The head of the UN World Food Programme has said he is hopeful Ivanka Trump will lobby her father into a U-turn on cuts to humanitarian aid in the face of an urgent cash crisis that is imperilling hundreds of thousands of lives.

David Beasley, a former Republican governor of South Carolina who supported Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency, said Congress and the Senate had already defied the new president to ringfence $980m (£764m) for famine relief this year.

Beasley said he believed Trump would now rethink his policy of stripping down funding of peacekeeping and humanitarian aid for 2018, due in part to the president’s “savvy” daughter, with whom he posed for photographs following a meeting earlier this month.

“I think we’ve got another advocate on our side,” he said. “Ivanka. She’s savvy. I’ve got two daughters and I know that when a daughter comes to me ‘Daaad’, you can’t turn your daughter down. We’re playing that. We are not leaving any stone unturned.”

The US is the biggest contributor to the UN, paying 22% of its $5.4bn core budget and 28.5% of the $7.9bn dedicated to peacekeeping. Trump has said that such contributions are unfair, and has been seeking to cut spending on US diplomatic and humanitarian efforts by a third.

Trump’s proposed cuts have been met by an outcry internationally and across the political divide in the US. This week Republican members of congress on the appropriations committee interrogated Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, about what they called the “massive and just devastating” cuts being sought.

Oxfam America has condemned the White House’s proposals as “immoral, short-sighted, and un-American”. Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican chairman of the subcommittee responsible for diplomacy and foreign aid spending, has said the consequences of the budget proposal would be a “retreat from the world”.

Beasley’s predecessor at the WFP, Ertharin Cousin, who led it for five years, said in an excoriating exit interview that she did not believe supporters of “America first” believed that should lead to “people dying” from starvation.

Beasley, who took up his position in April, said: “Obviously everyone is concerned about the US. It’s the 800lb gorilla in the room.

“[Trump] postures a lot, he positions a lot. As a lot of my friends would say, watch more what he does, less what he says. Like Nato, he believes in the importance of Nato, and the UN.

“But he has some justifiable concerns. He may approach it differently than I would because he has his own style and, you know, he’s president of the United States. I’m hopeful. And I have every reason to be hopeful that at the end of the day he will stand strong for ending starvation … America will not turn its back on starving people.

“I have been telling my friends on the floor of the Senate and House, if you want to spend another half a trillion dollars on the military, cut the World Food Programme. We are the first line of defence against extremism.”

Beasley said the organisation was facing an immediate crisis as a result of starvation in Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia and north-east Nigeria, and the humanitarian disaster in Syria.

Speaking on a visit to Brussels, where he met leaders of the EU and the Belgian government, Beasley said he needed an injection of $1bn in the coming months to save the lives of 600,000 children.

“While the European Union and Belgium have been tremendous supporters, the needs at this time are just extraordinary,” he said. “We are facing the worst humanitarian crisis since the second world war.

“Some 30 million people don’t know where their next meal is going to come from in just four of the countries facing famine, and 1.4 million are literally on the brink of starvation as we speak.



“If we do not receive the resources, the food that we need in the next few months we are talking about the possibility of 600,000 dying. If we receive the funds, we can avert famine and minimise the chance of death.”

In relative terms the US is one of the least generous countries when it comes to foreign aid: spending for 2015 stood at just 0.17% of gross national income, compared with Britain’s 0.7%.