By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Food Insecurity

Considered as a whole, the world has never been richer, more technologically advanced, or more capable of feeding itself. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many analysts feared that the world could run out of food. The rate of population growth, especially in developing countries, far exceeded the growth of agricultural capacity, and UN and World Bank reports suggested that without dramatic changes, the world was headed toward catastrophic shortages. But the so-called Green Revolution soon helped yield far greater agricultural productivity, ensuring successive waves of improvements and innovations in farming techniques. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the UN Environment Program have estimated that, if waste were minimized, the world’s countries could now produce enough food to nourish almost ten billion people, two billion more than currently inhabit the planet.

Yet this tremendous achievement has led to complacency—and masked a new and growing hunger crisis. Today, hunger is driven less by scarcity than by barriers to accessing food in a world where abundance coexists with staggering deprivation. According to the 2025 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, compiled by the FAO, up to 720 million people are chronically food insecure. Forty-three million children suffer from wasting, the most severe form of malnutrition, and 152 million from stunted growth, a consequence of nutritional deficiencies and repeated infections that, in turn, can reduce their cognitive and physical capacities in adulthood. The 2025 Global Outlook report by the UN World Food Program (WFP) found that 319 million people face acute hunger, an increase of over 130 percent from pre-2020 levels, and that two famines are unfolding concurrently, in Gaza and in Sudan.

At a time when wars, environmental disasters, and economic hardship are causing more and more people to go hungry, many donor countries are backing away from funding lifesaving and life-changing food assistance programs. A July 2025 study published in The Lancet, for instance, projected that the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development by the Trump administration would lead to up to 14 million untimely deaths, many of them from hunger, over the next five years. In retreating from aid, donor countries are ignoring an unavoidable truth: food insecurity in one place leads to instability in others. If rich nations do not step up to address growing hunger now, the consequences could be as far-reaching as the catastrophe predicted half a century ago—only this crisis is entirely within the world’s power to prevent.

 

Food Chains

The great famines of the twentieth century were often driven by droughts. Now, the reasons people go hungry are more likely to be structural, related to violent conflict, enduring climate change, and economic marginalization. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, the number of active conflicts worldwide has risen from 46 in 2014 to 61 in 2024. And the proportion of active conflicts that are resolved in a given year has reached its lowest point in half a century. Violent conflict has always increased food insecurity, and nearly 70 percent of people currently facing acute food insecurity live in countries affected by it. In Gaza and Sudan alone, war has driven a million people into famine.

Climate change has also begun to accelerate hunger. The Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at the University of Louvain found that between 1985 and 2004, the world experienced an average of 231 climate-change-related natural disasters annually. But since 2005, that number has jumped to nearly 343, around a 50 percent increase. In 2024 alone, EM-DAT, the premier international disaster database, recorded 371 natural disasters (including droughts, floods, and storms) that displaced 45 million people. This year, Hurricane Melissa left 3.1 million people in the Caribbean requiring urgent food assistance, and 6.3 million people in Pakistan were affected by floods. In the Sahel, frequent droughts are exacerbating poverty and displacement, and extremist groups exploit these vulnerabilities.

The fragility of the world’s economy only adds to the crisis. Roughly half of all low-income countries are in or near debt distress, which can significantly exacerbate food insecurity. High levels of debt force governments to prioritize repayments over essential expenditures, reducing available funding for food imports and social safety nets, as well as needed investments in agricultural and rural infrastructure. Today, more than three billion people live in countries that spend more on interest payments on their debt than they do on health or education. Because of rising debt, currency devaluations, and increases in production costs, food prices have risen by 50 percent in 61 countries and more than 100 percent in 37 countries over the last five years. The reemergence of trade protectionism is also choking the revenue streams poorer nations rely on to fund food and other essential imports.

 

From Famine to Plenty

Breaking this cycle requires economic farsightedness and political courage. The challenge is not technical: the world knows how to grow and deliver food. It is political and financial, a matter of making food security a shared priority, not a residual obligation.

