On Tuesday, the World Food Programme said it had to halve the number of people it can feed in the West Bank, beginning this month. The UN agency attributed its decision to cut the number of those receiving food assistance, from 400,000 to 200,000, to a funding shortfall.
This has come at a bleak time for the occupied Palestinian territory, where food insecurity has already doubled since 2023, with an estimated 900,000 Palestinians struggling to feed themselves.
Sadly, Palestine is not an isolated case. The WFP has also warned of ration cuts in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Yemen this year. In South Sudan alone, more than 650,000 refugees run the risk of losing food aid within weeks.
These are not places where the need for humanitarian aid has diminished. These are places where conflict, displacement, poverty and climate shocks have made funding more necessary than ever. Yet the shortfalls are precisely where hunger is most acute.
The crisis has reached global proportions. According to the UN’s State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, an estimated 645 million people – nearly 8 per cent of the world’s population – faced hunger last year. During this period, about 266 million people across 47 countries and territories faced high levels of food insecurity – a figure that has doubled over the past decade.
These evidently staggering figures belie the commendable efforts being made by humanitarian organisations such as the WFP to deliver aid, even as their workers risk life and limb in the line of duty.
The deeper problem is moral. During his visit to the WFP headquarters in Rome in June, Pope Leo XIV described persistent hunger in an age of abundance as a “collective moral failure and a historical fault”. It is also structural. National governments, squeezed by their own budget pressures, are pulling back from the multilateral system that has underpinned humanitarian response for decades. The WFP is simply the most visible casualty of a much broader retrenchment.
There are glimmers of alternative support as private philanthropists attempt to step into the breach. But the annual investment gap to achieve sustainable development goals – including ending hunger – run into the trillions of dollars that far exceed philanthropic reserves.
A much bigger predicament is that hunger is driven by systemic issues such as armed conflict and climate shocks that warrant long-term solutions. Hunger in Palestine, for instance, is largely a consequence of the Israeli settler expansion that last year alone stripped nearly 40,000 Palestinians of their land and livelihoods.
Food assistance, then, is an interim measure – but it is an urgent one. The international community can either pay the relatively modest cost of preventing hunger now, or face much greater human and financial cost of allowing it to become entrenched.
