Africa: Rethinking Humanitarianism | the Price of Speaking Up

“I wouldn’t be able to live with myself afterward if I didn’t live to the principles that I had.”

For Benjamin Davis, the senior Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) official who lost this job recently for speaking up about famine and genocide in Gaza, the last three years have been exhausting.

“We were constantly on the edge, trying to figure out what we could say and what we couldn’t say. How far could we push, and how far couldn’t we push,” says Davis, “and as a result, we did self-censor ourselves.”

Davis’s 26-year career at the United Nations came to a forced end when he was dismissed on 30 September as head of the FAO’s Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Division, at the request of FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu. He joins host Tammam Aloudat to reflect on the professional cost of speaking up about Gaza, the pressures driving self-censorship in the UN, and how aid workers can stand by their principles.

Davis’s story could be seen as part of a broader trend of institutional capture in the era of Trump diplomacy and multilateral chaos – one in which aid workers and humanitarians are often expected to stay out of the political fray despite operating in an inherently political system.

Davis calls out senior FAO and UN leadership for a lack of leadership on the “big moral issues of the day”, while advising staff in his position to “look for support in numbers” should they choose to speak out.

“I would absolutely do it again,” Davis concludes. “I wouldn’t be able to live with myself afterward if I didn’t live to the principles that I had.”

Guest:

Benjamin Davis, former head of FAO’s Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Division

Key moments [05:53] — Why the FAO ousted Benjamin Davis

[15:57] — The FAO Director-General’s threat to fire more staff

[20:14] — The quiet creep of self-censorship

[31:39] — The contradiction of being apolitical in a political world

[41:52] — Speak up or stay silent?

[44:08] — “I would absolutely do it again”

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Transcript | The price of speaking up Benjamin Davis

I mean, people are basically afraid to stand up and say what they think about some of these issues. […] Because, you know, there’s been other moments in my career where I’ve seen things which I didn’t like, sometimes internally, you know – human resources, corruption, what have you, right – where I’ve always had to make the decision: am I going to continue working or am I going to quit? And I haven’t. I haven’t. But this time, I felt as though I wouldn’t be able to live with myself afterward if I didn’t, kind of, live to the principles that I had and just speak up, you know.

Tammam Aloudat

Welcome to Rethinking Humanitarianism, a show that explores the future of aid in a world of rising crisis. I’m your host Tammam Aloudat, CEO of The New Humanitarian.

Benjamin Davis was ousted from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, in part for speaking up about Gaza and defending human rights principles. His forced departure has drawn outrage and concern from across the aid system, including a coalition of UN Special Rapporteurs, who warned that Davis’ treatment could create a climate of fear among staff, fuel a perception of deference to donors, and tarnish the reputation of the UN. Davis’s story could be seen as part of a broader trend of institutional capture in the era of Trump diplomacy and multilateral chaos. The signs are everywhere: agencies self-censoring and scrubbing terms like ‘gender equality’, ‘LGBTQ’, and ‘climate change’ from reports and public communications; staff sidelined for questioning their leaders on Gaza; the appointment of an inexperienced, Trump-aligned figure to the helm of the World Food Programme; the growing influence of big tech corporations. The list goes on and on. Through all of this, aid workers and humanitarians are often expected to stay out of the political fray in an inherently political system. How can individuals navigate this tension? How do individual choices contribute to institutional capture? And what can – or should – staff do to resist? Today: a conversation about individual choices in the face of political pressure. Joining us is Benjamin Davis. He headed FAO’s Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Division in Rome before being forced out in September. Benjamin, thank you for joining us.

Benjamin Davis

Thank you very much, Tammam. It’s a pleasure.

Tammam Aloudat

Ben, before we talk about your departure, can you give me a little bit of context about your career? What have you done for FAO and before?

