whitehall department set up 23 years ago with the sole aim of reducing global poverty? As far as the government is concerned, folding the Department for International Development into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office makes sense. The FCO has long had its jealous eyes on DfID’s ring-fenced budget, and in recent years chunks of the money that should have been spent on aid have been siphoned off to other departments. Boris Johnson, when he announced DfID’s fate, said the distinctions between British diplomacy and the country’s overseas development effort were artificial and outdated.
Despite the assurances that the UK’s role as one of the world’s development superpowers will be left unimpaired by having Dominic Raab in charge of the aid budget, it is clear the abolition of DfID is a serious mistake. As the first development secretary Clare Short put it, DfID was set up to reduce poverty, but FCO thinking is dominated by political and trade interests.
It is important that the 0.7% of national income devoted to the aid budget is well spent. There is, however, no guarantee that scrapping DfID will achieve this; on the contrary, when the campaign organisation One looked around Whitehall for waste, the culprits were the Home Office, the business department and the FCO.
The other argument used to justify DfID’s demise is that it will enhance Britain’s soft power. This looks implausible, not least because the decision to create an independent and generously funded development ministry was a classic example of a country gaining influence by doing the right thing. Even in the absence of Covid-19, the end of DfID would look shortsighted and counterproductive. In today’s circumstances, it is playing politics with people’s lives.