Author: Steve Hansch

New Food for Peace (FFP) Action by the U.S. Department of Agriculture

May 24, 2026    BACKGROUND: The primary way that the United States government, working with nonprofits, has fought hunger and malnutrition around the world has been through the U.S. Food for Peace program (originally Public Law 480, or PL 480), which began in 1954 and was expanded by President Kennedy in 1961, at which time it took on the name Food for Peace (FFP). Over seven decades, it has reached roughly 4 billion people in 150 countries through a mix of emergency relief and longer‑term development projects. Annual funding has typically ranged from $1.2–2 billion in recent years for the core Title II program (the main grant‑based humanitarian component), though overall international food assistance outlays have averaged $2–2.6 billion, fluctuating with global needs.

The structure and flow of resources for FFP begin with Congress, where appropriations come through agriculture and foreign operations bills. In its early history, most FFP aid went to “development,” but over time the balance has shifted toward emergencies. The main food commodities provided by the United States have been wheat, rice, sorghum, corn‑soy blends, beans, peas, lentils, vegetable oil, and ready‑to‑use supplemental foods. These are purchased competitively from U.S. farmers and producers and often bagged on ocean freighters bound for Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

RECENT ADMINISRATIVE SHIFTS:   After the Trump Administration dissolved USAID in 2025, FFP planning and administration moved temporarily to the State Department and then, in late 2025, to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with a strong “America First” focus on buying American‑grown foods. In December 2025, USDA and the U.S. Department of State signed an interagency agreement for USDA to take over FFP. USDA has long supervised other in‑kind international food aid programs, including the school‑feeding‑focused McGovern‑Dole Food for Education and the development‑focused Food for Progress (FFPr) programs, each delivered via partnerships with NGOs and the U.N. World Food Programme.

For many months it had been unclear how USDA would redesign FFP, how it would work with other organizations to deliver aid, and where. Then, in early May 2026, USDA announced a $350 million allocation of foods to WFP. In response, U.S. Wheat Associates announced that it “welcomes the announcement of the award of 20,000 metric tons (MT) (735,000 bushels) for emergency feeding programs under the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) administration of the FFP program.”

NEW OFFERINGS

The new May 2026 Notice of Funding Opportunities published by USDA for NGO proposals sets out three reforms USDA has applied to the inherited portfolio:

  • *-100% U.S. origin for every commodity procured.
  • *-Strict traceability of every taxpayer dollar to guard against fraud, waste, and diversion.
  • *-“Offboarding and graduating” criteria, so that Title II funding “prioritizes emergency and in‑need geographies rather than forever‑aid countries.”

At present, the geographic scope has narrowed. NGO applications can only be submitted for seven countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, Kenya, and Rwanda—a notable contraction from the broader Title II caseload USAID historically managed. Award sizes range from $20 million to $200 million, with USDA anticipating seven to fourteen awards out of $357 million in available federal funding, and a performance period of 18 to 24 months. The application submission deadline is June 12, 2026. Eligible applicants include public or private organizations, including intergovernmental organizations, language that explicitly keeps WFP and similar multilateral partners involved, while foreign governments are excluded.

With the large‑scale defunding of U.S. NGOs and other aid partners in 2025, intense competition for these new FFP program awards is expected.  NGOs such as CARE, CRS, World Vision, Mercy Corps, Save the Children and Action Against Hunger are expected to be seeking FFP grants.

At the same time, USDA is layering the program on top of its existing Food for Progress (FFPr) framework. Separate from Title II FFP, the new FY26 Food for Progress solicitation to NGOs—released last week, closing July 6, 2026, with awards expected by late September—makes up to $226 million available across seven countries: Bangladesh, Bolivia, Ecuador, Morocco, Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, with awards of $28–35 million over four‑to‑five‑year performance periods. Food for Progress operates on a monetization model authorized under the Food Security Act of 1985 (7 U.S.C. § 1736o) in which the USDA buys U.S. commodities domestically and ships them overseas, the NGO sells them in emerging markets, and the NGO uses the proceeds to fund agricultural development.  Monetization used to be standard as well for FFP programs particularly in the 1990s.

Both of these competitions for bids are concurrent with USDA funding opportunities for school feeding (McGovern‑Dole).

See also:  USDA:  https://www.fas.usda.gov/programs/food-peace

https://alliancetoendhunger.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/FINAL-FY27-ATEH-Senate-Agriculture-Appropriations-Letter-1.pdf

and:  https://www.devex.com/news/house-locks-food-for-peace-into-usda-with-50-commodity-requirement-112420

A primer from the Congressional Research Service here

New Lancet Journal Commission Report about Health Conflict & Forced Displacement

May 21, 2026     The new study, Health in a World of Crises and Impunity, by the Johns Hopkins – Lancet Commission about Health, Conflict & Forced Displacement, was published this week, from two dozen main authors (commission members), led by Dr. Paul Spiegel.  It critiques the current ways that humanitarian aid flows as “unfit for purpose” because it relies on politicized funding models that ration survival rather than saving lives.