Benjamin Davis

Well, I joined FAO in the year 2000. I’m an agricultural economist by training. Primarily a researcher for most of my career, primarily focusing on issues like social protection and agricultural livelihoods, and looking at the interface between social policy and economic policy at the level of rural households. And my work has mostly been in Latin America and in sub-Saharan Africa. And basically doing a lot of research, evidence generation, publishing in peer-reviewed journals, etc. That kind of stuff. That’s the broad part of my career. And about 10 years ago, I made the switch over to more towards management, leading first under the previous [FAO] Director-General director, it was one of their strategic programmes. This was on rural poverty reduction. And then when this new Director-General joined, I was put at the helm of this division, the Rural Transformation and Gender Equality division. It’s a division of about 150 people, a broad array of technical areas ranging from land tenure, to decent rural employment and youth employment, child labor, gender, gender equality. We’re responsible for all the gender work in the organisation. And the right to food team was also an important part of the work of the division. So you can see, it was a broad array of activities. Really, kind of the, this really ‘the people division’, let’s say, of FAO, which is very much focused on agriculture, and production, and those kind of things.

Tammam Aloudat

That’s brilliant. And Ben, after all those years in FAO, in September you walked out of their offices in Rome for the last time. In short, what are the events that led to that moment?

Benjamin Davis

It’s a long story in the sense that it really began with, I would say, with October 7th, right, and the reaction of the Israeli military, and all the unfolding war and genocide, basically, that was ongoing. And almost immediately, the issue of access to food, blockading or restricting humanitarian aid was almost immediately an issue, right, in that October and November. It immediately raised the concern, particularly of the colleagues of our right to food team, of the importance of, in any conflict, to make sure that there is continued access to humanitarian food, right? And it was also in the context of FAO didn’t, didn’t really make any pronouncements or say anything through the first month, basically through October and into November, in early November. So there began a lot of discussion within FAO in terms of staff who were concerned that the organisation should be saying something, given the evolving context. And so that was the beginning, really, of the events that led to my ouster [laughs] in September.

Tammam Aloudat

What were you told are the reasons for you to be asked to depart the organisation after all those years?

Benjamin Davis

What I was told in written form was that I wasn’t performing up to the standards expected of international civil servants, right. Particularly as pertaining to impartiality and to leadership. Verbally, I was told directly that there was two primary reasons. The first was I was accused of organising moments of silence in solidarity with the victims of starvation and famine in Palestine, and this was, in Gaza, and this was in – these moments of silence – began in May of 2025. At the height, well, first the the ceasefire, then the 11-week blockade, then the very slow resumption of humanitarian aid, and then the activities of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and all the concerns about access to food, basically, during that period. And then second, they specifically referred to a brief that we prepared in that same month of May 2025, where myself and another colleague had carried out some empirical analysis looking, trying to understand how much food was actually available – given the ceasefire, then the blockade – how much food was still available within the Gaza Strip, and we did some you know empirical calculations, and then we analysed those calculations in the context of international humanitarian law, human rights law, and the right to food. And we produced a brief. That brief was approved. It was cleared through the appropriate channels. Then two weeks later, we were told that we needed to take it down because we had exceeded our mandate in terms of using these legal frameworks such as, you know, international humanitarian law, and that they were afraid of essentially political problems from its publication.

Tammam Aloudat

Did you think, yourself, that you were doing anything particularly radical when you attended those moments of silence, or when you wrote the report, the brief you’ve talked about?

