June 9, 2026 Hunger Notes recommends students and practitioners to refer to and read the website “Salud Everywhere”, which is an expanding source about nutrition, humanitarian aid and health.
It has pages about world hunger, stunting, micronutrient deficiencies, low-birthweight and other key topics of relevance. It provides a list of List of NotebookLMs (AI information) about humanitarian action and development cooperation.
Each page or section of the site is available both in Spanish and English languages. It grows by the day.
The site’s author is Dr. Bruno Abarca, who also works for Action Against Hunger in Spain, and teaches Public Health in Complex Emergencies at the School of Public Health at George Washington University.
June 6, 2026. Dr. Gary Slutkin, in his new book The End of Violence (published April 21, 2026), explains his early career experience working with the Somali Refugee Health Unit, helping malnourished refugees in East Africa, which inspired him in time to apply the skills he learned to take on global outbreaks of violence, which can lead to malnutrition and famine.
An epidemiologist, Slutkin has applied the tools and lessons of disease prevention to violence across the U.S. and in other countries. The End of Violence: Eliminating the World’s Deadliest Epidemic(Little, Brown and Company) sums up his insights and experiences over several decades, particularly in Chicago, Illinois, including his key insight that violence is contagious. He writes: “Violence is often regarded as an unavoidable fact of life…[but it] enters the brain and infects people, communities, and countries via the same process as other epidemics.”
Over several decades of pioneering fieldwork, Slutkin observed that violence is not primarily a moral failing, or a political inevitability arising from poverty, or about failures of policing.
Instead, violence is a contagious, communicable disease that alters human brain biology, spreads by person-to-person transmission, and can be contained using the standard public health epidemic playbook that he had previously used to fight TB, AIDS, and other diseases. He notes the threat of super-spreaders, such as authoritarian leaders who abuse their platforms to mass-infect populations with violent ideologies or behaviors.
Slutkin finds that transmission is “dose dependent:” “Children who were exposed to intermediate or high levels of violence, especially those who experienced chronic exposure, were over 3,000 percent or 31.5 times more likely to engage in chronic violent behavior than those who were exposed to no or low amounts of violence.”
Violence not only directly hurts people; it has indirect harms. For example, when there is violence in communities, it prevents student learning and discourages teachers.
“We already have the tools to protect ourselves, heal our communities, and end violence in our lifetime.It is now up to us to use them.”
He argues that the cutting edge of public health is prevention via interaction with people to move them away from heighted risks.
Slutkin’s program trains “violence interrupters” and credible messengers (often individuals who have transformed their own lives after involvement in street violence) to identify and mediate conflicts before they turn lethal (the rough health equivalent of contact tracing and quarantine).
“To interrupt the transmission… we need to follow a new playbook, one grounded in public health… our most formidable tool to limit spreading is helping a population adopt safer behaviors… There is no epidemic control without changes in behavior.”
Dr. Ron Waldman, who worked with him in Somalia, writes: “Slutkin has taken incredibly innovative thinking, adapted from his experiences in global health, and applied it with remarkable dedication and even more remarkable results, to one of the most enduring and destructive social problems plaguing the U.S. This is an important book.”
His program, formerly called Ceasefire, now “Cure Violence Global” (CVG), has been replicated in hundreds of communities across 17 countries, and major cities in the United States. These includes:
* West Garfield Park, Chicago, where deaths dropped by 31.4% in the first year;
* San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where shootings declined by 94%;
* South Bronx, East New York, Brooklyn;
* Port of Spain / Trinidad and Tobago; and
* Cali, Colombia, where 30-50% of homicides were reduced.
CVG is a nonprofit that provides training, technical assistance, assessment, capacity building, hiring support, monitoring, and ongoing guidance rather than directly running every local program. Local community-based organizations or governments usually implement the on-the-ground work (violence interrupters, outreach workers, etc.).