While the study addresses food and nutrition, it does so only to a limited degree, placing hunger and malnutrition within a broader public health context. In its historical review, it highlights high malnutrition rates in Sudan, Yemen, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The report notes: “Undernutrition is a central pathway through which conflict increases mortality, contributing to more than half of infectious disease deaths globally in children.” Malnutrition significantly raises the likelihood of dying from communicable diseases such as malaria or measles.

Poor nutritional status, the Commission finds, “weakens immune responses, reduces vaccine effectiveness, and prolongs recovery from infection and injury.” It adds: “Recurrent displacement and prolonged food insecurity contribute to wasting, stunting, and micronutrient deficiencies, with long-term consequences for physical growth, cognitive development, and future health.”

Poor nutritional status, it finds: “weakens immune responses, reduces vaccine effectiveness, and prolongs recovery from infection and injury.” And:  “Recurrent displacement and prolonged food insecurity contribute to wasting, stunting, and micronutrient deficiencies, with long-term consequences for physical growth, cognitive development, and future health.”

The “Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health-Lancet Commission” worked for almost three years in leading up to the publication on May 19, 2026 on the Lancet journal’s website, accompanied this week by a launch event in Geneva.  Their 76-page report also notes “Conflict disrupts food production, markets, livelihoods, and humanitarian access, undermining household coping mechanisms and leading to acute and chronic undernutrition among displaced populations and host communities alike.”  Hunger follows from economic harms and job loss:  “Most conflict-affected populations have unstable or no income, affecting 78% of IDPs in Afghanistan and 70% in Iraq in 2022. In Sudan, unemployment in urban households increased by more than ten-fold after the conflict began.”  For example, refugees often lack access to legal employment in countries of asylum.

The Commission report has many recommendations about reforming the aid system overall, but few that are specifically about food systems, resilience, agriculture, supply chains of recovery foods (such as RUTF), food fortification, school feeding, or other anti-famine programs.  The report largely ignores food aid except to criticize its availability in Gaza, and to diminish it in comparison with cash hand-outs, though the report notes the World Food Programme’s large role in humanitarian aid.

The Commission comprises 42 authors from 20 countries, nearly all academics from universities, some with prior field experience. It includes no representatives from private industry, governments, digital health or technology companies, the military, or financial institutions.

In an accompanying editorial in the same issue of the Lancet (shown above), the editors summarize the findings, including a call to “invert power by shifting resources and decision making to affected populations, making external leadership exceptional, and strengthening nationally led health and social protection systems.”  And then concludes: “Creating an effective community-centred humanitarian system that provides a more just, robust, and sustainable future needs to be managed carefully and responsibly. “

The Commission names climate as both driver and amplifier:

  • * Droughts, dust storms, and floods drive food insecurity, resource competition, and erosion of coping strategies in Somalia, South Sudan, Afghanistan, and the Sahel
  • *  Climate impacts “interact with pre-existing political, economic, and social vulnerabilities, pushing fragile contexts beyond critical thresholds”
  • *  Women particularly affected where they “have limited access to material, social, and institutional resources to cope with, absorb, and recover from climate-related shocks”

Most of the report talks at a higher level. A key finding and recommendation:  “Humanitarian health action remains overly focused on short-term service delivery rather than sustaining health systems across crisis cycles. Fragmentation, disrupted financing, workforce losses, weak integration, and weak digital foundations undermine continuity, quality, and resilience, especially in protracted crises. Emerging technologies and artificial intelligence offer important opportunities to improve early warning, triage, supply chains, clinical decision support, and system planning, but without equitable access, regulation, and accountability they may also deepen exclusion and risk. The way forward is to prioritise health systems protection, ensure continuity and quality of care, integrate humanitarian and national systems where feasible, and invest in preparedness, workforce capacity, climate-resilient services, and ethically governed digital and artificial intelligence capacities that support more resilient, adaptive, and accountable health systems.”

Many readers of the report were pleased to see a vision for a “humanitarian reset.”

The authors try to be bold and do not shy away from controversy.  For example, they call for one big UN agency for humanitarian aid, not the many independent agencies with distinctive mandates seen now.  Repeatedly the report refers to “global health governance and “humanitarian architecture” as if there is now one coordinated system in place that is ill-conceived, as opposed to an ecosystem of independent actors each pushing progress in distinct ways.  While acknowledging the history of humanitarian aid, and in particular groups like UNHCR, World Heath Organization, and the Red Cross, it gives little attention to the thousands of initiatives pioneered by individuals or independent nonprofit or voluntary organizations, directly helping communities in need.

The Commission lumps a lot of “humanitarian” assistance into one concept but does not discriminate between natural disasters and conflict-related crises.  The authors argue that all aid should conform to national policies, even if the government in question are at war with groups of their own citizens.

The report’s strong push for massively expanded multipurpose cash assistance does not address funding sources or potential trade-offs with service provision, vaccination campaigns, food aid to fight famine, shelter materials, etc.

Some readers found the tone strident.  For example the word “must” appears 86 times, giving the impression that the authors are issuing commands without specifying to whom they are directed.

