In countries around the world, children are starving.
According to a recent report, almost 36 million children are acutely malnourished, including nearly 10 million suffering from severe acute malnutrition, defined as life-threatening.
Food insecurity threatens global stability, creating crises that are harder, more complex, and more costly to resolve. American generosity – private, governmental, faith-based, corporate – has stepped forward to alleviate hunger in time of need. However, as we face a world with multiple crises – everything everywhere all at once – the old model of food aid (often reactive, siloed, and delayed) doesn’t match current global conditions.
The world faces an urgent need to reimagine systems meant to prevent famine, not just a temporary spike in hunger. Over the last decade alone, acute food insecurity, defined as a lack of adequate food that puts lives and communities in immediate danger, has doubled, impacting over 266 million people around the world, the latest Global Report on Food Crises, published by the United Nations and the World Food Program, shows.
We can do better, while leading with American values and innovation. This isn’t just a moral imperative: Hunger is a national security issue, and a call for American leadership in the world.
The United States and other countries must prioritize early action and break down silos preventing aid from reaching those who need it most. Finally, they must both go local and coordinate broadly, turning to locally based programs and international donors.
Smart foreign assistance is preventive statecraft; every dollar spent early on resilience and stabilization reduces the need for far more costly military, humanitarian, and reconstruction interventions down the line. Food insecurity is a key driver of political instability, mass migration, violent extremism and state collapse – issues of noted importance across current U.S. foreign policy objectives.
Hunger is increasingly concentrated in a handful of countries. Two-thirds of the people experiencing the most severe levels of hunger live in 10 countries – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burma, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Of those, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Sudan, and Yemen face the greatest crisis in terms of the proportion and number of people going hungry.
This hasn’t happened in a vacuum. The warning signs have been apparent for years, as democratic backsliding, climate change, and poverty have ravaged the security of vulnerable communities.
The report,illuminates this truth, highlighting the intrinsic link between hunger and conflict.
Nearly 70% of acutely food-insecure people live in conflict-affected countries, making hunger and food assistance inseparable from security policy. Sadistically, malign actors often use food insecurity as a means of expanding their power and control, targeting aid convoys or weaponizing distribution and delivery routes to their advantage.
Famine is predictable, and we have the tools to address it.
Early warning systems, including those used by the U.N., World Food Program and partners, can accurately identify high-risk regions and countries months in advance, but support mechanisms and political will still lag.
We know where famine will stalk populations; smart assistance means prepositioning resources based on risk signals, not after preventable tragedy. For donors, including the United States, a shift toward flexible, multiyear funding will also allow agencies to act early.
But the U.S. and international partners must break down silos. Food insecurity isn’t the result of one single factor, but as the U.N. and others highlight, the combination of multiple destabilizing forces. Similar to the U.S. compact model, assistance can combine humanitarian relief, agricultural supports for long-term sustainability, conflict mitigation when possible and economic security in a single strategy.
Consistently, programs that are locally based, with investment in, and support to, local markets, farmers, and other suppliers increase resiliency and reduce costs.
But addressing famine also requires coordinated responses across the outside players – governments, donors, international nongovernmental organizations, the private sector, faith communities. These players are all trying to solve the same set of problems and should collaborate through real, structured action plans with clear lanes, responsibilities. and the funding to back it up – not just provide lip-service to teamwork.
For American security interests and global stability at large, the path is clear: Move faster, integrate more deeply and build coalitions that focus locally and match the scale of challenges. The alternative is a world where famine is no longer an exception, but a pervasive feature of, and trigger for, global instability.
