The Hidden Legacy of USAID
Humanitarian agency or imperial tool?
“Foreign aid is a method by which the United States maintains a position of influence and control around the world.”
— President John F. Kennedy.
For over six decades, U.S. foreign aid — in the form of food, economic, and military aid — has been a strategic tool to advance American interests in the Majority World, under the guise of humanitarian assistance. In 2024, the U.S. alone contributed over 43% of global aid, wielding unparalleled influence over global development. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has been at the heart of this effort, shaping food systems, economic policies, and health programmes across the Majority World.
Shortly after taking office in January, the Trump administration disrupted the global aid landscape by dismantling USAID, cutting 83% of its programs and merging the scraps into the State Department, to advance its “America First” agenda. Overnight, humanitarian efforts worldwide were thrust into chaos. Thousands of frontline workers laid off. Millions of tons of food grains stuck in ports. Critical programs in Sudan, Gaza, South Africa, and Syria collapsed. Millions of people — already navigating crises — pushed deeper and deeper into hunger and poverty.
Now, as USAID falls, we’re left to wonder: what does this mean for the millions dependent on its aid — and for the future of our food systems?
*Majority World refers to the countries commonly labelled as “developing,” who in fact make up the majority of the world’s population. Minority World refers to the countries commonly labelled as “developed,” and emphasises that while these countries tend to impose their will on the rest of the world, they are, in fact, the minority.
Founded in 1961 under President Kennedy, the USAID was conceived as a strategic move to counter socialist influence in newly independent Majority World* countries, ensuring their alignment with western capitalism.
Before it was taken down a few weeks ago, USAID’s website openly stated:
“U.S. foreign assistance has always had the twofold purpose of furthering America’s foreign policy interests in expanding democracy and free markets.”
USAIDs dual mandate — humanitarian aid intertwined with geopolitical strategy — has defined its role for over sixty years. From flooding vulnerable markets with U.S. food and drugs, to driving the Green Revolution, shaping agricultural research, and steering the mandates of global institutions like the United Nations, World Food Program, and Food and Agriculture Organisation, USAID’s influence has been unimaginably vast. But nowhere was this influence more potent — or more harmful — than in food systems.
As a chief architect of the Green Revolution, USAID reengineered agriculture in the Majority World by promoting monocultures, industrial fertilisers, and chemical inputs. Under its influence, international research centres pushed “high-yielding” varieties of wheat and rice that displaced Indigenous seeds and traditional agricultural practices. Farmers were locked into new cycles of debt and dependency. Biodiversity plummeted. Soil health collapsed. The Minority World consolidated market power.
As part of its program to “end world hunger”, each year, USAID shipped millions of tons of surplus U.S. grain at highly subsidised rates to food-insecure regions. But this wasn’t charity — it was strategy. Economic warfare dressed up in sacks of wheat and flour.
Most of this aid was “program food aid” — grain exported in exchange for political and economic concessions. In return, recipient countries were pushed to deregulate agriculture, restructure their economies, and sign trade deals that opened their markets to U.S. agribusiness.
Even “project food aid” — food donated “free of cost” — came with its own strings attached. Cheap U.S. imported grains drove Majority World food prices down, crippling local food systems and economies and forcing them to purchase food from Minority World countries and corporations to feed their populations.
The USAID playbook for collapsing local food systems looks something like this:
First, flood local markets with cheap food until farmers can’t compete. Then, push governments to deregulate agriculture and import instead of investing in local production.
As a result, formerly self-sufficient communities are turned into buyers — not growers — of their own food, locking Majority World countries into dependence — and securing total market control.
The consequences have been devastating.
Haiti
Haiti was self-sufficient in rice until USAID and the IMF pushed trade liberalization in the 1980s: tariffs were slashed, quotas dropped, and subsidised U.S. rice flooded the market. Haitian farmers couldn’t compete. Between 1985 to 2005, Haiti’s rice imports jumped from 7,337 tons (less than 5% of Haiti’s consumption) to 260,000 tons.
Even Bill Clinton later admitted:
“These policies may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked… It was a mistake that I was a party to... I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did.”
Yet, the U.S. has never taken accountability or moved to reverse the damage. Today, Haiti imports 85% of its rice, most of it from U.S. agribusinesses that now dominate the market.
