Tag: USDA

U.S. Food Aid (Part 6): A Timeline of U.S. Food Aid

July 20, 2026    This is the sixth posting in an effort to inform the public and USDA about Food For Peace lessons and directions.  Below is a timeline of selected milestones in the history of U.S. food aid sent overseas. World Hunger Education Service compiled this from a range of sources with inputs from various experts. It selects for different ways that the US has provided foods to other countries with a particular emphasis on Food for Peace, PL 480, Title II.

Notably, at the time of this publication the key food aid initiative is the same as the first, in 1812: aid to Venezuela in response to an earthquake. Contents in this table is meant to complement and not reiterate content published in other articles here at Hunger Notes.   Photo credit:  The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

Timeframe U.S. Food Aid Milestones
1812 USG sends food aid to Venezuela after earthquake. President James Madison and Congress appropriate $50,000 for wheat flour aid.
1847 Choctaw nation in Oklahoma raises famine relief funds for Ireland.
1914-1919 Commission for Relief in Belgium during WWI channels U.S. wheat that fed 10 million people in Belgium and Northern France, daily. Future president Herbert Hoover organizes first large scale food logistics to combat famine.
1918-22 American Relief Administration provides 700,000 MT of famine-relief food aid to Russia, Poland, Austria.
1930 U.S. Foreign Agricultural Service posts agricultural attachés around the world, starting in South Africa, Sydney, Belgrade.
1943 Catholic Relief Services (CRS) channels food aid in war-torn Europe. U.S. foods for Europe went through the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the UN Food and Agricultural Organization.
1944 Dutch famine (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague) led to US Operation Chowhound of B-17 Airdrops of flour, meat, eggs. Later US military trucked in food as Operation Faust.
1945 WWII famine relief. George McGovern in the 741st Bomb Squadron flew surplus food aid to Trieste in northeastern Italy. George McGovern later becomes first director of the Office of Food for Peace, and Democratic nominee for President.
1945-47 CARE Packages as WWII relief, using surplus US Army “10-in-1” rations stockpiled for the canceled invasion of Japan. CARE leaders negotiated with the Army to acquire nearly 3 million pre-packaged rations. Post-WWII US aid also flowed through multilateral channels like UNRRA, the Marshall Plan/GARIOA. CARE and CRS bridged U.S. surpluses through private networks.
1948-49 USG and UK airlift 296,000 tons of food (and coal) to West Berlin. CARE delivered 230,000 packages to Berlin on its own planes.
1948-51 American Friends Service Committee, CARE, and USG provide aid to famine threatened parts of India during the Partition that created India & Pakistan. US passed India Emergency Food Aid Act providing 2 million MT of grain.
1950s India looms large as major concern for large food shortages & famine. US provided large scale grain shipments under Title I and II.
1950s US holds large domestic reserves, including surplus dairy products. FFP framed as a benefit to US farmers as safety valve for purchasing surplus production.
1954 FFP assistance to Korea includes large quantities of wheat flour shipped under Title I, a total of $1.6 billion through 1974. Later in 1987, Korea became a food donor.
1954 Western Wheat Associates (U.S. wheat growers) used food aid for market development, teaching bakers in Japan and India how to use wheat flour.
1954 PL 480 signed into law by President Eisenhower with primarily Title 1 government to government food going to governments.
1954-59 Food aid to Pakistan, Japan, Taiwan, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, Spain.
1955 CARE’s Board of Directors votes to not dissolve, but to refocus the organization’s aid from Europe to other continents, hence the name changes from Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe to “Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere.” This passed by a single vote. CARE implements Title I and II food aid in Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, India and Dominican Republic.
1958 “Food and Fiber as a Force for Freedom” Senate report recommends food as a force for democracy and coins the phrase “food for peace”, written by Senator Hubert Humphrey, future nominee for US president.
1959 INCAP in Central America creates Incaparina weaning food to prevent malnutrition.
1961 President John F. Kennedy rebrands the initiative “Food for Peace” and consolidates U.S. overseas assistance under the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Title III food aid created to incentivize agricultural modernization.
1961 WFP proposed by George McGovern, the first director of the U.S. Food for Peace program, as a three-year UN “experiment” to internationalize food aid.
1963 FFP fuels Operation Niños: Ag Secretary Orville Freeman claimed that U.S. food reached one in four Latin American children, that rural school-meal programs in Bolivia and Peru doubled school attendance. Food for Work also in S America.
1966 Egypt gets soft loans to purchase PL 480 food.
1966 Food aid in India peaked during the severe Indian famine of 1965–1966. During this time, the U.S. used food aid as a heavy diplomatic lever. CARE receives food aid for emergency food program in drought areas. President Johnson involved in every food aid decision related to India.
1966 The 1966 Food for Peace Act PL 89-808 reframes aid from surplus disposal to development conditionality and economic development. President Johnson transfers FFP direction from the White House to the State Department. Johnson emphasized agricultural reforms as a precondition for a country to receive food aid.
1966 Likuni Phala fortified weaning food is pioneered in Malawi.
1968 USAID offers Corn-Soy Milk (CSM) and Corn-Soy Blend (CSB) as fortified foods.
1968-69 U.S. C-97 Stratofreighters (Boeing) help deliver $50M of food aid to Biafra during war in Nigeria, via CRS, CARE, the ICRC and Joint Church Aid. First large scale deployment of new CSB. First live-televised famine; introduced kwashiorkor.
1972 World food crisis, Sahel famine.
1972-1974 Dan Shaughnessy directs Food for Peace and planning for the 1974 UN World Food Conference. Henry Kissinger plays central role in targeting countries for food aid.