Slutkin writes, “We needed locals who had firsthand experience with violence. …This was equally true in the epidemic work I did… If we wanted to reach Somali refugees, we needed to hire other Somali refugees. If [we] wanted to help change behavior among intravenous drug users, [we] needed to hire former intravenous drug users. People trust people they recognize themselves in, and, ideally, already know.”
In his concluding Action Plan, he recommends: “Every city and community needs a violence-prevenion program, just as it needs police departments, fire departments, schools and health services.”
The books end-notes and “Solutions by Violence Syndrome Annex alone are worth the price of the book’s purchase.
The dominant funding source for CVG has been municipal and state government budgets, increasingly treating the program as recurring line items rather than one-off grants. Baltimore’s Safe Streets, for instance, became part of the city’s budget; NYC’s tens of millions flow through the city’s Crisis Management System; St. Louis committed multi-year city money through its Board of Aldermen.
Local health departments frequently act as the fiscal intermediary. Private donors also make a difference, such as Bader Philanthropies, which gave $100,000 to the City of Milwaukee to implement Ceasefire. Other funders are the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. International work has involved the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank.
Over the years, institutions like the Department of Justice, Johns Hopkins University, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have evaluated these interventions, frequently validating significant statistical associations between Cure Violence implementation and reduced violence rates.
The program is cost-efficient. Costs of implementation have varied from site to site, from $80,000 for a one-year startup, to $64 million in New York City. Societal savings of CVG are often estimated at $7–$33+ per $1 invested due to reduced medical, criminal justice, and other costs.
The strongest evidence comes from quasi-experimental evaluations: difference-in-differences, synthetic controls, interrupted time series, comparison neighborhoods, before/after analyses, and mixed-methods evaluations. The 2025 systematic review identified 13 papers, covering 27 program sites and 83 findings on shootings or killings. Overall, two thirds of findings showed reductions. Outside Baltimore, 95.8% of sites showed reductions and 54.2% reached statistical significance. Hunger Notes generated CVG’s Theory of Change diagram, shown here.
While the CVG has been effective at local gun violence at the community level the evidence is less compelling for larger systematic political violence, state violence, civil war, and international war.
The Nobel Peace Prize committee should consider Slutkin for candidacy.
The Middle East war continues to disrupt ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz affecting shipments of urea, sulfur and phosphates for fertilizer. As predicted, aid agencies are reporting increases in malnutrition as a result.
As reported here, in Hunger Notes in March, fertilizer prices increased by 6.5% in February. They increased yet another 26% in March. Because fertilizer is central to cereal and staple food production, these shocks are raising prices of basic foods and increase trade costs, with downstream effects on food security and nutrition in vulnerable low- and middle-income countries. Child wasting, a rapid, acute form of malnutrition characterized by severe weight loss, responds within months to food access shocks, unlike chronic stunting, which can take months to years.
India, Sudan, and Ethiopia are the countries most likely to experience the largest increase in child wasting following the fertilizer shock.
The fertilizer-to-wasting pathway does not operate in isolation from other conflict effects, as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which is driving up fertilizer and energy prices, is also disrupting broader maritime trade routes, especially impacting humanitarian aid.
As humanitarian access is already constrained by insecurity and damaged infrastructure in Sudan and parts of Ethiopia, higher transport and logistics costs further limit agencies’ ability to pre-position food and therapeutic supplies at the scale needed.
Since fertilizer shocks take 6-12 months to fully translate into food price increases and yield losses, the impacts are likely to peak in late 2026 and early 2027.
Ministries of health, UN agencies, and donors should pre-position therapeutic supplies, expand nutritional surveillance, and front-load assistance now rather than waiting for confi rmed increases in the prevalence of acute malnutrition to trigger a response.
– Contributor Rohma Akhtar, is a student of George Washington University Milken School of Public Health
June 1, 2026 Germane to the current outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease in eastern DRC this month are lessons from the large humanitarian efforts to curtail transmission of Ebola in West Africa in 2014-2016.
The USG commissioned an evaluation of that response, which looked not only at USG response, but that of other donors, UN agencies, NGOs, academia and other actors. The reports from that evaluation are linked below.