Jordan
Jordan’s food systems followed a similar path. For millennia, until the late 1960s, Jordan was self-sufficient in producing rain-fed wheat. In 1967, the U.S. started sending subsidised white flour as food aid to Jordan, facilitated through programs like USAID's Food for Peace. Neoliberal policies enforced by the World Bank and IMF prevented the Jordanian government from supporting local farmers. Agriculture collapsed. Youth migrated to cities. Farmland was paved over. Today, Jordan imports over 97% of its cereals despite having enormous potential to meet its own food needs.
Burkina Faso
At least for a time, Burkina Faso took a different path. Under the leadership of President Thomas Sankara in the 1980s, the country rejected foreign aid, including USAID, calling it a tool of dependency and control.
“He who feeds you, controls you”, Sankara warned.
He launched sweeping agrarian reforms to return land to the people, boost local food production, and achieve food self-sufficiency. In just four years, Burkina Faso doubled its wheat production and became self-reliant in staple crops — all without foreign aid.
Because of Sankara’s rejection of imperialism, he was assassinated in 1987 in a coup backed by the U.S. and France. His policies were quickly dismantled. Aid programs returned, markets reopened to foreign imports, and local agriculture collapsed. Burkina Faso was once again heavily dependent on external food assistance — not because it lacked capacity, but because the political will to resist dependency was crushed.
These are not isolated stories. They are part of a larger, ongoing project of colonialism — where aid is weaponised to systematically dismantle food sovereignty in the Majority World in order to sustain the flow of wealth and resources to the Minority World.
As anthropologist Jason Hickel reminds us,
“For every $1 of aid the global South receives, they lose $30 through unequal exchange with the North.”
The billions that flow in through USAID are funnelled back many times over — through interest payments, commodity exports, and access to new markets for American agribusiness. Aid is not a reparative transfer of wealth. It’s a mechanism for extraction.
Today, most recipients of aid are more food insecure than ever before, while Minority World countries have consolidated unrivaled power and control over global food systems and economies.
Just four corporations control:
60% of the seed market
65% of the agrochemical market
90% of global grain trade.
Over decades, the USAID has spread its tentacles into every aspect of the food system, to siphon off Majority World wealth and consolidate U.S. power. Now, as the Trump administration moves to eliminate 5,200 of the 6,200 multi-year awards and cut 30% of its foreign aid grants — journalist Thin Lei Win notes,
“It’s more a question of what’s not affected rather than what’s affected.”
Among the most devastating losses is FEWS NET — the Famine Early Warning Systems Network — a crucial tool used by aid agencies to predict food shortages and direct emergency response. Its shutdown has left aid organisations scrambling, unsure where or how to deploy resources. Food system researchers warn this loss could have the most catastrophic long-term impact on global hunger. And it’s not just the loss of foresight — it’s the dismantling of a system designed to manage the very crises the U.S. helped create. Crises fueled by decades of USAID interventions that have undermined food sovereignty across the Majority World. Now, especially in regions already struggling with severe food insecurity — like Sudan, Syria, and Sub-Saharan Africa — millions more could be pushed into hunger and famine.
But the fallout has already begun.
Within days of Trump’s funding freeze on January 20th, over 500,000 metric tons of food were lying in limbo, unable to reach the thousands it was committed to feed. The World Food Programme has since announced that it is shutting down operations in South Africa. Over 80% of emergency food programmes in war-torn Sudan have closed, leaving 2 million people food insecure.
Healthcare programs for HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria have stopped. 11.7 million women and girls have lost access to contraceptive care and the Guttmacher Institute predicts over 8,000 will die from complications during pregnancy and childbirth.
Other critical programmes in Syria, Gaza, and Ukraine now face abrupt and deadly disruption.
An online tracker visualising the human cost of just a few USAID programme cuts estimates that 103 people are dying every hour as a direct result.
The CDC, the health authority in Africa, estimates that these cuts could result in two to four million deaths.
And the ripple effects of this are only beginning to surface.
This is the true face of aid: not a bridge to self-reliance, but a mechanism of submission. Countries across the Majority World have been systematically denied the ability to produce what they need — from seeds to life-saving medicines — through trade rules and intellectual property regimes enforced by institutions like USAID. When the U.S. pulls the rug out from under these countries, it’s not just funding that disappears — it’s food, healthcare, and survival. If aid were truly about justice, it would work to dismantle the systems that make it necessary. Instead, it reinforces dependency, erodes sovereignty, and ensures that even the right to live remains subject to foreign policy.