Benjamin Davis

No, not at all. I mean, in terms of the moments of silence, I mean, for us it was very much important to demonstrate the concern, let’s say, right. And we specifically did not want to take it, you know, outside of FAO. We didn’t want to talk to media. It was meant to be an internal FAO community, let’s say, to, you know, provoke discussion, to provoke more interest, let’s say, in terms of what was what was going on and showing that solidarity. So it was specifically not meant to be radical or to be provocative, right? It really was a way of trying to communicate with the broader FAO community as to what was going on, right. And I think in terms of the analytical work we were doing, I mean, I don’t know what to say. I mean, the analytical work itself was very straightforward. I mean, humanitarian law is humanitarian law, right? I think what was objected to was the fact that we suggested that, perhaps based on our quantitative analysis, some of these international laws were being violated, or could constitute violation. I knew that some member countries might be upset, but again, a lot of the work that FAO does is around, I mean, we measure food security. Every year countries are unhappy because, you know, food security and insecurity may be going up and down, right? You know, and all of this time I knew it was a sensitive subject, right, because the issue of Palestine is an ultra sensitive subject for many, you know, reasons, for many historical reasons. And so we tread very softly. I never did anything that my supervisor didn’t know, right. Everything was cleared, everything was discussed with the chief economist of FAO, right. But we felt as though it was something that we had to say. I mean, it was so obvious. It was so… I mean, again, it was just televised every day what was going on, right? And so we felt as though we needed to contribute both what we could, what was in our mandate.

Tammam Aloudat

It’s hardly a secret that food aid was restricted, and that there were many organisations that are specialists argued that there is a famine in Gaza, or it has come closer to a famine than ever before at the time where you published the brief. So it’s not that you’ve came up with an argument that didn’t exist, and it is one that is built on calculation and empirical evidence. You also mentioned before that your supervisors knew about those activities.

Benjamin Davis

Yeah.

Tammam Aloudat

Did they suffer the same fate, those who approved the brief, for example?

Benjamin Davis

No, no, they didn’t. They didn’t, basically. [Laughs]

Tammam Aloudat

[Laughs]. Well, because this is interesting. I mean, it’s hardly possible to publish a brief, get it approved through the ranks. Why do you think they approved it and sort of withdrew that and then used it as an argument, at least in the verbal, what they told you verbally as a reason for your termination of your position?

Benjamin Davis

I mean, at FAO, there’s different levels of hierarchy and authority, right? And the chief economist was always, I mean, he’s a stickler, and rightly so, for technical rigor, right. And he always told us, “I’ll support you 100% in what you’re doing, as long as it’s technically rigorous, and it’s based on evidence,” right? And he kept his word, right, for the most part. And so, you know, he read the document and he cleared it from his technical point of view, right. Then other, let’s say, other members of the core leadership of the senior leadership read it or got wind of it, and complained, basically. And that’s when it went into, kind of, a political, the political optic, and it went to the office of the Director-General, right, and I think that’s when the reaction happened, right. And so typically with these kind of briefs, it doesn’t go to the Director-General every brief, right? So this is something that’s cleared by the chief economist, and so, it was kind of, it was the fallout from reading it, basically.

Tammam Aloudat

Do you know that it was the Director-General who actually made the decision to, like, effectively punish you for writing that brief?

Benjamin Davis

Well, ultimately, it’s his decision. I’m sure there were a number of different figures, or voices, or people influencing his final decision. It wasn’t always immediately clear to me how these forces were actually moving, let’s say, because there were there are definitely different political, different figures of power within the organisation that didn’t appreciate, let’s say, the conversation about Gaza, didn’t appreciate the fact that we kept pushing, you know, to bring up the topic. Because we had pushed. I mean, not only had we done these briefs, we’d also, we’d done a few events, let’s say, to talk about the right to food, to talk about what was going– again, always cleared, always with technical people. I mean, etc.

Tammam Aloudat

But this is also not the first time that politics have caused tension in FAO or other UN agencies, for that matter. I mean, I’ve seen, for example, a records of a meeting with [the] Director-General of WFP where there was a complete walk out, and it was much more vocal externally. As you said, you know, you wanted to do something internal. There were other political moves in relation to Palestine and others. What is different about this? Do you feel that there was a shift in your experience, or something happened? What’s different now?