1975 Integrated Child Development Services large child nutrition program in India. USG Corn Soya Milk and non-fat dried milk provided through South India Flour Mills for CARE’s “balahar” fortified food for school feeding, led by Tim Lavelle.
1976 World Hunger Education Service begins educating the public and USG about food aid issues and begins quarterly publication of the journal, Hunger Notes.
1977 Title III food aid revised to focus on barter for debt forgiveness and tying aid more explicitly to policy reforms and long-term development in recipient countries.
1979 Two key publications: Amartya Sen’s Poverty & Famines demonstrates that food insecurity is not only about food availability but also about access. Lincoln Chen demonstrates that risk of death increases non-linearly by degree of child wasting.
1979 U.S. donates polished (thiamine removed) white rice to anti-Khmer Rouge groups in Cambodia, resulting in epidemic beriberi (deficiency disease).
1980s Maternal Child Health (MCH) is main type of project supported by food aid, having grown during the 1970s. Food for Work also common for roads/infrastructure.
1983 Church World Service (CWS) stops taking USG FFP resources, following controversial episode of 60 Minutes on CBS about CWS programs in countries with communist governments. CWS goes overnight from being the largest food aid agency in the world to one of the smallest.
1984 Burma Border Consortium of NGOs formed, purchasing food locally for Burmese refugees in camps in Thailand, supported by the U.S. Department of State.
1985 Food for Progress Act explicitly references “Private Voluntary Organizations” or PVOs. Food for Progress authorized CCC financing for grants or credit sales to support agricultural development in developing countries and emerging democracies.
1985 6 million MT of food sent for African famine. Two supplemental appropriations made for Ethiopia famine. FFP manages $500M for Ethiopia alone, plus more for Sudan, and across 21 African countries.
1985 Farm Bill promotes PVO/NGO monetization, using Title II as an alternative revenue stream to direct-dollar grants. U.S. Dry Bean Council positioned pintos and black beans as shelf-stable, high-value food for NGOs to monetize. Initially monetization was to pay for internal transport, which was later funded by USAID in the 1990s.
1985 Ellen Levinson creates the Coalition for Food Aid of NGOs in Washington, DC to promote the roles of NGOs in food aid. Title II Enhancement Grant (later, Title II Strengthening Grant) for PVO headquarters capacity building.
1986 Famine Early Warning System Network (later named FEWS.NET), established on the advice of Tufts University’s President Jean Meyer. Credit also to John Field.
1989 Collapse of Soviet Union shifts emergency food aid gradually away from refugees fleeing regimes in host countries, instead to internally displaced persons.
1990 Food Aid Management funded by FFP with 5 original PVO members.
1990 Fred Cuny pioneers local purchase of food as a more appropriate response to food needs in Ethiopia.
1990s PVOs promote local village “grain reserves” with food aid for resilience.
1990-93 End of US food aid to Somalia leads to famine throughout 1992. President Bush directs US airlifts food via C-130s in late 1992. U.S. Food aid monetized to reduce retail prices across the country in 1993, but after famine has receded.
1990 “Partial monetization” turns into “100% monetization” for many NGOs.
1991 Famine Mitigation Project of experts convened by USAID to recommend best practices to prevention of famine. Including livestock, water, local food purchase.
1992 Food aid mobilization to former Soviet states where food insecurity tied to pensions lost from ruble devaluation. USG works through Red Cross movement. Operation Provide Hope channeled 25,000 MT to the Caucasus and Central Asian “Stans.” ADRA involved in Armenia and other states.
1992 Bosnia: Operation Provide Promise began July 2, 1992, becoming the longest-running humanitarian airlift in history. USG provided sorties into besieged Sarajevo, delivering food and other aid to civilians trapped by the Yugoslav war.
1992 Food Aid Management (FAM) publishes Generally Accepted Commodity Accountability Principles, GACAP, representing all NGOs working with US food aid.
1990s PVO/NGO “cooperating sponsors” include CRS, CARE, World Vision, Save the Children, ADRA, Land O Lakes, ACDI/VOCA, Food for the Hungry International, Project Concern, Africare, Technoserve, Partners for Development, World Relief, Mercy Corps, Lutheran World Relief, IOCC, UMCOR, and International Relief and Development. CARE is often lead food agency in refugee camps, while CRS is lead for IDPs.
1992-1994 FFP defines food security as: availability plus access plus bio-utilization.
1993-1996 FFP Director Robert Kramer rebalances food aid from entrenched USAID Mission projects to areas of greatest need (emergencies), and pushed WFP to recognize the greater priority in emergencies of food.
1993 FAM publishes NGO manual, Monetizing Food Aid, a Guide for PVOs.
1992 CRS’ Mike D’Adamo travels to Rome to strike a partnership with WFP, opening an era of WFP collaboration with NGOs.
1994 CARE and CRS account for roughly 72% of PVOs’ regular Title II programs.
1995 2 million refugees plus almost as many IDPs received some 240,000 MT of food in Rwanda and neighboring countries, following genocide and flight.
1995-97 North Korea’s famine received over 1.1 million metric tons.
1996 André Briend & Michel Lescanne create Plumpy’Nut, the first RUTF, at Nutriset.
1997 WFP strikes agreements partnering with NGOs for distribution activities.
1998 USG requires vegetable oil be fortified with vitamin A (and later, Vitamin D).
1997-2001 Asian financial crisis as currencies lost purchasing power. NGOs like IRD, and WFP used food aid as social protection safety nets.
1999 The majority of US food aid now channeled through WFP, not NGOs.
1999 USAID, FAM and the Canadian Govt convene food experts at a symposium at the American Red Cross to document feasibility of fortifying emergency food aid at the local level to mitigate micronutrient deficiency diseases widely seen among refugees.
2000 Global Food for Education Initiative $300 million, with CCC resources. Over next two decades, 5.5 billion meals for 31 million school children in 48 countries.
