Alex DeWaal, a well-known scholar of famines and civil wars, published a book in 2018 called 

in which he describes the history of famines over the past 150 years. DeWaal argues that deaths in famines have been in decline for much of that time period, even as the population of the world has increased from 1.5 billion to 8 billion. Since the 1980s, famines have all but disappeared (except for the great North Korean famine of the 1990s that killed perhaps as many as 2.5 million people). DeWaal attributes this to several factors. First, globalization has reduced death rates by accelerating economic growth and reducing poverty. The Green Revolution of Dr. Norman Borlaug increased yields of staple crops in Latin America and Asia, which increased the food supply and made the poor less vulnerable to food insecurity. The spread of democracy has increased government accountability; Amartya Sen argues that there has never been a famine in a democracy. Finally, the evolution of the international humanitarian response system to respond to famines has created a powerful tool to stop famines. It is on this latter factor that this article is focused. The question is whether the international humanitarian system will continue, evolve, or deteriorate under the weight of international crisis. And whether the system can be improved upon. 

Since the famine in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s, successive USAID administrators have incrementally built the agency’s infrastructure to respond to natural and humanmade disasters.

Using appropriation levels alone, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has arguably become the pre-eminent disaster response aid agency in the world, whether bilateral or multilateral. In FY 2023, USAID spent a remarkable $9.8 billion through its Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance (which includes food and non-food assistance such as water, sanitation, immunizations, shelter, medical assistance, and rehabilitation). The US government contributed 36% of the World Food Program’s budget in FY 2023 and rising to 54% for FY 2024 thus far. Over the past decade the US contributed 54% of WFP’s aggregated budget. If the State Department refugee account and contributions to the International Committee for the Red Cross and other UN agencies are included, the total is several billions of dollars higher. But these numbers do not tell the entire story. 

Expanding Humanitarian Response Infrastructure—and Expenditures

The USAID aid delivery model involves an intricate partnership with a network of international NGOs with expertise in famine relief and civil conflict response, and UN agencies such as the World Food Program (WFP), UNICEF, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UN Refugee Agency, and the International Red Cross movement. Since the famine in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s, successive USAID administrators have incrementally built the agency’s infrastructure to respond to natural and humanmade disasters (DeWaal would argue that all famines are humanmade, an insight with which I agree).  

This began in the 1980s with the development of regional disaster equipment and global supply warehouses and continued through the 1990s with the purchase of a fleet of armored vehicles for use by USAID staff in war zones. After the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s, USAID created the Famine Early Warning System. This system, which was initially focused on Africa, is now called FEWS NET and includes all famine-prone areas around the globe. FEWS has successfully predicted every famine (except for North Korea’s, which was outside of FEWS-NET’s geographic coverage). The development of FEWS was followed by the creation of the Disaster Assistance Response Teams (DART) in 1991, the USAID Field Officers Guide in 1992, and the expansion of the staff from 45 in 1989 to more than 1,000 in recent years. In 1994, the Office of Transition Initiatives was created to bridge the gap between short-term disaster programs and long-term development programs. The 2003 creation of the Offices of Military Affairs (later called Civil Military Operations), and the Office of Conflict, Mitigation, and Management, which was later renamed the Center for Conflict and Violence Prevention, provided mechanisms for greater operational connection to the US military; the latter office established the agency’s research capability on civil conflicts, which are directly connected to famines, particularly in Africa. The account to purchase local food was created to fund innovative approaches to food assistance such as vouchers and cash distributions to recipients so they can buy their own provisions. In early 2020 the disaster response system of USAID was reorganized into a more coherent and efficient structure. 

The Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance is now USAID’s largest programmatic bureau. This is extraordinary given that FY1989 appropriations for USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance was $20 million, for non-food assistance alone. By FY 2000, it had risen to $220 million. The chart shows this extraordinary growth.  

The cause of the enormous increases in funding experienced by the BHA during the 2010s may not be readily apparent. Some increases have been driven by serial emergencies of epic proportions—such as the on-going civil wars in Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Yemen, Myanmar, and Syria. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has killed or severely injured at least a million people. More than 7 million people have died from COVID-19 according to the World Health Organization, while deaths in excess of the yearly seasonal average have approached 36 million from the start of the pandemic in late 2019 according to 

, which is a more comprehensive actual death total. The forced migration crisis is the worst since the end of World War II, with 120 million people either internally displaced or refugees according to the UN Refugee Agency.  

From these depressing statistics we may conclude that the international order is inexorably descending into a worsening state of chaos. Failing states are multiplying just as they did as the Cold War ended in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet empire. While USAID’s disaster assistance budget increases have been partially driven by these serial crises, other less visible forces driving up spending are also at work.  

First, the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development changed its definition of what constitutes development assistance to include the donor government expenses for resettling refugees to their own countries. Thus overnight, donor governments (nearly all under severe financial pressure because of inflation and the aftermath of COVID-19) were allowed to count their use of aid budgets to pay for the huge influx of Ukrainian refugees which resulted in their cutting their funding of international NGOs and UN agencies. To make up for the losses, the US stepped into the fiscal breach and dramatically increased their humanitarian assistance budgets, cutting their development assistance budget to pay for it.  

While the US government’s disaster relief programs are well funded and please policymakers, they don’t always pass muster with disaster scholars, intellectuals, and analytical field staff about how to make up for past failures.

