A wide range of sustainability, health and environmental programs in the Amazon Rainforest are at stake after the U.S. government announced a 90-day pause on all foreign aid funding, including from USAID, during President Donald Trump’s first day in office.

The move prompted consternation among scientists and conservationists, who told Mongabay they were concerned about the effects on biodiversity, Indigenous livelihoods and security in the region. They said the temporary funding freeze will impact community-led conservation initiatives and programs to halt illegal deforestation and other environmental crimes. However, others also say USAID funding has led to problems in communities and that the potential impacts of the pause highlight the dangers of depending on foreign aid.

In some cases, the impacts are already being felt. Some territorial monitoring programs, which fund monitoring actions to protect Indigenous territories, have been suspended.

Ivaneide “Neidinha” Bandeira Cardozo, a member of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Indigenous Territory in Brazil’s Rondônia state and coordinator of the Kanindé Ethnoenvironmental Defense Association, told Mongabay the U.S. has stopped funding a territorial monitoring program that helps reduce the number of invasions and illegal deforestation in several Indigenous lands in the region.

“We had to suspend our monitoring activities,” she said, “but the problem is that we are under enormous pressure from land grabbers and loggers, so it is now more difficult to contain the invasions. The result will be more deforestation, and our lives will be more threatened.”

Since the support was suspended — what Neidinha called “a breach of trust and insecurity” — her organization has been trying to obtain assistance from other sources. But this has been difficult, she said.

A rise in deforestation may lead to “more fires” during the dry season, and “the heat will increase,” she said. “Last year, during the drought, the Indigenous peoples were left without drinking water. We had to take water and food to the villages. Imagine what will happen this year if there is an increase in deforestation.”

The USAID-funded Assobio Project, designed to strengthen community organizations and bioeconomy production chains in Mato Grosso, has also been suspended. Rodrigo Vargas, a communications coordinator for the Instituto Centro de Vida (ICV), the organization that runs the project, told Mongabay it benefited 5,000 people, including small farmers and Indigenous peoples from seven territories.

The U.S. State Department didn’t respond to Mongabay’s questions by the time of publication. The Trump administration has accused USAID of wasteful spending of U.S. taxpayer money; the State Department has confirmed the move is part of the administration’s America First foreign policy goals.

In 2023, USAID provided $375.4 million to international biodiversity programs, 50% of which went to the most biologically rich countries and regions across the world, such as Brazil, Colombia and Peru. The agency invested $318.5 million in forestry programs, of which $315.6 million focused on tropical forests.

According to USAID’s 2023 annual biodiversity report, some of the money was used to strengthen the capacity of Indigenous peoples, improve natural resource management and identify threats to forests and biodiversity using technology.

“This support has been essential to advance conservation and sustainable development initiatives in the Colombian Amazon,” the National Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon (OPIAC) wrote on X. “The interruption of these resources puts at risk vital projects for the protection of the environment, the well-being of our Indigenous Peoples and the good relations that have been built between the Amazonian Indigenous peoples and Western society, two ways of seeing life and relating to nature.”

Amazon Conservation’s Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) wrote in a press release that several of its alliance’s projects previously supported by USAID to combat illegal deforestation in Peru have been halted. “The latest decisions by the US government on foreign aid, conservation, and climate — among many other decisions affecting everything from humanitarian assistance to science — are already creating major ripple effects on local communities and the protection of nature,” it said.

Elizabeth Dickinson, a senior analyst for the Crisis Group’s operations in Colombia, an organization that doesn’t rely on USAID funding, told Mongabay in a voice message that the funding cuts could destabilize Colombia’s fragile security and endanger communities — issues intricately tied to the country’s forests.

Since 2017, the U.S. has provided more than $1.5 billion in assistance to support the implementation of Colombia’s peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Dickinson said this “monumental gap” will impact “a lot of the longer-term reforms that were meant to address the root causes of conflict and prevent the resurgence of these same types of conflict in the future.”

According to the USAID annual biodiversity report, in 2023, the agency invested $27.5 million in biodiversity programs and $40.3 million in forestry and forest programs in Colombia. Dickinson said the safety of community leaders is at risk from armed groups and community members because they’re often the face of these projects and will have to answer to their communities about why funding has stopped.

In Peru, Williams Arellano Olano, the head of OSINFOR, the state forest and wildlife agency, told Mongabay in a video call that U.S. financial support has helped them tackle illegal logging, drug trafficking and mining in the Peruvian Amazon by strengthening the agency’s operational capacity. Although Peru doesn’t depend entirely on USAID funding, its absence will lead to delays in the implementation of these processes.

Turning elsewhere?

Some conservationists and Indigenous leaders who requested anonymity due to fear of reprisal told Mongabay that USAID is a corrupt system linked to political interference and the fragmentation of communities.

“In light of all the bad stuff, maybe good can come out of this,” said Torsten Krause, an associate professor and deputy director of the Centre for Sustainability Studies at Lund University in Sweden.

Krause said the temporary funding pause serves to highlight the dangers of an overdependence on foreign aid. In response, governments and communities should look into bottom-up approaches and community-led alternatives, he said.

Pedro Bernt Eymael, a researcher at the University of Michigan, U.S., told Mongabay by email that countries like Brazil might turn to other donors, such as Germany’s international development agency, the GIZ. Germany provided Brazil with the most development assistance in 2023. However, accessing new resources involves lengthy and exhaustive bureaucratic processes and years of relationship building, Eymael said.

“Environmental and community projects are now heavily dependent on [USAID] funding, and with these very sudden cuts, this will not only stop new projects from expanding but their very existence and their survival is at stake,” Gabriela Sarmet, partnerships coordinator at the U.K.-based Decolonial Centre (DCC) and a consultant for the Mining Observatory, told Mongabay in a voice message.

“We need to think about alternative funding mechanisms and institutions that can prevent other similar setbacks on these sorts of actions in global environmental governance,” Sarmet said. “The political implications of these cuts can be massive, and are being felt by many different countries worldwide.”

Banner image: Heat spots in areas with Prodes warnings (2017-2019). Area next to the borders of the Kaxarari Indigenous territory, in Labrea, Amazonas state, Brazil. Taken 17 Aug, 2020. Image © Christian Braga / Greenpeace.

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