Four key lessons jump out from the research:
First, the aid response of separating family members with symptoms of Ebola had the unintended effect of discouraging honest reporting or referrals, such that the total official death count across West Africa was much lower than the true cause of death.
Second, what mattered the most in interrupting transmission was when local populations observed deaths of people they knew which led them to take seriously new changes in behavior (not touching the bodies of people wiht Ebola). This was the essential change that had to occur.
Third, much of the efforts overall by aid agencies had less of an effect in “bending the curve” of the epidemic than the simple communications by the families and communities affected.
Fourth, while many health professionals died early in the outbreak, attention to protecting them, including provision of protective gowns/gloves and equipment was necessary for further work to be achieved.
Food and Nutrition:
Food aid functioned less as a nutrition intervention and more as an enabler of disease control. Its main value was making isolation and quarantine viable. Qualitative data indicated that food distributions to isolation and treatment units, facilitated by Food for Peace (FFP), improved the effectiveness of isolation, quarantine, and response actions at community-based sites of transmission. FFP food distribution played a critical role in supporting isolation and restrictions on mobility, in response to warnings from implementing partners about food shortages among quarantined communities.
The scale was significant: through the end of 2014, USAID awarded nearly $35 million in food assistance to WFP through the Office of Food for Peace. Examples include WFP providing all patients discharged from the Guékédou treatment unit in Guinea with a 60-day food ration on leaving, and continuing general distributions of 45-day rations (rice, oil, pulses, salt) in affected communities.
The proportion of quarantined households that received food support was roughly similar across all three countries, between 60 and 70 percent. In Guinea, quarantined families with Ebola cases were more likely to have received food support in urban areas (89%) than in rural areas (53%), part of a broader urban bias the evaluation flagged in how supplies were targeted. Notably, the reports treat food almost entirely as rations/in-kind support for isolation; there is essentially no analysis of nutritional outcomes per se.
Behavior change
Behavior change was identified as one of the most decisive factors in bending the epidemic curve — arguably more than clinical capacity. The most effective USG-funded activities were nationally-led incident management and coordination, social mobilization, and safe human remains management; as OFDA scaled up community engagement — health education, household isolation, hygiene kits, community outreach, adapting safe burial practices, and involving local leadership — a downward trend in new cases is clearly seen in the data.
The substance of the behavior change effort was straightforward but hard to achieve: much of the social mobilization effort was oriented toward changing simple behaviors such as shaking hands, other physical contact, washing hands, and the handling of infected persons and dead bodies. The key lesson was sequencing — which donors under-prioritized at first. Whereas early priorities focused on facility-based responses, case isolation, treatment, and safe burial, donors and NGOs failed to prioritize social mobilization and community-level responses. Key lesson: social mobilization is the most relevant at the outset of the response. Aid agencies should hire and deploy anthropologists.
When trusted local actors led it, the payoff was fast: one Government of Guinea informant noted that within 1–2 months of accelerated social mobilization, the number of prefectures reporting social resistance dropped from 27 to 4.
A cross-cutting theme among evaluators were that while more than 90% of activity monitoring targets were reported as achieved, this reflected only activities and reveals little about actual change in bending the epidemic curve, a major limitation in analyzing the USG contribution.
These reports, led by the independent evaluation organization IBTCI were available on the USAID Development Experience Clearinghouse until a year ago when the Administration dissoved it. They are accessible via these links below:
May 30, 2026 Reports this week indicate an increase in food insecurity among lower-income houses with children in the United States.
On May 27, 2026, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York wrote: “We find a remarkable increase in food insecurity, particularly among lower-educated and lower-income households and households with young children. We document a contemporaneous increase in pessimism among the same groups, along with a sharp decline in job-finding expectations.” and: “The greater financial strain due to the high cost of living, combined with the expiration of pandemic-era aid (such as expanded SNAP benefits), have led to renewed concerns about food insecurity among those at the bottom of the K-shape.”