2000 Congress passes International Food Relief Partnership Act, amending Title II to authorized grants to US nonprofits to create shelf-stable food products for aid, such as Breedlove Foods in Texas.
2001 FFP Officer Tim Lavelle organizes long-term Bridge of Friendship pipeline from hub of Termez over the Amu Darya river from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan, facilitating hundreds of thousands of tons of famine-preventing food aid into Afghanistan.
2002 FFP nutritionist Tom Marchione promotes new formulations of CSB and nutrient-dense foods as part of commodity docket.
2002 CTC/CMAM modality for treating malnourished children with RUTF promoted.
2002 New McGovern-Dole Food for Education program passed in 2002 Farm Bill. This moves school feeding from Food for Peace to USDA.
2002 No more funding for Title III, a government-to-government program under PL 480 where the foreign government sold food for local currency proceeds.
2003 Large-scale U.S. emergency food aid rejected by five southern African famine-affected countries because US corn is genetically modified. Eventually the grain was milled in S. Africa before transporting to Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia, etc.
2000s Food aid targets HIV/AIDS response primarily in sub-Sahara Africa. USAID Administrator Natsios pushes for more flexibility for local purchase of food.
2003 Dr. Patricia Wolff from Washington University, St Louis, founds “Meds & Foods for Kids” in Haiti and produces Medika Mamba.
2003 FANTA and FFP develop criteria for prioritization of non-emergency countries.
2004 Jeanie Markunas retires from long career overseeing Food for Peace.
2004 C-SAFE consortium (World Vision, CARE, CRS) manages food aid across southern Africa, with the World Food Programme as a sub-grantee.
2004 Globally, World Vision now channels food aid mostly as a sub-awardee under WFP whereas a few years earlier it was primarily a prime.
2005–2011 RUTF increasingly mainstreamed among NGOs, UNICEF & USAID as part of a shift from blended-flour to lipid-based products for targeted feeding of malnourished.
2006 SMART survey manual released, about measuring acute malnutrition and mortality, with the intent to standardize reliable data across agencies. In 2008, the Global Nutrition Cluster designated Action Against Hunger (ACF) as the global convener of SMART, including ongoing infrastructure, guidance, consultations. FAM hosts a workshop about SMART for monitoring malnutrition.
2008 Farm Bill Sec. 3206 created the pilot USDA Local and Regional Food Aid Procurement Program. The rule established grants for field-based projects consisting of local or regional procurement.
2007 USAID & IFRC plan food aid reserves for future pandemics that contract markets.
2008 Prices for corn and oil increased 125% over a short period, increasing malnutrition worldwide. The USG provided additional $2.8 billion across all international food aid programs, delivering 2.3 million metric tons for 43 million people.
2009 Decades of US food aid to India ends. Meanwhile, India donates food to WFP.
2009 Land O’Lakes International Development nonprofit pilots local purchase of food baskets in Zambia for people with HIV.
2009 Food Aid Quality Review research starts at Tufts University School of Nutrition.
2010 Congress approves The Emergency Food Security Program (EFSP) to allow cash and voucher assistance, instead of only in-kind commodities, using International Disaster Assistance funds.
2010 MSF launches “starved for attention” campaign criticizing the US for donating CSB instead of only procuring RUTF.
2010s Ongoing scale up of RUF production by MANA and Edesia (U.S. NGOs).
2010-2011 Despite early warnings, over 200,000 Somalis die when US cuts off food aid because of Patriot Act. Food aid reinstated only after hunger season ended in 2011.
2010s “Sequencing, layering, and integration” promoted in FFP program designs.
2012 International Food Assistance Improvement Act of 2012 (H.R. 4141) sought to enhance nutritional quality and cost-effectiveness of food aid
2014 Farm Bill expanded Section 202(e) flexibility. USAID increase in authorized 202(e) funding to provide cash transfers, food vouchers, & local purchase modalities.
2014 Charles Hanrahan retires from the Congressional Research Service, after 29 years researching international food aid.
2015 Resilience Food Security Activities (RFSAs) formally introduced as new design of FFP development programs.
Mid 2010s Multi-year, development cooperative agreements, “MYAPs”, replaced by “DFAPs” as main form of FFP projects implemented by NGOs.
2017 Food to four well-publicized man-made famines: S Sudan, Somalia, Yemen & Nigeria.
2018 89% of FFP resources for emergencies. Development food aid % at all time low.
RFSAs emphasize new “graduation model”, along with theories-of-change, learning, and ‘pause and reflect.’
2019 USAID funds Nawiri resilience (RFSA) program in Kenya for northern, arid lands.
2020 Top recipient countries of US food aid from 2015 to 2020 were Yemen, Syria, South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, DRC, Sudan, Afghanistan, Kenya, and Nigeria.
2022 Response to Ukraine war leads to full draining of the Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust. USG also provides $388 million for shipping/freight, totaling $670 million.
2023 USG and WFP shut down food pipelines to Ethiopia. USAID Administrator on June 8 suspended food aid across Ethiopia because of widespread, coordinated theft of U.S. food by multiple actors (including to military units and markets). This stopped aid for ~20 million people amid drought and post-conflict needs.
2024 First RFSA program in Somalia.
2025 DOGE terminates many FFP (RFSA) and Food for Progress programs, while authority for FFP and FEWS shifted to State Department. A few RFSAs are re-started: Mercy Corps in Kenya, ADRA in DRC, Food for the Hungry in Ethiopia, and CRS in Haiti.
2025 December: FFP transitions again, to US Department of Agriculture which in February commits $452 million to WFP and bids new emergency programs for DRC, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, Kenya, & Rwanda.
2026 July: FFP announces $235 million to CRS for Ethiopia and Sudan.
2026 USG provides private and UN food aid in recovery from earthquake in Venezuela.

