Global Report on the 2025 Food Crisis: The Terrifying Rise of Hunger 

Imagine going to bed every night with nothing in your stomach but hope. Hope that tomorrow might bring food. For over 295 million people in 2025, this is not a metaphor. It is life. It is the mother in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo, trading her wedding ring for a bowl of porridge. It is the child in Haiti scavenging rubble for scraps, his body gaunt from weeks of starvation.

The Global Report on Food Crises 2025 (GRFC 2025), issued by the Food Security Information Network (FSIN) and the Global Network Against Food Crises (GNAFC), confronts us with this brutal truth: the world is not short of food. It is short of justice, political resolve, and collective conscience. We are not experiencing a food shortage. We are living through a humanitarian failure. This report does not merely present numbers. It bears witness to suffering and demands urgent global action.

Root Causes and Effects: A Crisis of Convergence

The GRFC 2025 outlines how this emergency is driven by a convergence of three dominant forces: conflict, climate extremes, and economic collapse.

Conflict and insecurity remain the primary driver of food crises, affecting nearly 140 million people. Sudan, the Gaza Strip, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ukraine continue to experience devastating violence, displacing millions and blocking access to farming, markets, and aid. The UN confirms that parts of Sudan have now entered IPC Phase 5 famine conditions.

Climate extremes worsened by the El Niño weather pattern have impacted over 96 million people. Droughts in Southern Africa, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, alongside flash floods in Somalia and Zimbabwe, have destroyed harvests and depleted household food stocks.

Economic collapse is the leading factor in 15 countries, with 59.4 million people driven into food insecurity. This includes sharp inflation, currency depreciation, reduced import capacities, and rising debt burdens. Since 2019, economic-driven food crises have more than doubled.

These forces are not isolated. Conflict uproots farmers, which disrupts food production. Droughts shrink harvests, which fuel inflation. Inflation weakens currencies, which crush import-dependent nations. Together, they have constructed a global system of hunger.

Geopolitical Drivers: When Politics Starves People

The politics of hunger are brutal. In 2025, international aid has collapsed under the weight of global apathy and competing crises. Donor fatigue and domestic economic concerns in countries like the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom have led to severe aid cuts. In Afghanistan, the World Food Programme was forced to reduce food assistance by 66 percent due to lack of funds.

Humanitarian operations in Ethiopia, the DRC, and Yemen have also suffered. Fourteen million children are at risk of losing access to life-saving nutrition programmes because of these funding cuts.

Trade disputes and protectionist policies have led to soaring food prices. Tariff impositions, energy instability, and export restrictions have devastated fragile economies. Countries like Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are now unable to afford basic food imports due to weak currencies and heavy trade deficits.

Conflict-ridden zones such as Haiti and Gaza face compounded instability. Armed groups disrupt supply chains. Governments collapse. International organisations are blocked from operating. In Moldova, food production and distribution face imminent disruption due to a worsening energy crisis in the Transnistrian region.

Food Crisis Policies: Failures and Flickers of Hope

Despite numerous global policy frameworks and programmes, their execution remains limited. Many are underfunded, inconsistently applied, or politically constrained.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) provides standardised assessments of hunger severity. Yet it is not operational in many high-conflict zones due to lack of access and resources.

FAO’s Global Information and Early Warning System (GIEWS) tracks global food markets and production, but it lacks the authority to trigger concrete action by member states.

The World Food Programme Strategic Plan 2022–2025 lays out a roadmap for zero hunger but faces an unprecedented 45 per cent drop in funding. Its ability to respond to emergency situations has been severely limited.

The Global Network Against Food Crises (GNAFC) seeks long-term, multi-actor coordination. Yet only 3 per cent of global humanitarian aid supports agricultural resilience, the core of any long-term food security strategy.

Policy Reform Recommendations

• Establish a Global Food Emergency Reserve Fund with at least $20 billion to provide rapid response financing.

• Legislate minimum aid quotas for protracted conflict zones and disaster-prone regions.

• Mandate real-time integration of IPC and GIEWS data into UN emergency peacekeeping missions.

• Introduce international trade conditions tied to food security benchmarks and human rights.