Governments, multilateral institutions, philanthropic organizations, and private-sector donors must urgently restore and expand predictable, multiyear financing for humanitarian and development programs. Funding lifesaving programs is essential, but so is support for initiatives that build resilience and enable people to escape the hunger trap. Continuously stepping in to save the same lives without addressing the root causes of hunger is not cost-effective. These programs must be funded on a regular basis even in fiscal downturns to avoid annual cycles of uncertainty that disrupt field operations. Because hunger and resource scarcity drive violent conflict and migration, NATO, the UN, the African Union, the European Union, and the G-7 must make food security a core pillar of their strategic frameworks.

Food-security monitoring systems such as the UN’s FAO, the U.S. government’s Famine Early Warning System, and the WFP must be fully funded to ensure that aid reaches the right populations at the right time. Data collection by these organizations helps aid groups prioritize assisting countries facing concurrent conflict, climate shocks, and economic collapse—places where inaction has the highest human and geopolitical costs. But a lack of funding is already causing delays in the production of crucial analyses.

Holding violators of international law accountable is a key, if sometimes overlooked, component of food security. It not only delivers justice to victims but also deters future violations. Prosecutions in international and domestic judicial systems, targeted sanctions, asset freezes, travel bans, and other punitive measures should be applied against individuals, entities, or states responsible for egregious violations.

Different kinds of donor groups must also strengthen their coordination with one another. Too often, fragmented funding streams and overlapping mandates lead to duplication of assistance in some areas and critical gaps in others. Governments, UN umbrella agencies, and nongovernmental organizations should conduct joint food security and vulnerability assessments, provide mutual access to their data systems, and communicate transparently to establish a more strategic division of labor. The FAO and the WFP should lead this coordination effort alongside competent national agencies. Humanitarian aid groups such as UNICEF and the WFP, development institutions such as the World Bank, and peace-building organizations such as Inter-peace all have a shared interest in boosting food security and ensuring that emergency assistance, recovery programs, and long-term resilience efforts are complementary rather than competitive. And donors must work harder to align their funding priorities and timelines with local and national response plans.

To ease pressure on low-income countries in or near debt distress, creditors and international financial institutions should propose debt relief in exchange for hunger relief. Forgiving debt can free up resources that would otherwise go toward debt service. This principle underlies initiatives such as the WFP’s debt-swap approach to food security, which has implemented food-for-education programs in Egypt and Mozambique.

Finally, high-income countries should eliminate or suspend tariffs on and other barriers to imports from economies with fragile food security. Exporting countries must also avoid food export bans that destabilize markets and drive up prices. And to combat the effect of climate change on food insecurity, governments must scale up financing for programs that invest in drought-resilient agriculture, flood management, and insurance for smallholder farmers. It is equally critical to invest in early warning mechanisms that use new technologies to anticipate disasters.

 

Penny Foolish, Pound Wise

Even as wealthy governments retrench from foreign aid, many insist that they remain committed to ending violent conflicts in places such as Ukraine and the Middle East. Missing from the equation, however, is a recognition that food security is a foundation for peace. Efforts to negotiate cease-fires and peace agreements must include provisions ensuring that aid organizations can deliver assistance and food systems can recover.

Without ensuring that aid workers have safe access to affected populations, no amount of funding can avert hunger. Outside actors—including governments, international organizations, and local and international nongovernmental organizations—can help humanitarian workers reach people in insecure areas by facilitating negotiations with local authorities and armed groups, providing security training and risk-management support, and applying diplomatic pressure. They must also direct more resources toward remote monitoring, digital aid delivery, and local partners that can operate safely on the ground.

Every dollar spent on preventing extreme hunger saves many more than might have to be disbursed in response to crises. The persistence of hunger is not inevitable. It is a policy choice. Reversing it is not only a moral duty; it is a strategic necessity.

 

 

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