Ending world hunger is closer than people often imagine. Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of how much money is necessary to reach this goal. People may think that so much is already being spent without there being much more room for progress. When this happens, it is helpful to have a comparison between things that Americans already spend a lot on like the military, and aid organizations whose funding is much less.

The emphasis of performing these comparisons is not necessarily to highlight the fact that less should be spent on important things like national defense, but rather that if similar amounts were to be spent on dire issues like world hunger, the effect of that spending would be tremendous. To narrow things down, this article will examine the cost of the F-35, the U.S. Defense Department’s newest fighter jet. The article will compare the F-35s cost to the spending of the World Food Program (WFP), based on its 2023 annual performance report.

The Cost of The F-35

For almost two decades now, since its first test flight in 2006, the F-35 fighter jet has been the example of what the most modern technologies look like in an aircraft. It boasts impressive radar technologies that allow it to easily locate enemy aircraft before it can be located, giving pilots a tactical advantage. The F-35 is also a force multiplier, collecting large amounts of information at once, while translating it to other aircraft including those using other aircraft systems.

Among 16 other nations planning to use the F-35 fighter jet, the U.S. has already purchased just more than 600 F-35s and plans to purchase approximately 2,000 more in the future. In its entire lifecycle, the cost of the F-35 fighter jet has totaled $1.6 trillion due in large part to its sustainment costs which have increased 44% in the past five years. As costs continue to increase, the response to meet the Defense Department’s affordability target has been to decrease the amount of airtime spent, while also trying to make the aircraft less expensive to fly.

In efforts to reach affordability targets, several initiatives undertaken have been somewhat successful in reducing costs by $85 billion due to improved reliability of aircraft parts. Despite this, there is still a growing backlog of repairs that have reduced the jet’s availability. These repairs and increased concerns about spending are what led the U.S. Navy to reduce their projected flying hours by 45%, and the U.S. Air Force to reduce their projected flying hours by 19%, according to Diana Maurer. Improvements are still necessary in aircraft sustainability to ensure that the military has proper equipment while remaining affordable for U.S. citizens.

WFP Spending

According to the data from the annual performance report of 2023 for the WFP, the organization spent a total of $10 billion on providing aid – $8.3 billion of that $10 billion was aid received for that year, while the remaining approximately $2 billion came from unspent funds of the previous year. This aid mostly consists of meeting people’s urgent food and nutritional needs, with the remainder spent mostly on improving health and education in target countries.

At a time when critical aid was increasingly necessary due to conflict, natural disasters and the lingering effects of the Coronavirus outbreak, the WFP reached approximately 152 million people. It accomplished this despite not reaching its initial funding goal by more than 60%, the largest gap in the WFP’s history, according to the 2023 report. Since its funding was significantly less than the previous years and even more so than the estimates of a needs-based approach, this $10 billion funding went almost exclusively to reaching people in crisis areas. These are areas where the threats of starvation and malnutrition are imminent such as in the countries of Afghanistan, Yemen and Ethiopia.

Using the previously mentioned numbers, the WFP critically supported one person for every $66,000 spent. While that is not a small amount of money, it is also important to note that many of these aid recipients received aid continually through food assistance programs, which continue to have a lasting effect. For example, every day in 2023, WFP distributed 14.5 billion food rations which averaged $50 a year for every beneficiary, according to the 2023 report. Oftentimes these food rations are the only thing keeping families from starvation, making the distribution of such aid essential.

The Cost of Ending World Hunger

Now seeing the cost of the F-35 fighter jet and the expenditures of the WFP, it is easier to understand what a large impact spending on world hunger can have. If just as much of the $1.6 trillion spent on the F-35 were to be spent on one year of the WFP’s annual expenditures, the outreach would expand by approximately 160 times to what it was in 2023. This means that instead of reaching 152 million people, a total amount of people summing more than everyone on earth could receive the same number of benefits that year. That would include more than 2 trillion food rations distributed, with still billions of dollars left to spend on the health and educational programs that The WFP’s funding also goes towards.

While the WFP receiving $1.6 trillion is quite a difference from what their annual funding typically looks like, it highlights that humanity is not that far away from solving world hunger. Picturing the WFP receiving funding that matches the cost of the F-35 fighter jet reminds us of how impactful and effective aid organizations truly are.

– Hunter Gomersall

Hunter is based in Santa Barbara, CA, USA and focuses on Good News for The Borgen Project.

Photo: Flickr