Country Case Studies: The Face of Hunger in 2025

1. Democratic Republic of the Congo

In North and South Kivu, 97 percent of internally displaced persons (IDPs) face acute food insecurity. More than 800,000 people were newly displaced in early 2025 due to conflict and flooding. Most are sheltering in unmanaged camps where meal skipping, food rationing, and high child malnutrition rates are reported.

2. Myanmar

The March 2025 earthquake struck as internal conflict intensified. Infrastructure damage and inflation have disrupted markets and blocked aid delivery. Over 15 million people now live in acute food insecurity, with many regions nearing famine thresholds.

3. Haiti

Armed gangs control the majority of supply routes and local markets. Cholera outbreaks and crumbling healthcare have exacerbated the food crisis. At least one-third of Haitians face emergency food insecurity levels. Humanitarian groups describe scenes of desperation, including reports of women and children exchanging sex for food.

4. Gaza Strip

Over 90 percent of children live in conditions of severe food poverty. Following a blockade in early 2025, humanitarian access was nearly impossible. Markets are empty, crops destroyed, and most households are surviving on minimal aid, when it arrives. Food prices have spiked by over 1,000 per cent.

5. Moldova

Food insecurity is rising as energy shortages impact food processing and transport systems. Transnistria remains the most at-risk zone, where power disruptions and political uncertainty threaten regional food access.

Call to Action: A Global Response for a Global Emergency

The hunger crisis of 2025 is not just a humanitarian issue. It is a test of our values, our leadership, and our humanity.

Here’s what must happen now

• Finance: Restore and expand humanitarian aid pledges. Wealthy economies must meet commitments and support the proposed Global Emergency Reserve Fund.

• Agriculture: Triple investments in agricultural resilience, especially for smallholder farmers who feed up to 70 per cent of the world’s most vulnerable communities.

• Governments: Implement national food security strategies, enforce price regulations, and support local production through procurement policies.

• Corporations and Technology: Mobilise innovation toward accessible drought-resistant crops, precision irrigation, and ethical supply chains. Private sector involvement must go beyond charity, it must be embedded in sustainability mandates.

• NGOs and Civil Society: Strengthen and fund local actors. Empower grassroots organisations that understand cultural dynamics, local geographies, and logistical challenges.

An Urgent Appeal to the United Nations from the Victims

To the United Nations and its member states,

We speak not as analysts or diplomats, but as the forgotten voices buried beneath your resolutions. We are the children who go to sleep with empty stomachs, the mothers who have no milk to feed crying infants, the fathers who break under the shame of barren harvests.

How can this Earth, our Earth, rich in resources and wealth, home to technological marvels, satellite farms and trillion-dollar corporations, fail to feed its people?

There are more than eight billion people alive today. Yet global capitalism is valued at over 500 trillion dollars in combined private and institutional assets. Still, over 295 million people across 53 countries experienced acute levels of hunger in 2024, marking the sixth consecutive year of deterioration. Alarmingly, the number of people in famine-like conditions doubled to 1.9 million.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the world produces enough food to feed ten billion people. Yet children still die from hunger while billionaires race to colonise Mars.

We ask the United Nations: where is your accountability? You were formed in the aftermath of war to prevent suffering such as this. Why do corporate subsidies and bailouts outweigh emergency food aid? Why do only 3 per cent of global humanitarian funds go to agriculture, the lifeline of the poor? How can we accept that water, essential to life, is traded on Wall Street while entire regions such as East Africa and Gaza go thirsty?

It is time to question the system that protects profit over people. You speak of Sustainable Development Goals, yet SDG 2: Zero Hunger is further away than ever before. The global issue of hunger and food insecurity has shown an alarming increase since 2015.

This is not merely about food. It is about power. It is about whether the international order values human life or merely economic portfolios.

If the United Nations is to mean anything, it must act now. It must mobilise emergency funding, compel donor nations to fulfil their obligations, enforce food access in conflict zones and demand that capitalism adapt to the needs of human survival.

Do not allow your legacy to be written in the blood of the hungry. Let it be rewritten through justice, compassion and urgent intervention.

Aric Jabari is the Editorial Director of the Sixteenth Council.