The Federal Reserves’ chart at right shows how the blue data points for February 2026 show greater dip in savings, and meals missed than in prior years.
CommonDreams.org reports how: “The New York Fed’s analysis came amid a flurry of new data showing that rising inflation, now at a three-year high, is eroding Americans’ paychecks and causing personal savings rates to plummet as households are forced to spend more on gas, food, and other basics. …the nonprofit research group Equitable Growth pointed to “an important milestone: Household incomes are now down year-over-year. American households had more money to spend in April of 2025.”
The Food Research & Action Center on May 28, 2026 wrote “Families are skipping meals, relying on food banks, and turning to SNAP to get by. Hunger is rising and Congress cannot look away.”https://t.co/ImAFSuTJSg
In other words, tens of millions of Americans are more hungry now than in past years.
Note: Hunger Notes previously reported:
* The 2023 USDA Household Food Security data showed prevalence rose from 10.5% in 2020 to 13.5% in 2023, an increase of just under 5 million households — about 47.5 million Americans.
* Repeated in an August 2025 note: “About 13.5% of U.S. households or nearly 18 million families experienced food insecurity in 2023”.
* January 2026 analysis noted food insecurity “has been on the rise in the U.S. for the past two decades, 17% from 2001 to 2023.” We reported how “In 2026, cuts in the SNAP program enacted in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, were estimated to eliminate SNAP assistance for millions of Americans, may further increase food insecurity”.
May 28, 2026 May 28 was World Hunger day, inspiring many to take action to reduce malnutrition. The overarching theme for this year’s global campaign is “The End of Hunger is in Our Hands”.
The World Hunger Day initiative was founded in 2011 by The Hunger Project, a global non-profit organization established in 1977.
While many global awareness days focus heavily on immediate crisis relief and the distribution of emergency food aid, the original intent behind establishing World Hunger Day was to shift the global narrative toward sustainability and self-reliance. Organizations like Islamic Relief have utilized today to issue a formal warning that the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal of “Zero Hunger by 2030” is rapidly slipping out of reach due to localized aid funding cuts and war-related supply chain disruptions, particularly noting that humanitarian aid is currently meeting only a tiny fraction of the acute need in places like Somalia.
In South Africa, the day serves as the climax of a national week of mobilization organized by the Union Against Hunger (UAH), which declared May 25–30 as Food Justice Week. International service networks, such as local Lions Clubs, are executing targeted community supply runs today, routing fresh fruits and vegetables directly to underfunded early-childhood crèches and community kitchens to combat localized child wasting and stunting.
The worst levels are concentrated in three bands:
* The Horn of Africa and East Africa – Somalia, South Sudan, Burundi, Ethiopia, and Sudan
* Central and West Africa – Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Niger, Central African Republic, Nigeria, and Madagascar
* Conflict hotspots outside Africa – Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Haiti, and North Korea.
In Haiti: nearly 277,000 children aged 6 to 59 months are facing or expected to face acute malnutrition. In Kenya, the number of children aged 6 to 59 months requiring treatment for malnutrition between April 2025 and March 2026 is estimated to be 741,883. In Ethiopia,~900,000 severely wasted children under 5 are estimated, nationally.
In the United States, food banks are feeling an intense squeeze. Daily living costs are so high that even families with full-time jobs are showing up at pantries just to make it to the end of the month.
The United Nations (UN) often sees significant legislative and health policy momentum occur in tandem with the day.For instance, the UN’s World Health Assembly (the decision-making body of the World Health Organization) regularly approves key nutrition-focused resolutions regarding persistent global stunting, wasting, and anemia around late May, intentionally capitalizing on the heightened public awareness surrounding World Hunger Day.
The UN’s 2025 Hunger Hotspots report flags the same places, naming Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, and South Sudan as the world’s most vulnerable, with 24.6 million Sudanese facing crisis-phase food insecurity. Global hunger actually fell to 8.2% in 2024, but Africa and western Asia saw hunger rise.
World Vision cites 673 million people in the world facing hunger.