Other launch events are scheduled in other cities.

Supplementary appendix includes

The New Humanitarian reviews the report here.

Numerous podcasts feature the study.  Johns Hopkins’ 20 minute podcast about this can be found here.   

 

 

In Memoriam: Charlie Sykes, CARE Leader and Food Aid Advocate

May 16, 2026    Charlie Sykes, who defined a life well lived, passed away at 92 years of age, on May 8.   He is survived by his wife, Anya, two children who both pursued careers in international aid (his daughter, Agnieszka and Chris) and four grandchildren:  Sasha, Coline, Lazlo, and Marek.

Anya Sykes wrote Charlie “lived a rich and meaningful life.”

Charlie spent 34 years with the private volunteer organization, CARE USA.  After early postings in Greece (Field Representative) and Algeria (Deputy Director, 1961–63), he was Country Director successively for Poland, Pakistan, India, Egypt (1964–1980), and Dominican Republic (1978-1980).

In the 1960s, Charlie took on one of the largest aid programs in the world, in India where CARE (then the largest aid agency in the world) managed feeding programs for children in schools.  Dan Shaugnessy was with USAID in India at the time and remembers:  “He directed some amazing and very successful CARE programs there that were jointly funded, including the huge CARE midday meals program, Project Poshak, the Balahar blended foods project, and other innovative programs.”

Colleague Franesca Nelson reflects:  “Charlie’s unwavering commitment to nourish the hungry made perhaps the most significant contribution to the nutritional wellbeing of children in the twentieth century  through CARE’s school feeding programs around the world. He was a visionary, …and most of all a wonderful human being.”

After his years managing large CARE programs in India and Pakistan, Charlie shifted to Washington, DC, working in close coordination with CARE’s President, Dr. Philip Johnston (who passed away three years ago).  From 1980 to 1994 he served as CARE’s Vice President for Public Policy — the head of CARE’s Washington, DC office and its principal lobbyist on Capitol Hill.  As Executive Vice President of CARE, Charlie was one of the most influential proponents of aid, shaping how Congress framed assistance legislation and appropriations.  He was the lead voice among nonprofits in fighting for anti-hunger programs and food aid.

Interviewed by management guru, Peter Drucker, Charlie explained:  The most important thing in working with government is patience and cultural respect. Non-profits must be careful when working with other cultural groups. A leader must get to know an organization before collaborating with it

He collabrated closely with other NGOs in the Coalition for Food Aid.

Shaugnessy again:  “He was a major proponent of NGO’s working with national and local governments and not trying to do things on their own. He believed NGO food aid could only be successful if it was carried out as a partnership with the host government, and he proved it with those successful programs. He carried that belief into later assignments including Egypt, Care New York, Care Washington, DC and finally as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the 1990’s.”

Sykes was named a 1991 recipients of the Presidential End Hunger Award.

Ellen Levinson worked with him in the Coalition for Food Aid and remembers:  “Driven by his knowledge of hunger’s devastating and generational impact, Charlie was instrumental in building a broad-based, national constituency for global food aid. He was both my mentor and a colleague, beloved for his warmth, insights, and dedication.”

After serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, in the Refugee Bureau of the Department of State during the Bill Clinton presidency, which included travel to refugee camps in Africa, Charlie then accepted and served for over ten years from 2001-2011 – first as Treasurer, then Chair, and then as a regular Trustee of the international aid agency, Partners for Development (PFD).

Executive Director Jack Marrkand remembers:  “Charlie had a deft touch in avoiding micro-management on operational matters but still ensuring that PfD was staying true to its mission and its overarching strategic plan.    He was greatly respected by his colleagues on the board from whom he was able to elicit helpful input and advice.”

Fellow PFD board member and long-time friend, Wasiq Khan (sitting next to Charlie in the photo at right) remembers:  “Charlie had this saint-like beatific quality to him.  It was obvious when one was in his physical presence that he left his ego somewhere else and forgot to retrieve it.    ….  I think that quality of being above the fray, above self-dealing of any sort, was what gave Charlie the respect of his peers.  It was the way Charlie listened patiently and always with profound empathy and genuine positive interest that drew so many of us to seek his counsel and company…. Wherever he went, he wanted to know where people were from, what their lives were like, how history had shaped their journeys.  Charlie read voraciously  and liked nothing more than  chatting about a great book, a fascinating trip somewhere, or encounters he had had with interesting people.  The world never ceased to fascinate. … he was a very free person.  His mind could focus on the curious, the beautiful, the uncanny.”

Donna Ellis of PFD (shown with Charlie at right) says that he “was the kind of person who understood the balance between being a strong leader and remaining approachable. He was incredibly impactful holding a position of authority but still made a point to lead with warmth and a genuine smile.”

Armin Bušatlić, a Bosnian, ran the local Bosnia program implemented under Charlie’s tenure, and remembers how “dedicated he was in helping us handle the project crisis we faced; he clearly cared a lot about the work and did a lot of good for the region.”