Benjamin Davis

Again, I think it’s a combination of forces, right, or factors. I think some of it had to do with, well, the nature of the conflict in Palestine and the fact that it’s so ultra sensitive, and that there, some member countries complained, right. And I know that the Israeli mission complained on a number of occasions, right. And I think it had to do with senior figures within the organisation who were worried about the relationship with the United States. I have no evidence that the United States ever said anything about my work or the work FAO was doing. And this covers many different topics, right, as you brought out at the beginning in terms of terminology, in terms of all of these things, a fair amount of self-censorship and kind of risk aversion and kind of managing risk and fear of what the United States may say. Because the United States is the most important, you know, contributor to FAO, I mean, it’s a very important member country, let’s say, in FAO. And I think third, the Director-General himself, I think– well, I think there’s a number of factors with the Director-General. One is he is annoyed that maybe I wasn’t a team player, and I just wasn’t being quiet, and that I, you know, I wasn’t kind of doing what most division directors do, which is kind of keep everything on a very superficial level – don’t rock the boat, don’t talk about controversial subjects. I also think that he, I mean, and this is what he said directly, right? And I imagine you’ve seen the video accusing me of playing the game of human rights. He has very strong views in terms of, as he said, right, I mean, human rights are done in Geneva, right? They’re not done at FAO. And that’s a heartfelt position, right? His other position is that FAO doesn’t do politics. Politics happens in New York. We do technical work. From my point of view, I mean, I agree we’re a technical organisation, but we live in a world, right, we work with member countries where everything is conditioned by politics. You can’t avoid politics. If you avoid politics, you’ll never do anything. The member countries themselves are extremely political, right, in everything they do at FAO, etc., right? So it’s a fake, I mean, it’s a non-reality that you can, that you can ignore politics. You don’t play politics, right, but you understand every, any, if you want to do any kind of technical work, you need to understand the politics of what’s going on. You need to understand the structural issues in a country.

Tammam Aloudat

I mean, we will put a section here on how the director Qu Dongyu spoke about it, and that was almost thought for a second that this is a deep fake made with AI because…

Benjamin Davis

[Laughs]. You and everyone! [Laughs].

Tammam Aloudat

And I mean, it was, it was a bit shocking, and I had to listen to it twice.

FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu

“We’re not allow you to play the game, here, of human rights. Of course, human rights is very important, but we have the human rights agency in Geneva. If you want to take care, go there. That’s why some senior members they play the political game here, I fire him. Yeah, if you are D1 and above, you should follow the FAO constitution. You are against the law of the FAO. You are against the basic [?]. You are against the staff regulations. No matter P5, or P4, or D1 above. You should be fired. But I’m a very soft person, I didn’t fire that many [laughs]. Yeah? I said I will use my last year, I will fire more people if they are against the law.”

Tammam Aloudat

I mean it’s, let aside the vulgarity of that sort of expression of power, but does he actually believe that he has nothing to do with human rights? I mean, I understand your argument that he believes it’s a technical organisation first and foremost, and I accept that. But is that an actual thing?

Benjamin Davis

I mean, I think it is an actual thing, right. And I think there’s been subtle, there has been subtle pressure – not to not to me directly – but to other divisions, other areas, to not talk about human rights, let’s say, in their work, right. To keep all the discussion- I mean, you can talk about rights-based approaches, you can talk about you know rights-based perspectives, but it’s really, it’s frowned upon to have that phrase. And so there is something real there. I don’t understand all the dimensions of it, but there is, there certainly is something real there. I know that they talk a lot more about the right to food, and the Director-General himself has made many statements about the right to food, but I have a sense that they don’t really look at it at a very superficial level, right. And so there’s this right to food, but we never talk about what that means in practice. What are the implications, how do we realise those rights, etc., right? And so, that’s kind of how they like to manage things. No matter what the topic is, it’s managing at an easy level in which we don’t talk about the contradictions. We don’t talk about the structural constraints. We keep at a very superficial level. It’s almost at the level of, I’m not going to say propaganda, but kind of just these kind of you know stock phrases about how we should be doing this or that, right, but which don’t have any comment, no. And so I think that’s all very real, and I think there’s a lot of pressure, subtle pressure for people to do that.