Action Against Hunger focuses heavily on treating and preventing acute malnutrition, often launching corporate and public partnerships on this day to fund nutritional programs.
World Vision & Compassion International utilize the day to run child-focused sponsorship campaigns, highlighting the specific impacts of food scarcity on early childhood development and maternal health.
Student resources for learning about world hunger can be found on this site, for instance: https://www.worldhunger.org/lesson-plans-on-hunger-and-food-insecurity/
Rethinking Summer Break: School Meals, Hunger, and American Families
Earlier this month, I saw a news segment about public schools in Loudoun County, Virginia — a large suburban school district near Washington, D.C. — exploring the possibility of moving to a year-round academic calendar. The discussion reflected a broader debate taking place across parts of the United States as educators and policymakers continue searching for ways to address lingering COVID-19-era learning loss and the “summer slide” that can leave students academically behind when they return to school in the fall.
As I read more about the issue, I found strong opinions on both sides. Some families and educators see year-round schooling as a valuable tool that could provide greater consistency for students while also helping working parents who struggle with long summer childcare gaps. Others worry it could limit opportunities for teenagers to work summer jobs, attend camps, travel, or simply experience a traditional summer break.
But there is another question that deserves far more attention: What would a year-round school calendar mean for hunger in America?
For millions of children in the United States, school is not just a place for learning. It is also where they receive some of the most reliable and nutritious meals of their day. Nearly 30 million children participate in federally funded school breakfast and lunch programs during the academic year. Depending on the school district, students may receive breakfasts such as cereal, fruit, yogurt, eggs, or milk, while lunches often include sandwiches, pasta, rice dishes, vegetables, fruit, and protein options designed to meet federal nutrition standards.
When schools close for summer vacation, many families suddenly face a sharp increase in grocery expenses. During the summer months, parents are responsible for providing additional meals each day while also managing higher childcare costs. Many families quietly describe summer as one of the hardest financial stretches of the year, especially as food prices continue to rise across the country.
Government-funded summer meal programs do exist and play a critical role, but access can be inconsistent. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Summer Food Service Program reached 2.8 million children at approximately 36,000 meal sites nationwide — far fewer than the number of students served during the regular school year. Transportation barriers limited operating hours, lack of nearby meal sites, and the expiration of some pandemic-era flexibilities have all reduced participation for many families.
That is why newer initiatives like Summer EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer), also known as SUN Bucks, are so important. Created as a permanent federal program in 2024 after being piloted during the COVID-19 pandemic, SUN Bucks provides eligible families with grocery assistance during the summer months when school meals are unavailable. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 21 million children could benefit from the program, which provides families approximately $120 per child over the summer to help purchase food. Research has shown these programs can reduce child hunger, improve diet quality, and help stabilize household budgets during one of the most financially difficult periods of the year.
This conversation is also unfolding at a time when policymakers are increasingly recognizing schools as an essential part of America’s broader nutrition safety net. In recent years, several U.S. states have expanded access to universal free school meals, while the federal government has strengthened summer nutrition programs introduced during the pandemic. Rising concern about inflation, childhood food insecurity, and family economic stress has pushed school meal policy more prominently into national discussions about public health and poverty reduction.
A more balanced year-round school calendar could potentially reduce the long gaps during which children lose access to dependable meals. It could also provide additional stability for working parents, reduce learning disruption, improve student routines, and lessen periods of heightened food insecurity that many families quietly experience each summer.
The debate over year-round schooling should not focus solely on academics or childcare. It should also include food security, child well-being, and the growing role schools play as part of the nation’s social safety net.
If designed thoughtfully, changes to school calendars could become one important part of a broader strategy to reduce childhood hunger, support working families, and strengthen child well-being in the United States.
May 26, 2026 Nicholas Haan, one of the innovative leaders in food security and humanitarian action passed away on December 2, 2025. He dedicated his life to combating global hunger and strengthening food security systems in crisis zones.