PFD director William Graham recalls:  “I am glad I had a chance to work with him.   Charlie was easy going, well informed about the Bosnia program and I appreciated his guidance and feedback.”  When Graham needed help getting his Macedonian wife immigration status, Charlie and his wife provided the critical support.  “Tanja and I are forever grateful to Anya and Charlie for their support and guidance.”  Charlie was proud of his wife Anya ‘s legal work, usually on behalf of immigrants , with AYUDA for many years.

Charlie was always an athlete, playing basketball and, until old age, tennis with his friends from the World Bank.  One of them, Stephen O’brien, remembers:   “On the tennis courts at the Arlington YMCA….was where he dominated! With his height and innate athletic ability he was virtually unbeatable by the rest of us. But we changed partners from set to set so at least once per match one could count on playing as Charlie’s partner and winning! 

Jack Marrkand again:  “Up until quite recently Charlie always stayed in touch with occasional calls and letters politely requesting updates about both work and family. At a lunch some years ago, Charlie gave me a copy of the book, “Black Ball Tales,” whose opening chapter profiles his father, Frank (Doc) Sykes.”

Charlie was deeply proud of his famous father, shown at right, one of the greatest American baseball pitchers of all time, who pitched a no-hitter playing for the Baltimore Black Sox, with a career 3.5 ERA over 15 competitive seasons.

Known as “Doc Sykes” he challenged the segregationist policies of the time. He fought for the integration of juries nationally beginning with the Scottsborro trial in Alabama where he testified for the  nine young African-American boys in 1931 facing an all-white jury.  Considered seminal in the advancement of U.S.  judicial equality, the Scottsboro trials were held after two white women, falsely accused nine boys, ages 12 to 20, of rape in order to justify their own whereabouts illegally onboard an interstate cargo train.  Doc Sykes’ testimony along with the whole trial experience later influenced novelist Harper Lee when she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, a best-seller, and which was rendered into one of the most important movies of all time, and won 8 Academy Awards including “best picture” in 1963.

In the Scottsboro trials, the accused’s collective guilt was pre-judged by the public, with newspaper headlines assuming their responsibility before all-white juries tried, convicted and sentenced to death all but one defendant in a matter of a day.   Doc (in fact he was a dentist) Sykes testified about the qualifications of Black residents to serve on juries, presenting a list of around 200 qualified Black potential jurors in the area.  In doing so he challenged the systematic exclusion of Black citizens from jury pools (and thus the all-white juries), which violated fair trial rights. His testimony helped highlight pervasive racial discrimination in jury selection.  Very soon thereafter, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (e.g., Powell v. Alabama in 1932 and Norris v. Alabama in 1935) that defendants were entitled to fair jury selection processes, advancing equal protection under the law.

The Scotssboro cases exposed the deep-seated racial biases of the Southern legal system to the world. Seeing how the machinery of justice could be entirely subverted by racial prejudice left a permanent impression on novelist Lee. When she set out to write her masterpiece in the late 1950s, the Scottsboro trials served as her historical blueprint for the systemic injustice she wanted to critique in To Kill a Mockingbird.

The model of Doc Sykes standing up for racial justice influenced Charlie to fight for humanitarian themes around the world, a life of service in and out of government. During his years with CARE, the nonprofit distributed some 12 million metric tons of food aid to some 150 million people, mostly children.

Jack Marrkand again:  “It was a privilege to know Charlie Sykes for many years and to be guided and inspired by his commitment, unfailing optimism, and wisdom.”

Wasiq Khan, again, sums up the views of many, “We were drawn to Charlie because we wanted to be just a little bit more like him: handsome and athletic into his eighties, great conversation on almost any topic, and the feeling that you were heard and understood by someone you trusted deeply.”

Roundtable Summary: The Future of America’s Foreign Aid for Basic Education of Children

May 14, 2026     The Future of American Foreign Assistance for Basic Education was a roundtable held on June 12, 2025 among some forty-eight international education experts convened together over Zoom by the Global Coalition for Education-US, the Basic Education Coalition, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, George Washington University, and the World Hunger Education Service (WHES) – the publisher of Hunger Notes.

It sought to chart a path forward for America’s assistance to child education in lower and middle income countries.

It was held in the context of a major disruption to America’s ongoing support to basic education around the world.  The US had been the world’s largest bilateral donor for basic education, annually reaching over 34 million learners, training 2.9 million teachers, and distributing 174 million textbooks. Programs covered early grade reading, education in emergencies, disability inclusion, and teacher capacity building across more than 50 countries.  The abrupt termination in early 2025 of 163 of 165 USAID education programs decimated implementing organizations, cost nearly 20,000 American jobs, and prompted parallel cuts by other donors including the UK.

US comparative advantages in supporting basic education:  Participants identified early grade reading expertise, global field presence, strong higher education networks, convening power, catalytic leverage of donor funds, and leadership in evidence generation and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as areas where the US stands apart.