U.S. Food Aid (Part 2): FAFSA – “Food Aid & Food Security Assessments”

July 13, 2026   This is the second of a series of Hunger Notes articles about the re-design of the U.S. Food for Peace (FFP) program,that is now in process at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which just released a request for informational inputs this past week.

In past decades, USAID commissioned two expert teams to review experience with development food-aid programming: the first in 2002–2003 and the second in 2012–2013.   The first, the 2002 “Food Aid and Food Security Assessment“ (FAFSA 1) found that success in health, nutrition, and agricultural components was largely driven by U.S. Government (USG) complementary inputs, such as technical assistance (TA) and training, both of which were primarily financed through the monetization (sale) of food aid. FAFSA 2 reinforced this, emphasizing that distributing food alone is of reduced value for improving food security and should be combined with non-food resources to build durable livelihoods and community resilience.  Although styled as an ‘assessment,’ the 2002 report functioned primarily as a broad program review.  It addressed the wide variety of competing mandates being pursued, including support for microenterprise, education, HIV/AIDS and emergencies, all while achieving sustainability.

During the two decade period, 1993 – 2013, the US shipped an estimated 17 million metric tons of food, worth $4.5 billion (not adjusted for inflation) for development programs (not including the larger volume for emergencies)..

Both studies found that FFP exit strategies were weak and that project outcomes were often not sustained.  Both studies reported broad improvements in child nutritional outcomes across the countries reviewed though this was based on a mixed set of project evaluations that did not include randomized controlled trials (i.e., with control groups).   Measures of child (under five years of age) nutritional status focused on stunting (which is a long-term outcome) and weight-for-age, not weight-for-height (wasting) that is more critical for health.

FAFSA-1:  Implementing agencies “should continue to use growth monitoring and promotion as key strategies to improve the nutritional status of children under 3 years old and improve referral and follow-up of malnourished children. [They] should establish clear protocols for identification and referral of malnourished children to health facilities.”

  • ◊ Agricultural programs ought to be market-driven, not just production-driven. While early programs often focused merely on increasing staple crop yields, FAFSA-2 found that the most successful agricultural programs adopted a “Pull Plus Push Model.” This approach links farmers to promising, higher-value markets (the “pull”) while simultaneously providing them with  new technologies, TA, and training needed to compete in those markets (the “push”).  Furthermore, FAFSA-2 emphasizes that programs should target farmers who are “vulnerable and viable.” For food-insecure populations who lack sufficient land or assets to farm their way out of poverty realistically, programs should focus instead on creating off-farm jobs and non-agricultural income generation.

  • ◊  Maternal and Child Health and Nutrition (MCHN) should focus on prevention during the first 2 1/2 years of life.  A major finding in FAFSA-2 was that preventive supplementary feeding, targeting all pregnant/lactating women and children under two years of age, is significantly more effective at reducing stunting than recuperative feeding, which only treats older children who are already malnourished. Additionally, evidence suggests that providing food to individual people is more effective and cost-efficient than providing larger rations to whole families.

◊  Food-for-Work (FFW) should be focused on the creation of public goods such as roads and canals.  The authors viewed FFW as having poor sustainability.
…
◊  Income generation should be combined with behavioral change such as caretaker behavior for diets and improved hygiene.  Increasing a household’s income does not always  improve family diets or reduce child undernutrition.
…
◊ Program evaluations should be more independent, standardized, and professionalized.  FAFSA-1 noted the need to reduce variability in how performance indicators were defined and measured and recommended shifting the burden of complex evaluations away from those NGOs implementing programs.
Both study teams, composed of different individuals, were led by agricultural economists, so it was not unusual that both studies focused on gains in crop yields and supply chains.
…

Differences

Co-authored by Roberta van Haeften, Mary Ann Anderson, Herbert Caudill and Eamonn Kilmartin, the FAFSA-2 (2013) report goes further than the first report by:

  • » Quantifying impacts (e.g., stunting reductions, income improvements).  FAFSA-2 calculated that U.S. food aid led to reductions in underweight children by 0.63%/year. Asia/LAC outperformed Africa (1.53% vs. 0.98% annual stunting reduction).
  • »  Emphasizing water, sanitation and hygiene interventions:

“Ninety-four percent of the Title II programs with WASH interventions created and trained Village Water Committees. This very important step greatly improved the likelihood of successful operation and maintenance once the Title II programs ended.”

  • »  Introducing new frameworks (e.g., risk/vulnerability, Food Security Country Frameworks).
  • »  Aligning with broader U.S. initiatives (Feed the Future,  Global Health).
  • »  Documenting external critiques (e.g., monetization, urbanization).

Where the first report dwelled more on qualitative data, the second report tried to include a meta-analysis of nutritional impacts, standardized indicators (MAHFP, HDDS), and quantitative trends (e.g., stunting reductions).

The second (FAFSA-2) report reviewed total of 101 programs (projects) across 28 countries. These were distributed geographically with 64 programs in Africa, 23 in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and 14 in Asia.  FAFSA-2: observed that the majority (57%) of food aid beneficiaries were women (2009), with a slightly higher female participation in health and nutrition programs (59%)

FAFSA-2 addressed supplementary feeding for families with AIDS and TB patients.  And it took a broader view of USAID programming, looking at alignment with non-FFP funding areas by Feed the Future (FTF) and Global Health Initiative (GHI), that had not yet been launched in 2002 when FAFS-1 was commissioned.  FAFSA-2’s review included some~80% of resources going to agriculture (49%) and household nutrition (35%).  A declining 8% went to food-for-education, which has been phased over USDA.

