Lasting nutrition and food security needs new funding — and new systems

As the recently released 2025 Global Report on Food Crises makes abundantly clear, efforts to combat global hunger and malnutrition need more support than ever: Over 295 million people experienced acute food insecurity last year, the highest number in nearly a decade.

With U.S. leadership in global food security facing an uncertain future following drastic national and global aid cuts across the development sector, leaders from the sector traveled to Washington, D.C., recently to make the case for continued American support.

“It’s easy to get lost in facts and figures, but a lot of this goes down to what we think is good and right,” Mark Viso, CEO and president of Food for the Hungry, told Devex of his message to U.S. lawmakers during testimony to Congress in April.

“It’s who America is, and when we don’t do what really is part of our DNA … we go astray,” Viso added.

Speaking to Devex, Viso shared more on what he conveyed in his appearance before the U.S. Congress, how Food for the Hungry is tackling hunger and malnutrition through resilience-based models, and what the organization is doing to shape the future of effective development in the food security space.  

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You recently testified before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on National Security and the Department of State. Why did Food for the Hungry decide to take this step?

We thought we would be able to add something a little bit different to the conversation, both because of who we are and how we do it. Food for the Hungry is a faith-based operational entity with diverse partnerships in the public, private, and innovation sectors that really focuses on systems: In other words, we look at upstream causes of risks and crises, and [think about] resilience as a mechanism for helping people have downstream success and [taking] ownership of their future.

What was the core message you wanted lawmakers to hear — and why, from your perspective, should U.S. investment in foreign assistance remain a national priority?

First and foremost, I think it’s the right thing to do, and it’s who we are as a nation. The United States’ founding principles include the idea of taking care of those in our communities and outside [them] who are suffering. It’s in our DNA to be compassionate, and [U.S. foreign assistance investments] really reflect that.

Second, it makes the United States, and also the world, safer. When there are fewer people suffering from injustice and poverty, there’s less reason for conflict. I’m not talking about democracy building, either; that's a nuance that others can talk about. But it’s about equality, inclusion, and providing opportunities for people to take ownership over their own lives.

I also made the point that making meaningful impacts in this space requires many different people to think differently and do things differently. But, at the same time, the role that the U.S. government plays is one that no one else can fill. It is on the cutting edge of research and can manage and marry policy with assistance, which is incredibly powerful.

According to the Global Report on Food Crises, nearly 40 million children and over 10 million pregnant and breastfeeding women suffered from acute malnutrition in 2024. How is Food for the Hungry approaching this problem, and what key strategies are guiding your response?

We’re really focused on prenatal vitamins for pregnant women and breastfeeding support for new mothers because the evidence is very clear that no matter what country you’re in, this gives kids the best start to life. Vitamin A supplementation, too, is critical.

This also goes into our focus on the first 1,000 days of a child’s life because adequate nutrition in this period is so foundational to all future development success. Malnutrition in that pregnancy through the age 2 window can cause devastating, irreversible harm, whether it be increasing the [probability] of future stunting or, in the short- or medium term, [conditions such as] wasting [the rapid loss of body weight and muscle mass due to illness or malnutrition] or severe acute malnutrition.

So you need to have ready-to-use therapeutic foods [to treat wasting as well, and we provide community screening and referrals for treatment with] ready-to-use therapeutic foods. While we don’t directly provide the ready-to-use therapeutic food [made with peanut paste from U.S. farmers], we do help catalyze these efforts. Our focus is holistic in terms of how we make these systems more resilient.

As you’ve just alluded to, Food for the Hungry is undergoing a significant shift toward a resilience-based development model. Can you talk more about what prompted this pivot?

In the last four years, we’ve been trying to reimagine what Food for the Hungry is and how it adds value. There are some wonderful things we and our entire sector have done over the past 50 years, and these efforts have been necessary and have made a difference. But it’s been fundamentally insufficient, particularly as the world around us is inscrutably, exponentially, and dynamically changing.

What this means is that Food for the Hungry has been challenging a lot of almost sacrosanct, or at least stipulated, assumptions about how to do foreign assistance. Part of this is that we can’t just focus on symptoms; we’ve got to focus on causes. As a result, we’re not focusing so much on projects, but really on systems — systems understanding, systems harvesting, systems design — to understand how we approach supporting resilience in communities.

What are the biggest challenges and opportunities in building the long-term capacity of the communities you serve?

Promoting resilience is difficult because you have to [also] make those immediate, micro differences. You want to make sure someone has shoes and has enough to eat, but this ultimately has to be in a way that leads to resilient capacity. We need a new resilience paradigm for development.

The problem, of course, is that whenever you try to deconstruct and then reconstruct a paradigm, it’s often impossible. It requires questioning everything we thought we understood about how we make sense of the world, and then sitting very uncomfortably in that area of ambiguity before new answers emerge.

What we’re also seeing as we push out some of these new things we’re doing around systems and resilience is that there's a lot of excitement initially. People are energetic, they’re curious, they’re hungry, they’re smart, and they’re engaged. But then the gravitational pull of the way we used to do things comes into play, which can pull people back to their comfort zones.

As you look further ahead, what would you like Food for the Hungry to be known for 10 years from now?

We ultimately want to be known as an organization that provides compelling evidence that our approach to overcoming poverty, injustice, and marginalization is the most promising pathway for sustainable, systemic, and lasting change. We don’t want people to just take us at our word; we want to show evidence-based results. We want to make a measurable, meaningful difference.