Key recommendations for future aid looking ahead 5-10 years:

  • Embed basic education within the restructured U.S. State Department programming for aid
  • Shift further toward locally-led, government-owned programs rather than parallel systems
  • Break down sectoral funding silos to enable whole-of-child approaches linking education, nutrition, and health
  • Expand the timelines of individual programs to ten years to allow systemic change
  • Invest in AI and technology while ensuring equity and accessibility
  • Preserve and publicly catalog institutional knowledge at risk of being lost.
  • Restore funding for education to FY2024 levels and comply with the Congressional READ Act

Participants agreed a follow-on roundtable should include voices from recipient-country governments and local organizations to complete the picture.  In the meantime, the sponsors have been conducting additional research, field interviews with local educational organizations, and planning additional publications.

Download the summary report here.

Malnutrition & Death Risks Rise in Bangladesh

May 11, 2026           Bangladesh’s leading newspaper, Prothom Alo, reported this week about a concerning decline in child health following decades of improvement, specifically regarding nutrition and measles. Health professionals have long recognized the insidious risks for children who are both malnourished and infected with measles; specifically, measles infection is significantly more fatal in children suffering from malnutrition.

According to reports from Prothom Alo, published from Dhaka, Bangladesh has recorded 19,161 suspected measles cases and 2,973 laboratory-confirmed cases across 58 of its 64 districts, resulting in 166 suspected deaths. Three-quarters of these cases involved children under five years of age. Furthermore, two-thirds of the infected children had received no measles vaccine at all—a major failure in public health coverage.  see:  https://en.prothomalo.com/bangladesh/pr0qimrtyr

Health experts warn that fatalities will likely continue to climb for several more weeks. The Lancet corroborates this trend, noting that the Infectious Diseases Hospital in Dhaka admitted 560 suspected measles cases in the first three months of 2026, compared to just 69 cases in all of 2025.  (The Lancet)

In this reporting, Prothom Alo correctly identifies malnutrition, Vitamin A deficiency, declining breastfeeding rates, and missed deworming as compounding or co-risk factors of disease and death, as supported by medical literature. While Bangladesh’s child health had improved over many decades, and achieved over 92% first-dose measles vaccine coverage by the mid-2010s, the program has become weak, irregular, and delayed in recent years. For instance, the measles vaccination drive scheduled for June 2024 was delayed by the deadly public protests that toppled then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

In the long run, chronic malnutrition—measured by stunting (low height-for-age)—has improved, falling from roughly 50% in 2000 to around 24% by 2022, representing a major achievement. Wasting (low weight-for-height) similarly declined from 17% to roughly 9.8% by 2019.

However, recent data show a concerning reversal. The Bangladesh Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 2025 found that wasting among children under five has climbed to 12.5%, up from 9.8%, indicating a steep rise in acute malnutrition. Nutritional health is heavily dependent on surveillance, growth monitoring, and optimal feeding practices, such as exclusive breastfeeding for infants up to six months of age.  Worryingly, exclusive breastfeeding, a critical health practice, has declined by 12% in recent years.

Fridtjof Nansen: Polar Explorer turned Hunger Activist

May 10, 2026     By Lani Marquez

My husband and I recently visited Oslo, Norway, a beautiful city surrounded by the Oslo Fjord. One of the many very interesting museums we visited there was the Fram Polar Exploration Museum, which houses Norway’s most famous polar ship, the Fram, which sailed to both the North and South Poles.  The ship was designed by the Norwegian scientist Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930) and launched in 1892.

Nansen had gained fame while pursuing a doctorate in Zoology when at the age of 27, he led a six-month expedition in 1888 to be the first to successfully cross Greenland on skis. He published two books about the journey with his own photographs and drawings, bringing him international fame. He then set his sights on being the first person to reach the North Pole.

Forcing ships through the Arctic ice to reach the North Pole had been tried and had failed many times in the 1800s. But in 1884, a Norwegian professor of meteorology, Henrik Mohn, had put forward a theory of an east-west current over the Arctic Ocean when the remains of the American expedition ship Jeannette were found by the Greenland coast after the ship had been crushed in the ice and had sunk sunk near the New Siberian Islands in 1881.  Nansen noted this and related it to the driftwood from Siberia that he had seen in the ice off Greenland.

Nansen conceived the plan of building a ship “so small and so strong as possible … that it was improbable that it could be destroyed by the ice”.  With such a ship he believed that he could drift over or very near to the North Pole.  In 1893, he and his crew prepared for a two-year journey in which they would let the Fram get frozen in the drift ice north of Siberia with the hope that the currents would carry the ship to reach the pole. While they did not reach the pole, the expedition returned home safely, and Nansen later sailed on the Fram on an expedition to reach the South Pole. He did not reach that goal either. (Robert Peary became the first person to reach the North Pole in 1909, and Roald Amundsen the South Pole in 1911.)

The story of Nansen’s polar expeditions was fascinating enough, but what really captivated me about this man was his humanitarian work.

Upon his return to Norway after his polar expeditions, Nansen became Norway’s first ambassador to Britain, and in 1917 led a Norwegian delegation to the United States to seek grain aid for Norway, since the country had depended on imports of grain from Germany and Russia before the first World War due to the very low proportion of its land that is arable and since most of the country is made up of mountains, forests, and glaciers.  Soon afterwards, horrified by the slaughter of World War I, Nansen became a champion for the League of Nations and attended the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 which helped shape it.