The fall of USAID exposes the fragility of the globalised industrial food system — a system so precarious that a single government shifting hands can entirely upend it, pushing untold millions into hunger and poverty. Aid hasn’t just been withheld — it’s been weaponised. Again.
What’s collapsing now isn’t just a global funding system — it’s the myth that it was ever meant to serve us.
The illusion that our oppressors could liberate us.
The fantasy that empire could feed us.
So no, we are not mourning the fall of USAID
We mourn the decades stolen from communities forced to rely on it.
We mourn the millions whose food systems were dismantled in the name of development.
We mourn the lives still at stake as this system collapses without a plan for what comes next.
But grief is not where we stop. Grief is where we begin.
Because now there is space for something else. Something rooted not in dependency, but in dignity.
Social movements and peasant communities have long warned us of the dangers of aid and shown us what’s possible instead: food systems grounded in sovereignty, where the power to grow, distribute, and decide stays with the people who feed us. And the reality is, communities have never waited for permission to reclaim that power.
In Haiti, the Mouvman Peyizan Papay (MPP) has spent decades organising smallholder farmers to rebuild local seed banks and resist dependency on imported seeds and food aid. After the 2010 earthquake, they led mass mobilisations to reject Monsanto’s “donation” of GM seeds and reinvest in native, climate-resilient varieties.
In Jordan, Al Barakeh Wheat is reviving the traditional rain-fed wheat systems decimated by U.S. food aid. What began with a handful of families planting wheat in abandoned urban plots has become a movement — uniting farmers, bakers, and city dwellers to grow food rooted in culture, sovereignty, and care.
Across Africa, movements like Rural Women’s Assembly and We Are the Solution are defending agroecology, land rights, and territorial markets against a tide of foreign-led aid projects that erase local knowledge in favour of corporate control.
These communities represent the frontline, not just of our food system, but in reclaiming humanity's sacred potential to imagine a better world.
A world where food is not a weapon.
Where aid is not a performance.
Where sovereignty is not outsourced but embodied.
The tragedy would be to let this moment pass without reimagining what comes next. This is our chance to ask different questions:
What would aid look like if its goal was to become unnecessary?
What if, instead of rebuilding the same unjust food system, we seize this rupture to imagine something radically different?
What if Majority World nations can begin finding pathways to reclaim resources and relocalise food economies?
What if we finally centered the communities who have fed the world for generations, and worked together to midwife systems rooted in justice, care, and self-determination?
This crisis is also a crossroads.
And what comes next is up to us.
So let us grieve.
Let us rage.
And then, let us get to work.
Because we plant our seeds in the cracks of empire.
In the next instalment, we will trace the roots of Pan-Africanism through the voices of leaders who rejected Western aid and fought for food sovereignty — and explore how their vision is rising once more across Africa today.
This interview, where Dr. Arikana Chihombori-Quao, former African Union ambassador to the U.S., critiques the role of USAID in Africa, describing it as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” She argues that the agency fostered economic dependency and undermined African sovereignty under the guise of aid. Rather than a loss, she sees USAID’s dismantling under the Trump administration as an opportunity for Africa to pursue self-determined development, free from external control.
This book by Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, is a powerful indictment of colonialism and imperialism in Latin America. Through lyrical prose and piercing analysis, Galeano traces how foreign powers—first European empires, then the United States—systematically pillaged the region’s natural wealth, leaving behind deep inequality and underdevelopment. Far from a neutral history, it is a passionate call to remember, resist, and reclaim.
This article from Jacobin traces how USAID and other Western development agencies have used humanitarianism and civil society programs to entrench neoliberal policies, open markets, and weaken grassroots movements across Latin America and the Caribbean. Rather than alleviating poverty or strengthening democracy, these interventions often reinforce the very systems that sustain inequality and dependency. The Trump administration’s suspension of aid, the article argues, didn’t disrupt this system—it merely exposed its true nature.
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I was just meeting with some seed savers near Hue, Vietnam recently. It was unbelievable what they shared with me about the aftermath of the widespread use of “Agent Orange” there during the American War. They are still working hard to clean it all up. But now that USAID funding has been cut, they are stranded. Shameful. It wasn’t the Vietnamese who made this mess.
The silver lining in this fiasco is the Global South, which was fully reliant on the USA to provide basic support, can now introspect, hopefully shake the dust off, and work hard to regain their sovereignty.