From stockpiling tents and blankets, to trucking water and distributing food and medicines, logistics are at the core of emergency responses – but that work is now said to be at a “crossroads”, with decades of progress at risk of being squandered by Trump’s aid cuts.
Logistical expenses – for supply chains, moving and storing goods – soak up around 70% of the costs of most humanitarian operations, according to Lila Ricart, deputy project manager of the Emergency Supply Prepositioning Strategy (ESUPS), a group helping NGOs to organise their lifesaving supplies.
Logistics are the “backbone” of “being able to deliver aid and attend to the beneficiaries”, Ricart told The New Humanitarian. But it’s not a trendy area. “Logistics and supply chain questions are always forgotten,” said Ricart. Improvements are “almost never prioritised in comparison with [other] programmatic considerations,” she added.
Amid the ongoing aid cuts, agencies around the world have already been cutting back on their logistics budgets, and this is already directly impacting people affected by crises. As the aid sector reckons with the broader crisis triggered by USAID’s closure, Ricart said humanitarian logisticians, and their organisations, face critical choices about how they work.
The field is made up of a complex, context-dependent web of different NGOs, private businesses, and coordination mechanisms. The World Food Programme was designated by humanitarian leaders at the Inter-Agency Standing Committee to lead the Logistics Cluster, which attempts to bring together the various parties involved in emergency logistics.
It’s an area that has been greatly modernised in recent years, but Ricart worried the sector risks falling back into an era of “chaos” – marred by waste and overspending – unless there are concerted efforts to maintain its hard-won improvements and learn lessons to improve further.
The New Humanitarian spoke with Ricart to hear about the risks to humanitarian logistics posed by the ongoing aid sector crisis, and what she sees as the best path forward.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
The New Humanitarian: How has humanitarian logistics changed in recent years?
Lila Ricart: The 1990s was peak chaos, the approach was: ‘I have to move my stuff. I found my truck. I was there first, that's it.’
You would go in an emergency and see three half-empty trucks going in the same direction because they were contracted by three different organisations and they would all have lost a lot of money in moving the same thing in the same direction.
Or you might see the biggest organisation with the most money hiring all the remaining trucks available after an emergency and moving just their stuff, maybe only WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene), but medicines were also needed.
To improve this, the idea was ‘Okay, let's just hire one truck and have someone coordinating what we put in and make sure the truck is full’, and to organise who pays for it.
This was not only for logistics – the trucks, the helicopter, the warehouses etcetera – but also the procurement of the goods, which is most costly: People asked ‘How do we buy? each of us separately? Do we negotiate separately with the same provider or together?’
And we were slowly going in that direction. Before the stop work order [which ordered NGOs funded by USAID to pause operations], we were in a phase where organisations were still doing it on their own but they were slowly coming to peace with the fact that they had to do it together. So we had this parallel system, but the shift towards the common approach takes time.
The New Humanitarian: How have the USAID cuts affected humanitarian logistics so far?
Ricart: Everyone is affected. I don't know any organisation I usually work with that are not heavily affected.
I've been in touch with colleagues from NRC [Norwegian Refugee Council] in Latin America and the Caribbean and they're talking about reducing 50% of their activity, letting go of 45% of their staff. Same with colleagues from Humanity and Inclusion that have operations worldwide and that have to stop working with implementing partners from local organisations worldwide.
Most of us in logistics received US funding. The strongest effect on the supply chain came when we received the stop work order, and then termination letter. So everyone stopped distribution activity and stopped attending beneficiaries.
Also, organisations used to pay three months of costs themselves, which were reimbursed by the US every three months. For logistics, it's often a lot. They have a lot of money out – from October 2024 to January 2025 – that they expected to be reimbursed: It has worked this way since forever. So the big hit right now is not only money stopping, it's about money they have out and won't be reimbursed.
[Ricart said she was unsure how much was missing in logistics-related costs that were expected to be repaid by the US government. Reuters reported on 20 March that nearly $2 billion in total was owed by the US government to aid groups. A court order for USAID to repay money it owed to organisations has only been sporadically fulfilled, and legal papers filed on 27 March indicated at least 6,000 payments still to be made, according to CNN.]
The New Humanitarian: What risks have the aid cuts caused to progress in humanitarian logistics?
Ricart: We're at a crossroads: Do we go for the full common approach, and we share? Or does everyone say, ‘Okay we have less money but I will protect what I have’, and go back to minding their own little business, and doing it way less efficiently?
These years of work, do we put them in trash or do we really try to do it differently? I don't know what will be the answer.
The New Humanitarian: What needs to happen to maintain progress?
Ricart: Organisations sticking together. I’ve worked with the logistics cluster for years, and everyone always says they have an intention to work together. But at some point we have to stop sitting at the same table and expressing what we like, and switch to just one of us buying, and then we share.
Also important will be how the remaining donors act, and whether they revert to funding their preferred NGOs.
ECHO (the European Commission’s Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations) are now the main player in the game. They will define a lot: The shape of what's coming; how much they will compromise to save this kind of pooled resources initiative, and how much priority they put on supply chains versus, for example, the Ukraine war.
The New Humanitarian: What are some of the other challenges and opportunities ahead?
Ricart: This current moment of crisis gives the humanitarian community the chance to reset and focus on what matters most. Individual mandates need to come second to the needs of affected populations. Trust between organisations must be cultivated. Individual agencies must abandon their comfortable “silo” approaches and band together to find ways that best meet needs. There is a clear opportunity for real collaboration if we seize the opportunity.
And in a context of funding scarcity, it is a chance for the logistics to come back to the centre of the conversation, and for it to be fully considered as a key component of the humanitarian architecture. The benefits of this will be measured in terms of cost savings, environmental impact, and, ultimately, the effectiveness of disaster response itself. It also aligns with the localisation agenda, allowing local responders to take a leadership role on matters that affect them.
But for NGOs to really go for the common initiative, they have to make some organisational changes: They have to stop having their own supply chains. And it means they have to reduce personnel, reshape the size of their operations – these are hard decisions.
And to be able to feel safe enough to make this decision, offers of pooled resources will need to be consistent and strong enough to convince NGOs it is worth it.
Everyone has been talking about this choice in the supply chain sector since forever.
Now we don't have a choice anymore. So what will we choose?
Edited by Andrew Gully.
