Devex Dish: How WFP delivers food in Sudan amid war and aid cuts

Two years of brutal war have killed tens of thousands, displaced millions, and are pushing hundreds of thousands more to the brink of famine. Right now, 637,000 Sudanese people face “catastrophic” levels of hunger — the highest category in the U.N.’s system for measuring food insecurity. That’s out of a staggering 24.6 million people who are acutely food-insecure across the country. For context, that’s nearly the entire population of Australia.

This is now “the largest humanitarian crisis ever recorded,” according to the International Rescue Committee.

And there’s no sign the conflict — currently at a kind of stalemate — is letting up. “We’re seeing another shift in the conflict dynamics happening … with the recent strikes in Port Sudan, which is extremely concerning, and again, may have an impact on supply chains and fuel availability, which is critical for the transport of food and all goods,” Leni Kinzli, the spokesperson for the World Food Programme in Sudan, tells Devex contributor Rebecca Root.

“This means prices will spike, making it harder for people to afford basic items, including food. That'll continue to exacerbate humanitarian suffering and make what is already the worst humanitarian crisis in the world even worse.”

This all comes as Sudan enters its lean season — the stretch between harvests when food supplies run dangerously low even in peaceful years. “We’re already looking at 25 million people facing acute food insecurity … We expect that to spike in the next three to four months,” Kinzli says. And the sobering reality for humanitarian groups is that aid from the U.S. and other traditional aid donors is disappearing.

While there have been some breakthroughs in humanitarian access around the capital, conditions in other areas — such as El Fasher in North Darfur — remain dire, with serious barriers to aid delivery. “Getting assistance to these places is really difficult because of the shifting front lines, different areas of control, having to transport convoys across these different areas where there are multitudes of checkpoints,” Kinzli adds.

Earlier this month, a humanitarian convoy on its way to El Fasher was attacked — killing five aid workers and injuring several more. It would have been the first convoy to reach the area in a year.

Meanwhile, humanitarian agencies are being forced to do more with less. Deep funding cuts have hit across the board, even as needs continue to climb. Still, WFP has managed to reach 15 million people since the war began. “Now we're currently providing assistance to around 4 million people per month, aiming to scale that up to 7 million people per month by the middle of the year,” Kinzli says.

But the truth is, aid alone won’t fix this. A political solution is urgently needed. At peace talks in London back in April, U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy put it bluntly: “I have doubled our aid to Sudan, and today I am announcing a further £120 million worth of support,” he said. “But the biggest obstacle is not a lack of funding or texts at the United Nations, it’s lack of political will.”

Read: What it’s like to deliver food aid to war-torn Sudan

Early warnings

Speaking of cuts and political will, let’s turn to the latest in Washington, D.C. At a forum I attended at the Capitol last week, lawmakers emphasized how much American farmers and even consumers stand to lose from cuts to foreign aid and agricultural support programs — in hopes of building political will to protect some of the initiatives now on the chopping block.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, said farmers face a confluence of pressures. “You are hit right now by so many headwinds,” she said, listing tariffs and market volatility, “that you are about to become roadkill for this administration’s policy.”

And when it comes to consumers, lawmakers underscored the role agricultural research and innovation plays in protecting domestic food safety. For example, U.S.-funded programs help spot and contain crop and livestock diseases abroad before they reach the U.S. Without those programs, “we blind ourselves to early warning signs,” Klobuchar said, pointing to threats such as African swine fever and exotic fruit flies.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is already under strain. Over 1,300 staff have left APHIS — its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service — in recent months, according to former agency head Kevin Shea. “I served the USDA for 45 years … and I’ve never been so concerned about the ability of the agency to carry out its mission,” he said.

Those capacity issues raise questions about what it would mean to shift major food aid programs such as Food for Peace from USAID to USDA — an idea that’s still under debate. I asked Sens. Klobuchar and Jeanne Shaheen what they thought. Both said they were open to the move, with caveats. “I'm always open to new ideas so we can start getting these programs going again,” Klobuchar said. “At least they are showing that they want to keep the programs going.”