Second, unlike long-term development programs, disaster assistance avoids divisive domestic issues such as abortion, the culture wars, border security, global warming, and trade policy and tariffs. Divisive issues tend to drive down appropriations. Members of Congress and the public often see disaster relief as being directed toward people whose circumstances are no fault of their own. Aid might even create incentives for them not to migrate to other countries, so, USAID’s disaster relief programs enjoy bipartisan support, even from isolationist legislators who don’t typically support foreign aid programs.  

Third, humanitarian assistance has broad support politically in the US. Since the founding of USAID, policymakers have preferred aid programs that display three characteristics: they are openly visible, rapidly implemented, and easily measured. Disaster assistance programs display all of these characteristics while many long-term development programs do not. In the early years of the Alliance for Progress (President Kennedy’s signature development program in Latin America) he and his cabinet expected poverty to be eliminated or dramatically reduced within a few years of the initiation of the program, according to the exit interview with the second USAID Administrator Daniel Bell. This was an entirely unrealistic expectation. Policymakers prefer visualizing aid programs at work because they can point them out to their constituents who may be otherwise unenthusiastic about spending their tax money in some country they may have never heard of on the other side of the world.  

The new school of management theory teaches that program outcomes must be quantified to be managed properly and thus be successful. (I have ridiculed this doctrine and termed this “Obsessive Measurement Disorder” in an 

 I wrote in 2010. The central purpose of international development programs is to build and strengthen institutions, something not easily measured. Disaster assistance outcomes are easily measured by declining death rates.  

The Ripple Effects of Disaster Assistance

Disaster assistance must be provided rapidly, or people will die—particularly in famines—but this assistance also has diplomatic implications. Bags of US food aid with the words “USAID From the American People”

stamped in red, white, and blue adorning them, are very visible in USAID famine responses, so these programs are popular in the Defense and State Departments, the White House, and the US Congress. Boxes of medicines with a large USAID logo on them are delivered to the disaster zone. Plastic sheeting with equally visible branding is distributed to displaced and refugee families to construct shelters—shelters that can last for 5-10 years in a prolonged displacement emergency. USAID disaster response teams can deploy on US Airforce planes within 48-72 hours to the disaster location with great fanfare at the local airports, where the US ambassador usually greets them as they arrive.  

While the US government’s disaster relief programs are well funded and please policymakers, they don’t always pass muster with disaster scholars, intellectuals, and analytical field staff about how to make up for past failures. In the 1980s and 1990s, questions were raised by scholars and self-critical practitioners about the long-term effectiveness of disaster relief. Does traditional famine relief help poor countries prepare for future crises and permanently reduce food insecurity by improving the resilience of agricultural systems? Do poorly designed and managed disaster relief programs sometimes make crises worse? How can the protection of human rights be integrated into disaster management? Can we integrate mass employment programs into disaster management to increase people’s purchasing power? 

Perhaps the greatest innovation is an effort first proposed during George W. Bush’s administration and advanced by the Obama administration to purchase food locally instead of importing food aid from the United States. 

, he connected the two disciplines which sometimes seemed to be in disconnected programmatic worlds. Amartya Sen in his classic book 

also published in 1983, developed his entitlement theory of famines that connected poverty analysis with famine vulnerability. It is now the dominant famine theory widely accepted by practitioners. Mary Anderson’s book 

, published in 1999 after disaster relief failures during and after the Rwandan genocide and other crises, suggested that how we undertake disaster assistance programs in conflict zones can actually fuel the conflicts unless they are carefully designed and implemented. She gave guidance on how that might be done.  

Most disaster assistance agencies—particularly USAID—have developed disciplines to minimize the unintended consequences of large-scale disaster assistance programs—particularly in conflict zones. The concept of developmental relief evolved and argued that program managers must build into disaster response efforts to make disaster prone countries more resilient to future shocks. For example, introducing high yield, drought resistant seeds for staple crops like wheat, rice, maize, sorghum, and millet can avoid—or at least reduce—crop losses. 

Perhaps the greatest innovation is an effort first proposed during George W. Bush’s administration and advanced by the Obama administration to purchase food locally instead of importing food aid from the United States. This approach cuts transportation costs (which can be as much as 40% of food aid expenditures) and reduces time delays; it can take as long as four months to deliver food during emergencies. USAID and other aid agencies are increasingly providing cash cards to refugees and displaced people instead of commodities, so they can make their own decisions on how to satisfy their basic needs. Cash transfers like this are at least one-third of the WFP budget these days. These cash distributions or vouchers stimulate local markets and again avoid high transportation costs. More recently, USAID has championed using more local civil society organizations to provide assistance and build resilience.  

These innovations have transformed the disaster management discipline. The question remains as to whether the massive increase in emergency assistance over the past decade has institutionalized these reforms into programming or whether the enormous volume of aid and the rolling crisis has compromised accountability—and may undo the progress that has been made. It is at this point an unanswered question. 

Andrew Natsios is the former administrator of the US Agency for International Development and Executive Professor at the George H.W. Bush School of Government & Public Service at Texas A&M University.

Cover photo: US and Philippine soldiers unload relief supplies for typhoon survivors at Guiuan township, Eastern Samar province in central Philippines, November 20, 2013. Humanitarian efforts from all over the world, led by the United States, were in central Philippines following Typhoon Haiyan, that displaced hundreds of thousands of people. AP Photo/Bullit Marquez.

Congress has massively increased the emergency response money of USAID to $9 billion, what Natsios says is almost a shocking level. He tells us what this money may be used for and explains why this category of funding is rising so fast and the systemic problems this amount of money may cause. Finally, he explains the concepts of the relief to development continuum and developmental relief, and why they should be integrated more aggressively into humanitarian aid programs. 

Examining the USAID humanitarian response system.