Tammam Aloudat

Because it boggles my mind, this non-political thing. The whole UN is bound by a charter that is based on human rights.

Benjamin Davis

Yeah [laughs].

Tammam Aloudat

And it’s still unsettling, to be honest. That video was – not that I have major faith in the leadership of, you know, agencies in the UN – but that was quite unsettling to me. Do you know if there were repercussions from him saying that so publicly? Did anyone say anything about it? Do you hear?

Benjamin Davis

[Laughs]. Well, lots of people have been, lots of people have talked about it, right? I mean, I think that statement was even much more disturbing than you know the news of my being let go because I was talking about Gaza. Because I think it, well it upset a lot of staff obviously but it also upset obviously a lot or disturbed a lot of the, obviously, the human rights community, right, and a lot of the United Nations community. You know, the UN rapporteurs, I’m sure I don’t know if you saw right, they put out a statement, 20 of them. I mean, I know that the, I mean the UN, the Secretary-General doesn’t have much influence, let’s say, over the FAO Director-General, but kind of the indirect comments that they’ve made, it’s clear that they don’t share, let’s say, the view, right?

[music break]

Tammam Aloudat

If we go back to the point about the self-censoring, because we’ve observed this in The New Humanitarian repeatedly, of suddenly Trump administration comes in, and before they even demand anything, people start taking out stuff that they think Trump might not like. Like even the words ‘gender’, or ‘LGBTQ’, or ‘equality’, or, you know, ‘justice’, or whatever is. Did you see that happen?

Benjamin Davis

Yeah, I mean, I definitely saw it [laughs]. I definitely saw it happen. Llanguage is always very sensitive, right? And so there’s a great deal of attention is played on language, no, at the United Nations. And you know, many of the concerns that, you know, that you just brought up in terms of you know speaking about gender, or speaking about climate, I mean, a lot of these were there even before the the election of Trump, right? Just that the kind of the balance of power in terms of the member countries not liking these terms and wanting to backtrack on the use of many of these terms. Once Trump was elected, the balance of power shifted incredibly strongly, right, because again, the United States is the single largest donor to FAO, right. And so immediately there was, and kind of evolving over time, there was very subtle changes in the use of language, right. Again, I was never told directly not to say this or not to say that.

Tammam Aloudat

Did they expect you to get that on your own, or like to…

Benjamin Davis

I don’t know what they expected, right? But I don’t think they wanted to be caught saying “don’t use this or don’t use that,” right? And so what would happen is that, you know, the OCC, which is the Communications Division, you know, if you were putting out something, some publication, some one of the bigger publications or something formal, there would be, kind of, words would disappear [laughs], let’s say, in the editing process, no. So over time, one begins to self, you self-censor yourself, or you decide: when is the terminology a matter of principle, and when it is something that I can give up with? Right? And I understand that’s always, that’s always there, right? Again, you’re balancing the national interests of, you know, 190 countries or something that like that, and so you’re constantly aware that you don’t want to, you know, upset countries, right. You know, for the last three years, I think, have been so exhausting, precisely because we were constantly on the edge, trying to figure out what we could say and what we couldn’t say, right. How far could we push, and how far couldn’t we push? And as a result, we did self-censor ourselves, right? We would, you know, instead of gender equality, we would talk about women’s empowerment many times, right.