He was a co-founder of the international humanitarian NGO, Field Ready, which publishes its memory of him here. In it, co-founder Eric James says “We bonded over our passion for improving the hardest places and our frustration with things not working better.”
Raised in California, he earned his Bachelor of Science in Genetics from U.C. Berkeley, and went on to earn a Ph.D. in Geography, a Master’s in Development Economics/International Development, and a Master’s in GIS & Remote Sensing, all from Clark University.
His deep international perspective began as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kenya, where he taught science in a remote village and became fluent in Swahili. He made history alongside his kayaking partner as the first person to paddle the entire lengths of both Lake Victoria (a 500 km expedition) and Lake Turkana.
Over more than three decades, Nick specialized in food security, developing groundbreaking approaches that combined data analytics, geographic information systems, and supply-chain resilience to prevent famine. He is celebrated globally as the creator of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) System.What began as a localized data solution to map crises in Somalia is now the undisputed international standard led by the FAO, guiding billions of dollars in emergency funding across more than 30 countries
Later in his career, he was a faculty Fellow at Singularity University in Silicon Valley and previously the Vice President and Faculty Chair of Impact.
He authored influential papers and two books on adaptive food systems in fragile states. His innovative “anticipatory aid” model, delivering support before crises peak, is now considered a standard in the field. See: this publication about information systems for food resilience.
He is one of the creators of the international standard for classifying the severity of food insecurity, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) System which started in Somalia, and is led by FAO. He was the lead technical advisor to the UN’s Joint Interagency Analysis Framework (JIAF), which provides essential information to allocate over $50 Billion per year in humanitarian aid. Nicholas has been one of the 5 members of the global Famine Review Committee, which makes the independent determination as to whether a place is officially classified as being in ‘Famine’. A year ago, Nick wrote about the IPC on Linked-in:
“The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) is celebrating its 20th anniversary of informing decisions to end hunger. Thank you to the countless people who contributed to the IPC’s technical development, believed in it, and supported it–especially in the very early days when it was just “a crazy idea”. Here are just a few of those idea-stage contributors from 20 years ago: Cindy Holleman, Thomas Gabrielle, Noreen Prendiville, Yusuf Mohamed, Ali Duale, Mark Smulders, Wolfgang Herbinger, Mohamed Aw-Dahir, Sidow Addouand, and Luca Alinovi. Thank you to all the thousands of IPC practitioners around the world, all the IPC Global Partner Agencies, and the IPC technical development experts who continue to evolve the IPC. Ending hunger requires a collective effort. It’s doable.”
He is survived by his wife Mariam, and siblings Mary Catherine and Annie. Beyond his professional achievements, Nick was known for his deep humility, dry wit, and a boundless spirit of adventure.
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
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
For the past 50 years, since its founding in 1976, the mission of World Hunger Education Service is to undertake programs, including Hunger Notes, that
Educate the general public and target groups about the extent and causes of hunger and malnutrition in the United States and the world
Advance comprehension which integrates ethical, religious, social, economic, political, and scientific perspectives on the world food problem
Facilitate communication and networking among those who are working for solutions
Promote individual and collective commitments to sustainable hunger solutions.
Local health departments frequently act as the fiscal intermediary. Private donors also make a difference, such as Bader Philanthropies, which gave $100,000 to the City of Milwaukee to implement Ceasefire. Other funders are the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. International work has involved the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank.
As humanitarian access is already constrained by insecurity and damaged infrastructure in Sudan and parts of Ethiopia, higher transport and logistics costs further limit agencies’ ability to pre-position food and therapeutic supplies at the scale needed.
resistance dropped from 27 to 4.
e.”
yogurt, eggs, or milk, while lunches often include sandwiches, pasta, rice dishes, vegetables, fruit, and protein options designed to meet federal nutrition standards.
Addouand, and Luca Alinovi. Thank you to all the thousands of IPC practitioners around the world, all the IPC Global Partner Agencies, and the IPC technical development experts who continue to evolve the IPC. Ending hunger requires a collective effort. It’s doable.”
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.
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. “
communities in need.