In 1920, the League of Nations appointed Nansen as High Commissioner in charge of the arrangements for the safe exchange of some 250,000 German and other foreign prisoners of war held by the Russians and some 200,000 Russian prisoners of war held in Germany.

At the same time as the prisoner exchange was being organized, the new Soviet Union was experiencing widespread famine. Nansen arranged for food, clothing, and medicines to be provided to the prisoners of war on Soviet territory and appealed for food aid for the Soviet Union. When Western governments refused to provide such aid to the Communist government, Nansen toured Europe and the United States to raise private donations to fund food for starving people in the Soviet Union.

He argued in the League of Nations for a £5 million loan to address the Russian famine, but his pleas were denied. Nansen estimated that 7 million people died in the Soviet Union as a result of the famine—more than twice the population of Norway at the time.  Nansen led relief efforts as High Commissioner for Relief in Russia for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and associated organizations, after the League of Nations declined official involvement due to distrust of the Soviet government. His work combined advocacy, logistics, fundraising, and on-the-ground aid distribution.

Through the Nansen Mission (involving Red Cross branches from multiple countries and groups like Save the Children), he helped set up free canteens at orphanages, railway stations, and factories. Field kitchens (hundreds deployed) provided daily rations like half a liter of soup and over 100 grams of bread per person. The effort served hundreds of millions of meals overall.

“The difficult is what takes a little time, the impossible is what takes a little longer”
— Fridtjof Nansen

After that, in 1922, the League of Nations appointed Nansen as its First High Commissioner for Refugees, the first High Commissioner for Refugees (what would later become UNHCR), where he continued to use his fame as a polar explorer and diplomat to call attention to the victims of famine and genocide in Russia, Ukraine, and Armenia. In 1922, Nansen received the Nobel Peace Prize for his tireless work for refugees in Europe after the war.

In his biography Nansen: The Explorer as Hero, Roland Huntford wrote, “Nansen is among the few really worthy winners of the Peace Prize, although he is probably the one who spent the shortest time earning it.”  Nansen spent the prize money on the purchase of tractors and the establishment of model farms to develop agricultural improvements in Russia.

Nansen’s legacy as a diplomat and hunger activist is worth remembering today.  His Nobel Prize recognized this work alongside his refugee initiatives. He approached it with the same determination he showed in polar exploration—practical, innovative, and relentless. His legacy influenced modern humanitarian organizations like UNHCR.

see also:  https://www.unhcr.org/il/en/about-fridtjof-nansen-unhcr-israel

Summary of Aid Agency Roundtable Meeting about the Duty of Care of National Staff

May 9, 2026       Increasingly aid agencies have argued for more decision- making, resources and active roles for “local”, or national, actors in aid programs, including food, nutrition and other development and humanitarian efforts.  At the same time, aid agencies have taken efforts to provide balanced “duty of care” (DoC) for local employees, partners, volunteers and their families during disasters.  But best practice standards remain unclear and there are many challenges, if not barriers, to achieving the goals of DoC across security, training, psychosocial care, rest and relaxation, legal support, relocation and other dimensions.

On March 13, World Hunger Education serivce (publisher of this online educational platform, “Hunger Notes”) partnered with Compassion International and George Washington University in hosting a roundtable of experts from two dozen aid agencies, for a two-hour open discussion to share lessons about DoC.

A central concern was the persistent gap between policy and practice. Local staff often work in dangerous environments, carry the “double burden” of being both responders and affected community members, and have limited access to evacuation, psychosocial support, family assistance, and equitable medical care. Participants also noted that security, HR, and wellness systems remain siloed within organizational systems and responsibilities, weakening crisis response.

One participant said, “In disasters national staff deployed away from home are exposed to crisis contexts and deserve the same evacuation protections as international staff.”

The roundtable highlighted additional problems in federated NGO structures and sub-granting systems, where responsibility for partner staff is often unclear. Family support, remote work options during conflict, and coverage for indirect workers remain underdeveloped. At the same time, participants cited emerging improvements: more donor attention, growing mental health awareness, contextualized well-being frameworks, and some stronger onboarding and training models.

“Framing duty of care as mission-driven (not compliance- or HR-driven) is the key to getting executive support.”

Overall, the meeting concluded that NGOs need clearer definitions of who is covered, more equitable protections for local staff, harmonized policies, better training, and a stronger cross-sector community of practice

See this downloadable below:  Roundtable Summary Duty of Care (public)

Opinion: “No One Should Go to Bed Hungry: A New Era of Global Need”

May 8, 2026     The U.S. nominee to head the World Food Programme, and currently the Under-Secretary of Agriculture, Luke J. Lindberg, published an opinion in this week’s Newsweek Magazine, arguing that:

“Today, hunger is rising, with almost 320 million people facing acute food insecurity.  Conflict, weather, and economic instability are placing unprecedented strain on the world.