Using the conceptual model shown below, the FAFSA-2 report concluded that FFP programs were generally successful at increasing household access to food, with 92% of the reporting programs seeing improvements in the number of months of adequate household food provisioning. Furthermore, 79% of reporting programs saw improvements in household dietary diversity, and 80% exceeded their targets for increasing household income.  The FAFSA-2 report highlights that by identifying and applying the specific technical models, approaches, and practices that contributed to these positive food security impacts, and by learning from the strategies that did not work well, there is a tremendous opportunity to improve overall program performance in the future.

U.S. Food Aid (Part 1): Reflections about Development Food Assistance by Long-Term Practitioner

July 7, 2026    by Mara Russell     This is the first in a series of articles by Hunger Notes about the U.S. Food for Peace (FFP) Program.  “Food for Peace Title II Non-Emergency Programs: What are they and Why are they needed?”

In the United States, government-funded “Food for Peace” (FFP) programs  transitioned from USAID to the State Department when the former agency was dissolved  in 2025. Several months later, the Food for Peace program was transferred to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), a large federal agency that had not managed this program previously. Soon after this transition, $452 million in FFP resources was awarded directly to the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) for food activities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, Kenya and Rwanda.[i]

Then, as recently reported in Hunger Notes, in 2026, USDA released a “Notice of Funding Opportunity” for nonprofits (NGOs) for new Emergency Food for Peace programs, naming the same set of countries that were eligible for food assistance.  These upcoming programs are scheduled to be worth $357 million in total.[ii]  Since a total of $1.2 billion was appropriated by Congress for Food for Peace in FY26,[iii], USDA is now considering how to implement the rest of the funding for “development” or non-emergency food programs, referred to during the past seven years as Resilience Food Security Activities or “RFSAs.”[iv].

One critical variable that non-emergency programs have leveraged during recent cycles of USG funding is timeframe. These NGO-administered programs are generally five years in length, while emergency programs only last for a maximum of two years. Emergency programs are designed to address the impacts of acute (wasting) malnutrition and severe food insecurity. Resources in emergency programs are provided to address short- to medium- term impacts of a severe shock. This can be due to a natural disaster such as an earthquake, a severe storm, drought, or  severe conflict. The spread of an epidemic or pandemic disease can also result in such impacts, either due to a breakdown of production and markets, or due to people being at greater risk of malnutrition due to the impacts of a disease. Or shocks can result from a combination of several things.

On the other hand, non-emergency programs focus on preventing emergencies.   They address the underlying causes of hunger that tend to become more serious when conditions are such that food supplies become limited, or people lose access to food due to the types of shocks outlined above. These underlying causes, such as poverty, cultivation practices that result in poor yields, inadequate services or limited safety-nets that result in food insecurity and malnutrition, lack of income earning opportunities, poor access to water for agriculture and for drinking and inadequate sanitation that can cause water-borne disease- a significant underlying cause of acute and chronic malnutrition, lack of attention to the special nutrition needs of women of childbearing age, pregnant women and young children, and lack of capacity to prepare for potential shocks that impact food security and nutrition. These are complex issues that call for a combination of access to goods and services, while adopting of behaviors and practices within households.  Programs also ensure that the food consumed meets the standards of a healthy diet, prevent water-borne disease, and build resilience to unexpected shocks.

This takes time. There is a limit to what can be done in only one or two years. This is especially the case because according to the 2026 USDA Emergency funding opportunity, it takes between 45 and 90 days from the award of a program until food aid from the Food for Peace program can be exported from the United States, and then up to another 6 months for commodities to arrive in the country where they will be distributed.[v]

A second factor has to do with geography.  Emergency food aid programs are in countries and locations where there is an active ongoing shock, and large concentrations of people, including refugees and internally displaced people, living in a situation of extreme food and nutrition insecurity that should be addressed immediately.  Identification of these locations is guided by early warning systems or methodologies that classify people based on the degree to which they are currently food insecure or malnourished. The system that tends to be most respected internationally is the U.N.’s Integrated Phase Classification or IPC system. During its existence, USAID utilized this system, and now USDA is using it also as a way of designating where and among whom an emergency program should be implemented. In its recent funding request, USDA stated that a minimum of 20% of the population to be targeted with food aid should be living at IPC 3 or higher. The IPC classifies populations at levels 1 through 5 based on the severity of food insecurity as follows: 1 = None/Minimal, 2 = Stressed, 3 = Crisis, 4 = Emergency and 5 = Famine. The “shorthand” clarification used for those populations needing immediate assistance are those at IPC 3+.[vi]

However, non-emergency programs aim to reduce the likelihood that people living in a particular geographic area will experience conditions at or above IPC 3. Countries prioritized for these programs may already have sizeable populations at IPC 3+, but there may not be significant active shock conditions causing this situation. Sometimes, populations may be at IPC 3+ due to a shock that has previously increased food insecurity and malnutrition. For instance, after the Haiti earthquake in 2010, there were emergency programs that addressed food insecurity, malnutrition, reconstruction and access to food for the people impacted by this shock.  However, by 2013, many of the immediate impacts of the quake, such as food insecurity and displacement were initially addressed, but there was a need to address long-term root causes of malnutrition and vulnerability.  At that time USAID implemented a non-emergency program that sought to address these underlying causes and increase the ability of the country to cope with severe shocks.[vii]

Many countries where non-emergency programs are implemented experience cyclical shocks that recur on a periodic basis. They do not always exist in shock situations but may be impacted by droughts or floods during serious weather events, such as El Niño or La Niña events. During the El Niño event in 2023-2024, most of the harvest of the country of Zimbabwe was ruined due to inadequate and poorly timed rainfall.[viii]  However, on-going non-emergency programs continued to increase yields, increase incomes and reduce malnutrition, while emergency programs supported households and communities as necessary with additional food and other emergency assistance. Most of these countries also experience an annual “hunger season”, which tends to occur anywhere from 3-6 months prior to the next harvest when food stocks and cash earned from the prior harvest have been depleted.  Thus, while non-emergency programs are not implemented in contexts where active shocks occur, they may be targeted within fragile environments where hunger seasons make life very tenuous for people living in those geographies.

