The next global food crisis will come. The US is not ready

You’d be forgiven for thinking the United States has given up on the world’s hungry. In just the last few months, the Trump administration unilaterally shuttered the lead agency tackling global hunger, the U.S. Agency for International Development, fired nearly all of its workers, engaged in repeated extraconstitutional efforts to zero out its budget, and destroyed 500 metric tons of emergency food aid.

Yet, amid this wreckage, the Trump administration and the U.S. Congress have taken limited steps to sustain a part of America’s global hunger effort: Food for Peace. Dating back to the Eisenhower administration, Food for Peace buys food from American farmers to send to those in dire need around the world. And while the program has faced its own share of deep budget cuts by the White House, sacks of U.S.-grown grain are once again being sent to starving people abroad, and the State Department has hired 64 staff let go from USAID, most with deep Food for Peace expertise, and housed them in the Office of Global Food Security to keep humanitarian food aid flowing. 

This aid is critical — it saves lives for those in desperate circumstances, giving them time to recover from emergencies such as natural disasters, droughts, or wars. But history has shown us time and again that food aid alone cannot cure hunger. Poverty, low agricultural productivity, food loss, and weak markets are root causes of hunger that food aid cannot address. In modern times, countries that have broken the cycle of mass starvation, such as India, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia, have done so through a combination of food aid and U.S.-supported investments in food security.

If food aid is a handout, food security is a hand up. Through targeted investments that help poor farmers and small agricultural businesses access finance, markets, quality seeds, fertilizer, and irrigation, countries are able to boost their agricultural productivity, strengthen food supplies, raise incomes, and lower food costs. This was the economic transformation that the U.S. helped deliver during the Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, breaking cycles of hunger and poverty while saving an estimated 1 billion lives.

Yet after that stunning success, the U.S. and other donors largely turned away from food security investments, with agricultural development budgets falling 50% between 1985 and 2005, while funds for the World Food Programme, the main provider of emergency food assistance, almost  tripled. That meant that in 2008, when global food prices soared, more than 100 million people were thrown into hunger and poverty. Food aid could only patch the wounds of hunger, not cure it.

The U.S. responded to that crisis by launching Feed the Future in 2010, a corrective meant to address the failed strategy of a food-aid-only approach. The initiative worked with low- and middle-income countries to develop plans to boost their agricultural productivity, invest in women farmers who form the backbone of rural economies, tap into the latest agricultural research conducted at American universities and global institutions, and build partnerships with the private sector to get diverse crops to market. Over a 10-year period, poverty, hunger, and malnutrition declined on average by 25% in the areas where Feed the Future operated.

The impacts of these longer-term food security investments are clear. In the drought-prone border towns on Kenya’s border with Somalia, Dina spoke with communities receiving a series of investments in drip irrigation and water access, alongside efforts to improve soil, reduce flooding, and restore pasture, while others were simply given monthly distributions of food. When the next drought came, those who benefited from food security investments said they could fend for themselves. Those receiving food aid said they could not possibly survive without it.

Long-term investments in food security like Feed the Future, enshrined into U.S. law in the Global Food Security Act, gave America more tools to respond to the next global food crisis. In 2022, when COVID-19 and the invasion of Ukraine led to record-setting global food prices, the U.S. was able to surge seeds, fertilizer, and financing to farmers and small agricultural businesses in hunger hot spots, keeping people employed, markets supplied, and families fed. Thanks to these investments and a number of other actions governments took to stabilize markets, the worst of the 2022 food crisis did not come to pass, and extreme poverty actually declined by 2024.

Such long-term food security investments benefit the U.S. directly as well. Over the past 25 years, U.S. agricultural commercial exports have grown steadily, mostly to low- and middle-income countries such as the ones targeted by Feed the Future. Those exports generate more than $175 billion in economic activity and support over 1 million jobs each year.

Yet today, Feed the Future lies in tatters. The Trump administration has cut off funding to all but one of its research labs and failed to restore any other part of an effort that reached more than 30 million people annually. The entire Feed the Future team at USAID — leading global experts in agricultural development, food security, and nutrition — has been dismissed. When the next food crisis comes — and with food demand rising, global agricultural productivity slipping, and climate shocks intensifying, it surely will — the United States will be even less prepared than it was in 2008 to address a hungrier, more dangerous world.

We don’t have to relearn this painful lesson. The U.S. Congress and the State Department should set a clear strategy for combating global hunger that involves both food aid and food security investments, with a focus on both saving lives and building more resilient and robust food systems. And they should explicitly provide funding for agricultural development staff, research, and programming, just as they did on a bipartisan basis with the Feed the Future initiative for 15 years. Former President John F. Kennedy, the person who founded USAID, called the fight against hunger the most important battle faced by the human race. With the right strategy, that battle could still be won.