Tammam Aloudat

And it’s very good to hear from you that, because it’s important to, for people to not think that this suddenly happened once Trump administration came to power. There has always been things that could be said and things that couldn’t be said in reports, and it’s not only at, on on issues that carry such political weight as as the genocide in Gaza. It’s about everything. There is like a whole language in the UN that, about what gets said and not said. Arguably people are going one step further in accommodating one more country that has one more, especially as the biggest donor. But there is something different now. The Executive Director of the World Food Programme is not your run-of-the-mill, like, semi-expert with a big, you know, agenda behind them. The last one was Cindy McCain, for example, and despite her positioning on Gaza, she still managed to give the appearance of a head of agency. The new selection is Luke Lindberg. He’s an openly “America First” Trump pick. And not only that; he has now-deleted tweets where he is photographed beside Benjamin Netanyahu, saying, “Everything is justified in response to terrorism.” Another one where he’s carrying a gun, saying, you know, “we’re exporting” – if I remember it right – “security and prosperity for our friends in the IDF”. This guy is now going to discuss how to deliver food to Palestinians, that he… The same goes for the FAO Director-General; he’s not a neutral figure in the sense of he had close ties with the Chinese government. We know now his views about, you know, “the game of human rights,” quote unquote. And is this institutional capture? You’ve been there long enough – is this exceptional? Is there a different degree of those institutions being captured by the politics of member states, or powerful ones, at least?

Benjamin Davis

I don’t know if it’s any different. I don’t think the problem is necessarily the specific people they put. I think the problem is the process by which they’re chosen, right. I don’t think there’s anything particularly different. I think perhaps just the, you know, the governing style of the Trump administration is particularly crass, and direct, and bare bones, and there’s no pretending anymore what they’re doing, right? And so it just becomes so much more obvious. It’s not new per se. There’s certainly has been a shift, let’s say, in how, not not only the Trump administration, but a lot of the Western donors, the Western governments as well are are dealing with the UN, both in terms of financing, in terms of the policies policies, right. Again, this is kind of a broader set of analysis in terms of the weakening of the legitimacy of the multilateral system more broadly, right? It just seems to be creaking under all these weights, which are contradictions that I think were always there, but now they’ve been really brought to boar just by the brass-ness, no, of governments, you know.

Tammam Aloudat

To take it further, I mean, as staff in UN agencies and in other aid agencies, there’s plenty of political pressure. I mean, there has been – to just give a couple of examples – there has been in the earlier days of the the genocide after October the seventh, there has been a letter from Antonio Guterres to all UN staff saying, you know, avoid speaking about politics, and you know code name for “don’t talk about what’s happening in Palestine.” Do you feel that this is new? Was it the same for Ukraine? Was it the same for previous conflicts?

Benjamin Davis

There was some consistency, let’s say, in terms of how FAO responded to the invasion of Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza, in the sense that the DG came under incredible pressure right after the invasion of Ukraine to make declarations, to say something. And here was all the Western countries; they were almost hysterical in the way they were demanding that FAO take a stand, right? And he resisted. He resisted. He resisted. Then eventually, kind of, gave in, right. So there, there was a bit of a precedent, let’s say, that “we’re not going to say anything. We don’t want to be drawn into it politically into this.” On the other hand, then they did give in, and there was a bit more, I mean, some of the things that we’ve done around Gaza, which were criticised, were more accepted, let’s say, eventually in the context of the invasion of Ukraine, primarily because, you know, the U.S. and the Western countries were supportive of of that.

Tammam Aloudat

How did your colleagues react to that, to you speaking out and paying that price that you’ve done?

Benjamin Davis

There was a lot of concern among staff about the silence, about FAO really not fulfilling its mandate, about not saying anything. But again, an incredible amount of fear about saying something. And the fear permeated everywhere, right. And the fear of retaliation, the fear of, you know… I mean, people are basically afraid to stand up and say what they think, right, about some of these issues. Again, not necessarily taking political perspectives, but saying, you know, “this is part of FAO’s mandate, and we need to be talking about it.” Because, you know, there’s been other moments in my career where I’ve seen things which I didn’t like, sometimes internally, you know – human resources, corruption, what have you – where I’ve always had to make the decision: am I going to continue working or am I going to quit? And I haven’t. I haven’t. But this time, I felt as though this was kind of, I mean, this is where really, I mean… I wouldn’t be able to live with myself afterward if I didn’t, kind of, live to the principles that I had and just speak up, you know. And I felt very supported by many staff. I felt very much less supported by anyone at my level, any of the management, you know. There was a few colleagues who, you know, who would express their personal sympathy, or there was even a few of the senior management that came to these moments of silence. I mean, I wasn’t the only one, right? There was even some higher level staff, managers that came a few times. But no one was really willing to really even to to really fulfill our mandate, right? To fulfill our mandate in terms of what’s going on in fisheries, in terms of the destruction of the fisheries in Gaza, and just to document that and to talk about what the solutions are. I mean, that’s really what it is: it’s about documenting and talking about what we need to do, right? I think some people just weren’t interested, and some people were just afraid, and they didn’t want to take the risk because they felt it was going to jeopardise the rest of their program and priorities.