Another important element in these programs are the participants who are targeted. In emergency programs, large portions of the population are highly vulnerable due to the impacts of a disaster, such as an earthquake, a hurricane or other cyclonic storm, or severe conflict. In these cases, those targeted for assistance may have been displaced, or otherwise lost everything – including their health. In such emergency situations, it does not matter whether people were rich or poor prior to such shocks.

However, Title II non-emergency program participants tend to be those who are poorest, receive the fewest services, and are at greatest risk of malnutrition and food insecurity.  Often the focus is on those who have the least to fall back on when shocks occur and tend to be those most impacted by annual hunger seasons and other severe shocks.  A case in point is the Ethiopia Productive Safety-Net Program (PSNP), which has been supported by Title II non-emergency food aid since its inception in 2005.[ix] The PSNP targets people who are impacted by the annual hunger season through a Cash or Food for Assets (FFA) activity that creates a safety-net during the period of greatest vulnerability in normal years while developing assets that communities can use during good years and fall back on in bad years. The PSNP is supported by the Ethiopian government as well as several other donors. During normal years, a certain number of households are targeted for the program based on their chronic food insecurity and malnutrition. However, during years when poor crop yields and impacts increase the number of households needing food assistance, the number of households targeted increases to also address the needs of those who would not normally be included in the PSNP program.

In addition to selecting participants based on their food insecurity, there is a difference between how emergency and non-emergency programs select participants when it comes to malnutrition. In the case of emergency programs, care is taken to address the needs of people who are acutely malnourished, mainly children under 5 and pregnant and lactating women. In the case of emergency programs, acute malnutrition, in which the body loses weight rapidly, becomes a major risk. Moderate acute malnutrition exists when body weight for height among children under 5 falls below 2 standard deviations from the global mean, and severe acute malnutrition exists when this falls to 3 standard deviations below the mean.  If the rate of wasting malnutrition in a population reaches or exceeds 10%, this is deemed a humanitarian emergency requiring immediate rehabilitation using ready to use therapeutic and supplementary foods  that provide concentrations of fat, calories, protein and other nutrients all aimed at ensuring survival and rapid weight gain. Women of childbearing age, including those who are pregnant or breastfeeding as well as men also benefit from rehabilitation with RUTF or ready to use supplementary foods (RUSF), designed to also rehabilitate people in these conditions. These products are available via Title II.

However, in the case of non-emergency programs, participants are targeted based on the rate of “Stunting”, or chronic malnutrition, which exists when height-for-age among children under the age of 5 falls below 2 standard deviations under the global mean. The logic behind this is that there are milestones for linear growth that children need to reach before the age of 2 to avoid being developmentally disabled and to ensure a healthy life. Infants and young children under age 2 in this condition can recover from this and their linear growth can catch up to normal levels before they reach age 2.  However, after these children reach age 2, it becomes extremely difficult for their growth to catch up.  It is possible for a child to be both chronically and acutely malnourished (also known as “wasted”). It is also possible for stunted children not to be wasted and wasted children not to be stunted. However, there are certainly connections between these different types of malnutrition.  Nonetheless, stunting and wasting are indicative of different situations based on how and when they occur within the population. High levels of acute malnutrition indicate the existence of an acute shock as it does not take long for children to become acutely malnourished. This occurs when children are deprived of the food they need for a period of days or weeks (at most). However, it can take a long time for a child to become stunted. Children become stunted because they lack sufficient nutrients in their diet (both macro- and micro-nutrients) to fulfill their daily requirements. It takes months for a child to become stunted, and it also takes a long time for them to overcome this problem. If there are a lot of stunted children in the population, this indicate that the population is chronically food insecure and poor.

Thus, non-emergency Title II programs target populations with high chronic malnutrition rates among children under 5 as this is a clear red flag that there is a significant poverty and food insecurity problem within these populations. Targeting participants from these areas indicates that while there may not an active shock situation, there may still be a lot of food insecurity – which left unaddressed – could lead to more serious problems.  People living in these contexts are on the edge, and one missed harvest due to a storm or drought or earthquake or locust swarm or violent attack could result in them becoming part of the emergency case load of Title II programs.

Non-emergency Title II programs focus on ensuring that infants are exclusively breastfed until they are six months old, and that beyond that time their diets consist of the types of diverse foods that children of their age need to meet their linear growth milestones by age two. At the same, these programs  also address the underlying causes of chronic malnutrition. They train mothers to feed their children properly, including exclusive breastfeeding, take care to prevent water-borne disease through handwashing and use of clean water. At the same time, these programs recognize that mothers will be unable to feed their children the types of food they need if they are not able to produce or purchase it throughout the year. Raising these issues among all community members can build support and solidarity to ensure that children’s and women’s dietary needs are met. In addition, creation of clean water access and sanitation – including installation of accessible working water points and household latrines – support practices such as frequent handwashing with soap, and reduction of open defecation. These practices in turn reduce water-borne disease from hindering the absorption of the nutritious food being consumed. And, integrating these practices into people’s lives takes a long time, thus the longer timeframe of these programs is critical.

