Up to 700,000 people estimated to have died due to USAid cuts, Minister to say

Up to 700,000 people around the world are estimated to have died as a result of cuts to international aid put in place by the Trump administration, the Government will tell a meeting of EU development ministers on Friday.

Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs Neale Richmond will say that “cuts to development and humanitarianism cost lives”.

He will tell a meeting of EU development ministers and other key figures in international humanitarian assistance and global crisis response at Dublin Castle that “people across the world have and will die from political decisions”.

“It has been calculated that the cuts to USAid alone has cost the lives of between 500,000 and 700,000 people globally.”

The US Agency for International Development (USAid) was closed down by the Trump administration in July last year. In the preceding months more than 80 per cent of its programmes had been cancelled with the remainder absorbed into the US State Department.

Richmond will tell EU ministers in his speech on Friday that HIV and malaria rates are “going back up”. He will say that this is “something that we have not seen for decades”.

“It is estimated that up to 10.8 million additional new HIV infections and up to 2.9 million HIV-related deaths in children and adults could occur up to 2030. This is as a direct impact of cuts to global development, but the impacts of these and similar crises will not be contained by higher walls.”

Richmond will also say that instability is on the rise across the world and global food security is “on the edge”.

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“Experts are warning that the coming months will see increasing inflation in global food costs as a consequence of conflict, economic disruption and climate impacts. The consequences will have particularly severe implications for vulnerable countries and communities,” he will say in the speech.

“It is a sad fact that in 2026, we are witnessing two man-made famines – in Sudan and in Gaza, and significant food insecurity in Mali, Haiti and South Sudan, among many other places. This is an intolerable situation which we must seek to address with the highest level of urgency. Indeed, the World Food Programme has warned that we could soon see four active famines.”

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Richmond will say that ministers and others gathered at Dublin Castle on Friday have a power with “the potential to drive change and save the lives of millions of people around the world”.

“This is particularly vital as we face a world with more autocracy, in which democracy and our other deeply held values are under threat, and in which conflict and humanitarian suffering is on the rise.

“We cannot allow the political decisions of others and the financial pressures that we all face to contain our commitment to our values. To put it even more starkly, the question that we must answer is: how do we secure the future of the development and humanitarian system?”