“At the same time, the world produces enough food to feed every person on the planet. With knowledge at our fingertips, our expectations for transparency and effectiveness are growing. This is the challenge before us: not one of production, but of delivery, coordination, and collective will.”

and also:  “No person anywhere in the world should go to bed hungry. That is not simply an aspiration; I will make sure that together we can make it a reality.”

see:  https://www.newsweek.com/no-one-should-go-to-bed-hungry-a-new-era-of-global-need-opinion-11913495

Village Enterprise, a Nonprofit, Champions the “Graduation Model” to End Poverty

May 8, 2026    In the mid 2000s, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) pioneered a new approach for helping the very poor to grow out of poverty phase by phase, an approach called the “Graduation Approach.”  Replicated since then by many NGOs, the period of implementation tends to be about two years for each family, and averages about $500 per household with researchers estimating $2-5 in benefits for each dollar spent.

One NGO championing this approach is Village Enterprise which combats hunger and builds resilience.  In 2025, Village Enterprise reached over 316,000 people in rural Africa, bringing their cumulative total to more than 2.3 million lives  affected, including over 1 million in Uganda alone.

Prior to her stepping down as CEO this year, Hunger Notes had interviewed  Diane Calvi, who led the California-based nonprofit from 2010 to 2026,  transforming it into a multi-country leader in evidence-based poverty graduation.  From her interview:

     “Village Enterprise is exclusively working with people living in extreme poverty in rural areas of Africa. We go into villages and introduce ourselves to the local community. All of the staff that implement the program are recruited from the local communities:  they speak the local language, they understand the culture. And they introduce the program, which entails targeting the poorest of the poor.”

     “I don’t even consider the Graduation Model we implement a livelihood model. I consider it a microentrepreneurship model. We’re really helping people become entrepreneurs for the first time — but not through a microfinance model. We’re doing that through a cash transfer, which gives the poor a lot of agency. It’s not like so many livelihood programs: here are some goats, here are some chickens. You’re giving them cash and saying: write a business plan, figure out how you’re going to run your business.”

      “Because we provide the cash in the form of a grant rather than a loan, people aren’t so busy trying to pay back the loan. They’re able to invest in their families, they’re able to invest in the business. And so we see better impacts — both in terms of increasing income, savings, and nutrition….We’ve been rolling out a program called DreamSave, which is a digital bookkeeping application at the savings group level that runs on a smartphone. That’s been really well received and has had some positive impacts on the actual savings of the savings groups.”

     “The cash transfer is provided to them on a mobile phone.”

    “For every dollar you invest in the program, the participants generate … $5 in lifetime income.  At baseline, the households were on average eating 1.7 meals a day. Five years later, on average, they were eating 2.5 meals. In terms of animal protein, they went from eating animal protein every other week to eating animal protein 1.3 times a week. So also pretty significant increases in protein consumption.”

    “We need to have results-based funding frameworks. There need to be incentives for the achievement of results. The kind of receipt-based, activity-based funding is not incentivizing achievement. There really aren’t the incentives in place.”

     “When I started with Village Enterprise in 2010, it was a very small organization with a $1 million budget and about 18 staff. And of the 18 staff, 8 of them were in Africa and 10 of them were in the U.S.,  it was mostly run through volunteers in the field.   We have primarily been in the rural areas of Kenya and Uganda. We’re now about 530 staff people, and we’re working in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Ethiopia.  We launched that project during one of the worst droughts in the history of East Africa. So it was really timely, the implementation of the project. And it has shown to be successful despite the challenges of working during a very severe drought — which I think is very encouraging.”

    “We work both in northern Uganda outside the refugee settlements and in the refugee settlements. In the refugee settlement, yes, most of them are Sudanese refugees — 80 to 90% are from South Sudan.”  [End of interview]

A notable evolution of the programming is to embed the graduation model within African government systems. Village Enterprise provided technical assistance to the Government of Kenya throughout the development of the country’s first Ultra-Poor Graduation Strategy, and began providing technical assistance to Nigeria’s Kaduna State Government (with Gates Foundation funding) to support 1,200 women and young people to launch small businesses. A £7 million project funded by the British High Commission — “Kuza Jamii II” benefits 90,000 people across five arid and semi-arid counties in Kenya and the Dadaab refugee settlements, running through March 2026.

More recently, Village Enterprise launched SPRINT (Scaling Poverty Reduction through Innovation and New Technologies), a digitally enhanced version of the graduation model using tools like Kolibri for training, WhatsApp for mentoring, and DreamSave to track savings, enabling product scaling officers to support 5 to 10 times more entrepreneurs than traditional business mentors. The goal is to reach 15,000 entrepreneurs by mid-2026, with potential rollout in Rwanda and Ethiopia.