Non-emergency programs also provide a few more benefits that make them important to reduce the emergency caseload of Title II. They target countries and regions that are fragile and shock prone. They can detect changes in conditions,  both positive and negative, which can reduce time lags on responses. If the number of acutely malnourished children begins to escalate – this could easily occur within the areas where populations are most food insecure. If harvests begin to fail due to weather impacts, many farmers in the geography where the program is implemented (they may or may not be participants) will experience these conditions first.  The presence of an implementer (NGO) in these areas can ensure the monitoring of IPC levels, levels of acute malnutrition, impacts on harvests and prevalence of diseases – including those that are water-borne.

At the same time, these programs seek to enable participants to anticipate and cope better with the types of shocks that normally impact these geographic areas. Reviewing the history of the targeted population, it is possible to learn more about the major shocks that typically impact them, and they are sometimes cyclical. For instance, locust swarms may occur every so often in parts of East Africa. Working with communities likely to be impacted by these swarms during years when they don’t occur to prepare for when the locusts return will help participants to cope more effectively when this happens. There are now many agricultural technologies that enable farmers to adapt to drought. This could range from water-harvesting, to irrigation, to use of drought-adopted seeds, to reorienting productive systems through methods such as Resilient Design and Perma-gardening.[x]  The last two types of systems prevented farmers from losing their crops during the El Niño drought event in Zimbabwe mentioned above.[xi] It was a non-emergency Title II programs that provided training to farmers to enable them to maintain their crops in the face of this severe drought.

Finally, one of the key underlying causes of food insecurity is poverty.  Farmers may depend on their crops for food, but they need cash to fall back on when their crops fail, and they need to purchase food from markets. Also, for farmers to maintain their land and plant crops, they need cash for inputs and often to pay for land,  either as the owner or as a renter or lease holder.  It also costs money for children to attend school, and it costs money to get to markets, visit health centers, buy fertilizers and crop-protection products. Maintaining water points and latrines can also cost money because spare parts and their installation is not free. And when the program is over after five years of investment, ensuring that people not only achieve but also sustain their food security will mean that people have a secure source of cash and savings to fall back on.  Otherwise, closing the program will be commensurate to a shock for those who have benefitted from it.

A methodology that has proven itself over the years, and within the past nine years in Title II non-emergency programs has been the Graduation Approach.[xii]  Developed and initiated by BRAC in Bangladesh, this approach has been tested throughout the world in fragile contexts where large numbers of poor and food insecure people live.[xiii] The approach targets extremely poor people, provides them with food assistance safety-nets  and then links them to a savings and loan group where they meet others in their situation and obtain peer group support. At the same time, they are provided training in a livelihood opportunity for which there is demand within their context. This livelihood training could be agricultural (crops or livestock) or non-agricultural in nature and offers people the opportunity to become employed or operate their own business. After their training is complete, participants  receive small grants or assets (such as equipment or animals) that enable them to start their activities until they become viable. During this time, they continue to receive coaching and mentoring so that they can be successful within their chosen livelihood. They also receive training and support with respect to nutrition, water and sanitation and learn to anticipate and respond effectively to shocks. The Graduation Approach has been shown to ensure a high return on investment and results are sustained over time after the end of the program.[xiv]

Now that the program has moved to USDA, the leadership is reviewing the program and will likely make changes that will increase the cost  of food and ocean freight versus what is provided to those in need.[xv]  The recent Emergency Program set of funding opportunities stipulated that at least 50% of program budgets must be devoted to commodities and ocean freight.[xvi] This reduced the funding that could be provided to internal transportation storage and handling to distribute commodities. It also reduced the funds that could be provided for technical interventions such as monitoring of severe food insecurity and levels of acute malnutrition, training mothers about how to monitor and refer their children, and enabling technical interventions that will help people to recover from emergency situations. It is possible that the same 50% requirement may be put in place by USDA for future Non-Emergency Programs, and this could reduce the resources available to enable the sustainable improvement of food security and nutrition in extremely poor and fragile contexts as described above.

Changes in the legislation over the years made it possible to integrate international disaster assistance funds  with emergency Food for Peace programs enabling the use of cash, vouchers and local, regional and international procurement  to ensure that the right resources were available at the right time to address peoples’ needs. This prevented the need to wait 6 – 8  months for U.S. commodities to arrive in country to begin addressing acute malnutrition.  As noted above, the impact of acute malnutrition is rapid and if not addressed quickly will lead to death.

Similarly, U.S. legislative changes enabled the coordinated use of Development Assistance funds with non-emergency Food for Peace programs, which covered the cost of the complex interventions discussed above. These resources also provided the opportunity for programs to transition people away from dependence on U.S. food aid and foreign assistance.  While food aid has been important for non-emergency programs to build stability for those suffering chronic food insecurity, we will not ultimately accomplish Title II’s objectives if people remain dependent on food aid at the end of each program.

As global conditions worsened around the turn of the century, the need for emergency food aid programs increased around the world.  These needs began to reduce the funds available to pay for non-emergency programs. Thus, in the 2008 U.S. Farm Bill, a Non-Emergency “Safe Box” was integrated into Title II legislation to establish minimum funding to ensure that these programs could continue to be implemented. Currently $365 million is designated for the implementation of these programs.  $700 million of USG  funding from FY26 and FY27 allocations may be made available soon for these programs.[xvii]

While much remains unclear about the future of U.S. Title II non-emergency food aid programs, the need for activities that reduce and prevent high levels of acute and chronic food insecurity and malnutrition has not diminished,  and perhaps has increased, during the 18 months since the 2025 Executive Order to pause foreign assistance was announced.[xviii] It is also clear that addressing the underlying causes of food and nutrition insecurity is still important. Hopefully, USDA will hold true to this fundamental mandate of these programs. This will entail implementing these programs over a 5-year timeframe, in fragile geographies where shocks are frequent, among participants who are chronically poor and/or malnourished, while increasing peoples’ ability to cope with shocks, and producing outcomes that are sustainable.  If these are not the Title II mandate’s parameters for non-emergency programs, they run the risk of violating legislation..