Shaheen echoed that: “If you're going to move it to USDA and make sure that the people are there to run the programs and the structure works, then I'm open to that.”

As we reported in Dish last week, the House Agriculture Appropriations Bill for fiscal 2026 had included language to shift Food for Peace and FEWS NET from USAID to USDA. But an amendment quietly removed that language before the bill passed through committee.

Still, experts say that doesn’t mean the idea is off the table — just that it won’t move forward through this particular bill. It could still come via separate legislation introduced months ago After all, appropriations bills are meant to fund programs, not redesign them. But as always, stay tuned.

Read: US farmers ‘about to become roadkill’ under Trump food aid cuts, senators warn
Background: As USAID is dismantled, Republicans fight to save a food aid program

A new generation of farmers

World Bank President Ajay Banga has made job creation the centerpiece of his agenda — and small-scale farmers are a key focus. His concern: Farming, in its current form, isn’t a future anyone wants to inherit, my colleague Anna Gawel reports.

“The single biggest crisis in the farming communities is that the children of small farmers don't want to be farmers,” he said during a discussion last week at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“They tend to sell off the land, and at that time, they think they're rich. They buy a Toyota and a TV and smoke and drink, and then four years later, they're in a shanty town on the south skirts of an urban city, looking for gig driving jobs. That is a tragedy, and it's going to get worse,” Banga said.

He said the World Bank is building an open architecture platform with Google through which farmer collectives can get connected with “a buyer, a fertilizer, a seed producer, a crop insurance provider at the other end, to create the marketplace … and create a business model.”

“You've got to start thinking in terms of … how do these farmers get access to better markets for their produce, better pricing for fertilizer, better tools for figuring out which pest is on their plants and so on and so forth,” he said.

Further reading: World Bank doubles agribusiness investment to $9B in strategy shift

Related opinion: Farmers are getting old. It’s time to unlock our youth’s potential

+ Devex Pro members can read our insider reporting on a multimillion-dollar “fund of funds” that launched last year with the aim to fill Africa’s agribusiness financing gap over the next decade.

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Speeding up transformation

Lawrence Haddad, World Food Prize winner and executive director of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, says the world isn’t moving nearly fast enough to transform its food systems — and the clock is ticking.

In a new opinion piece for Devex, he points to findings from the Food Systems Countdown — an interdisciplinary scientific tracker that charts the progress of food systems transformation — showing that just 11 of 31 key indicators are headed in the right direction, and none are on track to hit their targets. Drawing on GAIN’s Nourishing Food Pathways program in 12 countries, Haddad lays out four areas ripe for acceleration: better collaboration among food system actors, more realistic public-private engagement, stronger action from development finance institutions, and sharper tools for tracking progress. On public-private engagement, he writes: “Too often, the attempts to do this fail because the two parties — public and private — hold wildly unrealistic expectations of each other.”

The solutions are there, Haddad writes. What’s missing is the urgency — and coordination — to act.

Opinion: On food system change, time to keep calm and accelerate

Chew on this

Climate negotiations in Bonn begin with familiar finance clash. [Devex] 

Israeli troops have killed at least 70 Palestinians and wounded hundreds as they sought aid in Gaza yesterday, firing at them with tank shells, machine guns and drones according to local medics. [Al Jazeera]

As private aid companies such as Fogbow and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation expand operations in crisis zones such as South Sudan and Gaza, critics warn this could mark a shift toward a more politicized aid model — one that risks sidelining neutrality. [Reuters]

NGOs say that the new Gaza aid model is undermining lifesaving work. [Devex]

Solar-powered machinery is bringing clear benefits for African agribusinesses, yet there are major hurdles in rolling it out. [African Business]

Anna Gawel contributed to this edition of Devex Dish.