Update:  Replacing Ms. Calvi, Sazini Mojapelo was appointed as the new CEO, becoming Village Enterprise’s first Africa-based CEO, beginning February 17, 2026

Action Against Hunger 10 Global Hunger Hot Spots

May 6, 2026    This year, as in the past, the international aid agency “Action Against Hunger” (also known as ACF, or Action Contre la Faim) released their annual hunger report, titled “10 Global Hunger Hot Spots.”  This year the report describes a compound crisis model as causing hunger.  The compound crises are: conflict, displacement, climate shocks, inflation, market collapse, disease, and weak public institutions all stack on top of each other. Its real message is that famine is rarely just about food.  Rather, hunger is usually the endpoint of different social and economic crises.

Action Against Hunger estimates that 30 million children are acutely malnourished today, including about 8.5 million severely malnourished children, and at least 13 million pregnant or breastfeeding women are malnourished. That makes this as much a maternal-and-child survival crisis as a food-security crisis.

The report also makes an unusually strong argument that humanitarian access and humanitarian financing are now central determinants of mortality.

The report seeks to quantify the impact of global reducations in aid during the last year in various ways.  It highlights the 65% funding shortfall for hunger-related humanitarian programming and notes that the United States announced an 83% cut to humanitarian support, alongside cuts by several European donors. it explains the cascading effects of these cut-backs (e.g., 300+ nutrition centers closed in Afghanistan).  It cites the  Lancet-linked estimate that USAID-funded programs saved over 90 million lives over 20 years, warning that sustaining cuts through 2030 could lead to 14 million preventable deaths, including 4.5 million children under five. That is one of the report’s most consequential arguments.

It recommends:

  1.  Ensure full and safe humanitarian access of aid to needy people, and prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war;
  2.  Integrate climate and food security: 3. Focus on women and children.
  3.  Donor funds should be addequate, flexible and multi-sectoral
  4.  Support local and inclusive solutions
  5.  Strengthen prevention: Every strategy should include nutrition, food security, and access to basic health services, aiming to prevent hunger rather than just manage it.
  6.  Uphold adequate nutrition as a fundamental human right,
    ensuring that the right to food is respected and protecte

According to ACF, the top ten countries today in terms of total numbers of  people in acute food insecurity (at risk of hunger) are:

    • → Nigeria: 31.8 million:  “The nutritional crises are exacerbated by prolonged conflicts in the northeast of the country (Boko Haram and ISWAP), which make large areas virtually inaccessible to relief and food supplies, creating a vicious cycle of food insecurity and malnutrition.”
    • →  Sudan: 25.6 million:  “Sudan is facing the world’s most severe food and displacement crisis, but the scale of the suffering remains underestimated and underfunded.”
    • → The DRC: 25.6 million:  “This is not just a matter of a lack of funds: it is a matter of life and death.”
    • → Bangladesh: 23.6 million:  “Bangladesh faces recurring extreme weather events, demographic pressures, economic instability, and vulnerability of urban and rural infrastructure.”
    • → Ethiopia: 22 million
    • → Yemen: 16.7 million
    • → Afghanistan: 15.8 million
    • → Myanmar: 14.4 million
    • → Pakistan: 11.8 million
    • → Syria: 9.2 million

The report includes the map at right showing the countries where ACF, seen here.:

To assist journalists and researchers, the report has chapters by country. The country-specific “Inside Look” sections (written by Action Against Hunger directors) provide expert analysis on barriers like bureaucratic delays (Sudan), siege conditions (Gaza), or climate adaptation (Bangladesh).

For example:  “South Sudan continues to experience levels of malnutrition that reach emergency thresholds, with a steady downward trend each year. Local communities face multiple and interconnected crises, including the collapse of basic services, recurrent displacement due to conflict and flooding, and widespread food insecurity caused by climate shocks and economic
instability. In this context, the difficulties for humanitarian organizations are
multiplying…”

These chapters combine direct stories from affected communities (e.g., Zuwaira in Nigeria, Yasir in Sudan, Fatima in Afghanistan) and operational insights from Action Against Hunger’s country directors. These add emotional depth and ground-level reality to the statistics.

At the same time, the chapters include technical indicators such as population estimates, HDI rank, internally displaced persons, refugees, people in need, Humanitarian Response Plan funding requirements, HRP funding gaps, health-facility functionality, WASH access, cholera cases, food-price inflation, currency depreciation, hectares/crop losses from floods, and ACF operational outputs such as children treated for severe malnutrition, water points rehabilitated, cash assistance, and psychosocial support beneficiaries.

ACF (Action Against Hunger) has published many important publications for many years, such as “the Justice of Eating” shown here.  “The Justice of Eating – the Struggle For Food and Dignity in Recent Humanitarian Crises” was a 2007-08 Hunger Watch Report by Action Against Hunger.  It positioned the right to food as an essential human right and a matter of justice, not charity, arguing that failing to address hunger is a violation of human dignity.  The report, edited by Samuel Hauenstein Swan and Bapu Vaitla, documents the struggles for food access during humanitarian crises and emphasizes that fighting hunger is about upholding human dignity.

see:  https://www.actionagainsthunger.org/app/uploads/2026/01/2025_GlobalEmergencies_Map_v3-compressed.pdf

and:  https://www.actioncontrelafaim.org/

https://accioncontraelhambre.org/en