Tammam Aloudat

It’s been exceedingly rare for people to speak out, and, like you, there were cases where people quit or were terminated. But given how many tens of thousands of people are employed by the UN, this is still exceedingly rare. Why aren’t more people willing to do what you did? I don’t want to sound skeptical. Of course people are afraid for their programmess and their work and their… But is it what makes it so rare for people in the UN to speak out against the policies of their agencies?

Benjamin Davis

I don’t know. I mean, I think at the heart of it is people who are, this is their career, right? They have their kids in school, they’re they’re economically invested, and they’re afraid of losing their jobs, basically. I really think that’s at the, at the heart of it.

Tammam Aloudat

Do you think if someone lost their job because something like this, to your knowledge, is there any blacklisting system? Would they not be employable? Is it, uh…

Benjamin Davis

I don’t know. I mean, I don’t, there’s certainly no formal blacklisting system. Whether there’s an informal one, I don’t know. There have been there there have been some other colleagues who’ve been, that are being let go by the other organisations, right. More junior colleagues, no. But again, they’re not being let go directly for these reasons. They seem to have come up with other ways of making them redundant, or kind of letting people go, right? So it’s more difficult to make an accusation, right? My case is rare because they kind of, they openly admitted it, right? [Laughs].

Tammam Aloudat

Yeah, I mean, crassly, and…

Benjamin Davis

Exactly, right.

Tammam Aloudat

[It] feels like a libelous way to like, self-libelous way to admit it.

Benjamin Davis

Yeah. But people, I mean, I know people at FAO have certainly taken this as a threat, right. And he made the threat direct, right, that he would, you know, looking forward to firing more people that…

Tammam Aloudat

Absolutely.

Benjamin Davis

… break the rules, and people have taken him at his word. And so people are really concerned, and people are keeping their heads down, right.

Tammam Aloudat

I come from Syria, and I lived my youth in an authoritarian government. When you get a threat like this from the top, it encourages bullies and snitches. Like people start being able to threaten each other. It becomes an intolerable, between the fear of, you know, the authoritarianism of the top and the fear of everybody around you who might become, you know, weaponised.

[music break]

Tammam Aloudat

We hear many saying that staff in aid agencies, or UN agencies, see their roles as apolitical. Is that your experience?

Benjamin Davis

Yeah, they do. They very much do, yeah.

Tammam Aloudat

Isn’t there a contradiction?

Benjamin Davis

Well, no. I think it’s apolitical in the sense that we shouldn’t be political protagonists, right? In my mind, we’re very political because we need to understand the politics of what we’re doing, right? Because if you want to get a policy passed, if you want to get a technology adopted, you need to understand the policies. You need to understand, you know, inequality. You need to understand, you know, why women aren’t able to, you know, access credit. I mean, you need to know all that. You need to, and these are all essentially political.

Tammam Aloudat

Absolutely.

Benjamin Davis

And addressing them requires political solutions, right? So you need to be very politically savvy, but you don’t want to be a political protagonist, right? So that’s kind of the difference.

Tammam Aloudat

And this is interesting because I’ve worked in that humanitarian sector for a long time, and to my mind, there is a conflation between “don’t be political” as “don’t be a protagonist” – that’s a very good way [of putting it] – and “I don’t care who wins or who loses” of member states or governments.

