Presented by The Crop Trust
Happy New Year, Dish readers. 2026 is off to a racing start, and if there is one theme already coming into focus, it is uncertainty. After a year that saw foreign aid budgets shrink, institutions retrench, and long-standing assumptions about global food assistance unravel, the big question is no longer just where the money will come from. It is whether the global food system, as it is currently designed, can withstand sustained instability.
The backdrop is stark. At least 318 million people are facing acute food insecurity worldwide, more than double the number in 2019. And with donor budgets under pressure in the U.S., Europe, and beyond, the gap between needs and resources is widening fast.
“2026 will be the year the world has to admit a hard truth … humanitarian aid alone cannot keep pace with today’s food crises,” Beth Bechdol, deputy director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, tells me. “With resources shrinking and shocks multiplying, the real test will be whether we invest in agriculture not just as a source of food, but as the first line of defense for stability, resilience, and recovery.”
That shift in thinking is becoming harder to avoid. Climate shocks are more frequent. Conflicts are more protracted. Supply chains built for efficiency are showing their limits. And as Jack Bobo, executive director of the UCLA Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies, puts it, “We are entering an age of turbulence, driven by climate risk, geopolitical stress, and economic uncertainty. Food systems optimized for efficiency are increasingly fragile under these conditions, forcing a shift toward resilience.”
So what does that mean for the year ahead?
We are watching five trends closely in 2026: how food institutions adapt to shrinking budgets; what happens next to U.S. food aid after the dismantling of USAID; whether multilateral development banks can really step up at scale; what a packed “triple COP” year could mean for food, land, and climate diplomacy; and, finally, how innovation — especially artificial intelligence — is being used to stretch scarce resources. But there is growing caution about treating technology as a silver bullet. AI may help target support, improve productivity, and reduce waste, but it cannot substitute for political will, sustained investment, or functioning food systems.
As Alice Ruhweza, president of AGRA, puts it to me: “Artificial intelligence, digital finance, and climate-smart technologies can be powerful accelerators, but only when they strengthen local capacity, unlock markets, and crowd in investment rather than create dependency. The next phase of food systems transformation will be defined by who can move from pilots to scale, and from short-term responses to long-term resilience.”
Read: What we’re watching across food systems in 2026 (Pro)
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Money moves
There’s a perennial question among development finance watchers: What about the Gulf? As traditional donors step back, are Arab states stepping in? And if so, what does that actually look like? On food security, there is now an early answer.
A new Arab-backed platform, the Global Flagship Initiative for Food Security, is moving out of its groundwork phase and into its first round of project funding. Launched at the U.N. desertification talks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in late 2024, the initiative brings together governments, development financiers, researchers, and companies to coordinate food security projects in dryland and desertification-prone regions. After a year of coalition-building, its first call for proposals is set to open this month, with an initial focus on the Horn of Africa.
Central to the effort is the Arab Coordination Group, whose members include the Islamic Development Bank, the OPEC Fund for International Development, the Qatar Fund for Development, the Saudi Fund for Development, AGFUND, and the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa. The group publicly backed the initiative ahead of its launch, signaling support of up to $10 billion for implementation-linked investments.
The idea behind it is coordination. Food security financing is fragmented, with money scattered across pilots, platforms, and parallel initiatives that rarely connect. The ambition is to pull governments, donors, researchers, and companies into a single orbit and move faster from ideas to funded projects, while also creating clearer, more credible entry points for private capital.
“We need to get serious about SDG 2 [the U.N. goal to end hunger, improve nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture],” Conrad Rein, the initiative’s secretary, tells me. “There’s too much fragmentation, and the world needs to come together on SDG 2.”
Its membership now spans more than 90 governments, development institutions, civil society groups and companies, including PepsiCo, ACTED, AVPN, and China’s Academy of Global Food Economics and Policy.
The initiative — whose secretariat is hosted in Bonn, Germany, at the Crop Trust — is set up as a platform, not a fund. It does not hold money or disburse grants. Projects are reviewed for impact and scalability, then matched with donors who decide how to finance them, whether through grants, loans, or blended packages. The goal is to reduce duplication and get more projects to the point where real money can actually move.
That structure also underpins a clear private sector push. “We want the private sector to take over, for it to become a profitable business,” Rein says. “And we want, in particular, that the private sector invests in women and in young people and make it attractive again for young people to work in agriculture.”
Read: Arab-backed food security platform moves toward first funding round
Power center
My colleague Michael Igoe pulled together a clear-eyed guide to who is shaping U.S. foreign aid in the post-USAID era. With “America First” assistance taking form and much still unsettled, the piece maps the power centers, personalities, and quiet operators trying to keep the system functioning as it is rebuilt.
For Dish readers, two names are especially worth clocking.
Meghan Hanson is the U.S. State Department’s senior bureau official for global food security, making her the top official overseeing international food assistance at a moment when roles and responsibilities are in flux. She was appointed by President Donald Trump last January as USAID’s director of policy, just weeks before the agency’s dismantling.
Then there is Luke Lindberg, the undersecretary for trade and foreign agricultural affairs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a central figure in the likely transfer of Food for Peace from USAID to USDA. Lindberg is tasked with expanding markets for U.S. farm exports while overseeing international food assistance programs in ways that benefit American producers. As he puts it: “Our intent is that these programs are not eternal, right; they happen, and then they end, and the countries graduate off and are in a better place.”
Watch this space for more people you should know in the months ahead.
Read: The key players in ‘America First’ foreign aid (Pro)
Temperature check
Bringing home the bacon
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If you missed it over the holidays, we published a special year-end edition of Dish looking back at the stories and opinion pieces that defined 2025. It was a year of disruption, hard lessons, and uncomfortable truths for food aid and nutrition, from the dismantling of USAID to stranded food shipments, staff cuts at the World Food Programme, and growing evidence of the human cost of funding freezes.
Looking ahead, my colleague Jesse Chase-Lubitz dug into what 2026 is shaping up to mean for climate change and development, and the outlook is just as fraught. Political headwinds, a U.N. Climate Change Conference presidency split between Turkey and Australia, and the aftershocks of the U.S. pullback from international climate diplomacy are colliding with rising pressure from low- and middle-income countries for stronger action on fossil fuels, finance, and climate change adaptation.
At the center of it all is, of course, money. Countries agreed to scale climate finance to $300 billion per year by 2035, but there is still little clarity on how that will be mobilized, who will move first, or how private capital will show up amid regulatory pressure and “green-hushing.” Add unresolved questions around adaptation metrics, a leadership transition among African negotiators, and a crowded calendar of global summits, and 2026 is shaping up to be a year defined less by new pledges than by whether existing ones actually materialize.
Read: Our most-read food systems stories and opinion pieces in 2025
See also: What you need to understand about climate and development in 2026 (Pro)
Chew on this
One hundred percent of Gaza’s basic food needs met for the first time since 2023. [UN News]
FAO has published its Emergency and Early Recovery Response Plan for Ukraine for 2026–2028. [FAO]
One in two children are malnourished in parts of Sudan’s Darfur. [Al Jazeera]
About the author
Ayenat Mersie
Ayenat Mersie is a Global Development Reporter for Devex. Previously, she worked as a freelance journalist for publications such as National Geographic and Foreign Policy and as an East Africa correspondent for Reuters.