Benjamin Davis

Yeah, exactly.

Tammam Aloudat

There isn’t there isn’t a way to understand the work that we’re engaged in outside politics. You have to navigate politics, hence understand them.

Benjamin Davis

Of course, of course, yeah. We have an office in almost every country around the world, right? To get anything done, you need to understand the political forces, the political system, you know, who to talk to, how it works. You know, and hen you have a radical change in government, then you learn to work with the new government, right? Whether it’s left or right. And I think that’s great, and I think that’s what we should be doing. And you need to be very real, you need to be politically real to do that, no?

Tammam Aloudat

I mean absolutely. The example that jumped to my mind that there are aid workers and development workers who work in North Korea and are smiling and are polite. And then I thought, well, there are ones that work in the U.S. and that are smiling and polite to Trump administration these days. So it’s, you know, that is political, and you have to know how to say, what to say. You’ve talked about the perception, like what is being political or apolitical, the fear they have for their programmes, and potentially for their jobs, and “I have two kids, I don’t want to lose my salary”. That’s obviously a concern that people will have. But where is the responsibility? What do you think individual staff here, particularly in UN agencies, have as a responsibility? And do they have options? What can they do?

Benjamin Davis

I mean, everyone has to make that decision for themselves, right? And I also think there’s a valid argument to be made that you want to stay inside the system because it’s still worth defending. It’s still worth working within to try to get things done, right? And I mean, most of my career I’ve made that choice, let’s say, right, even when there’s been moments where I doubted whether I’d made the right choice. And I think people could push a lot more, right. It’s funny, what I first realised – and this was like in late 2023, early 2024, right – when I started to really realise I was touching up against some limits in terms of what they wanted us to do, right. So we were hitting the limits, and we were kind of seeing, “okay, what can you say? What shouldn’t we say, right?” And we were being, trying to be careful. It made me realise that most of my career I wasn’t going anywhere near the limits, right. It made me question what I’d been doing my whole career. It’s like my whole career, I think I’ve been doing stuff which was very safe, right. And I, you know, consciously or not, you know we avoided some of the really difficult political issues. And again, most of which have to do with inequality, you know, inequality and access to land, you know, income inequality, political inequality within countries, the question of collective action, all of this, which are all these critical structural issues that need to be addressed in order to really achieve the goals that the [2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development], all of that stuff, So I worked in social protection. It was a lot of it was around, you know, cash transfers, social assistance, right. There’s a big critique of that, that you’re, it’s a very much, you know, you’re not dealing with the core issues of structural inequalities and all of that. And so I realised that for most of my career, I was kind of being, I was kind of avoiding the big, the big issues, right? And so no one really cared, basically, no. And it only was when I began to to touch on something that really hit some of these political issues or political sensitivities or, you know, really important things that I finally, okay, I realised this is what it’s like to hit the ceiling. We’ve hit that as well in some of the other topics, right, it isn’t just on Gaza and Palestine. It also has to do with our work around corporate concentration and in, you know, agri-food systems basically right or the other work in conflict, right? We had some issues around Sudan because we wanted to do more work in Sudan, and the government complained, and in that case, we had to drop the work in Sudan, right. And then of course the whole issue of LGBTQ, which you brought up at the beginning, that’s not even on the horizon yet at FAO. Early on before Gaza, we had tried to make some initial steps just to kind of bring up the topic and just to have some discussions, because there’s no consensus on the member countries, there’s no agreement, right? So it wasn’t something we could kind of embrace wholeheartedly, but we wanted to at least kind of bring up the discussion, no. So there was the same thing, you know, kind of saying, “okay, what can we say?” Kind of, you know, hitting the limits, etc. To make that happen, you need to have, kind of, leadership or middle leadership which is willing to, you know, take some risks, which is willing to have some of these discussions. UN agencies, FAO is extremely hierarchical. If there had been someone else as the director of this division, none of this would have happened, just because it’s very much… a typical director would just be much more risk averse.

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