Further Reading:

Food for Peace / U.S. Food Aid

Global Hunger, IPC, and Malnutrition

Country-specific articles relevant to your examples (Haiti, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, DRC, etc.)

REFERENCES:

[i] Miolene, Elissa, USDA takes over Food for Peace with $452M World Food Programme deal, 29 January 2026.

[ii] U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food for Peace Notice of Funding Opportunity, Fiscal Year 2025, May 13, 2026

[iii] Miolene, Elissa, House locks Food for Peace into USDA with 50% commodity requirement,1 May 2026,

[iv]  These progras were known variously as Development Activity Programs (DAPs), Multi-Year Activity Programs (MYAPs), Development Food Assistance Programs (DFAPs), Development Food Security Activities (DFSAs) and Resilience Food Security Activities (RFSAs). There were differences between these programs, but those differences were not necessarily associated with the names given to them.

[v] U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food for Peace Notice of Funding Opportunity, Fiscal Year 2025, May 13, 2026, https://grants.gov/search-results-detail/362375.

[vi] Integrated Phase Classification, https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipcinfo-website/ipc-overview-and-classification-system/en/?__cf_chl_f_tk=vmmArOlbSf51oWrK_G0UqCVyP0w6jSuy9SVydqdsIlk-1783098737-1.0.1.1-XKb_PsSY1mVf1b2u8K3Udd85lbGsjDgfDcO0yyY9UrE,

[vii] https://borgenproject.org/kore-lavi-provides-food-security-in-haiti/; accessed July 3, 2026.

[viii] United Nations, UN News, Zimbabwe faces worsening food crisis due to El Niño droughts, 7 August 2024, https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1152936.

[ix] IFPRI, Productive Safety-Net Program, https://essp.ifpri.info/productive-safety-net-program-psnp/, accessed July 3, 2026

[x] FANRPAN, Scaling up Resilience Design in Zimbabwe: Position Paper, https://fanrpan.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Takunda_CareSlideDeck-1.pdf.

[xi] Chitsa, Tanaka, Growing Hope: Community gardens flourish amidst El Nino challenges, 27 August 2024, https://www.carezimbabwe.org/growing-hope-community-gardens-flourish-amidst-el-nino-challenges/.

[xii] AVSI, Graduating to Resilience, https://www.avsi.org/en/graduating-to-resilience

[xiii] BRAC, Graduation Out of Ultra Poverty, https://www.brac.net/solutions/development/ending-poverty/ultra-poor-graduation/

[xiv] Abrams, William, Joshua Goldstein, Larry Reed, Carine Roenen, and Jean Francois Tardif, The Business Case for Investing in Graduation, September 2017, ultra-poverty.org, https://www.ultra-poverty.org/blog-post/the-business-case-for-investing-in-graduation/#.

[xv] Miolene, Elissa, House locks Food for Peace into USDA with 50% commodity requirement, 1 May 2026,

[xvi] U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food for Peace Notice of Funding Opportunity, Fiscal Year 2025, May 13, 2026,

[xvii] Miolene, Elissa, US Dept of Agriculture to reboot Food for Peace’s ‘safe box’ programs,

[xviii] The White House, Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid, January 20, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/reevaluating-and-realigning-united-states-foreign-aid/.

Mara Russell is a career programmer of Food for Peace Title II food aid including leading Food Aid Management, and spearheading CARE’s food aid for decades.

On Resilience: What is Resilience in Anti-Hunger Aid?

July 1, 2026     This ongoing column in Hunger Notes was created to explore the fascination aid agencies have with the term “resilience,” which to some degree has replaced other broad, aspirational buzzwords like “development”, “sustainability,” and “empowerment.”  Like those other terms, resilience has become a goal of many aid programs, both development and humanitarian.  Yet, there has never been concensus about how to measure if and when resilience is achieved.  This is because resilience means as many different things as there are programs addressing it.

Food, nutrition and other anti-hunger aid programs have been under the banner of resilience for most of the last decade.  Today, the US Department of Agriculture is seeking inputs about its Food for Peace programming including lessons about the large “Resilience Food Security Activities”, or RFSAs whereby diverse NGOs aimed to foster resilience with food aid.  So, sharpening and clarifying the relationship between resilience and hunger is timely.

Key donors, including the European Union and US Government, as well as the Red Cross, tend to view resilience as “capacity under stress.”  The International Food Policy Research Institute and key advisors to the former USAID posited resilience as the ability of households, communities or systems to “withstand, adapt to, and recover from shocks.”

In practice, for any given program, what does this mean?  The EU representative in Juba, South Sudan, was very clear in defining resilience as the rate of acute malnutrition among children.  Other programs measure resilience as essentially being the same thing as sustainability (do the program’s outcomes or systems persist after the end of funding?).

When USAID had an office of resilience, it promoted resilience primarily in terms of household livelihoods, community cohesion and food security throughout cycles of drought and floods, measuring:

  • ♦  Resilience capacities (absorptive, adaptive, transformative)
  • ♦  Well‑being outcomes (food security, nutrition, income stability)
  • ♦  Shock severity and frequency
  • ♦  Longitudinal household surveys to observe recovery patterns.

The Rockefeller Foundation has defined resilience as the capacity of cities, communities, and systems to survive, adapt, and grow despite chronic stresses and acute shocks, and in this includes good, inclusive governance, leadership, and urban planning.

The Red Cross has been piloting resilience measures for many years, focusing on “risk” assessment.  It has developed a dashboard which measures resilience across 11 dimensions: disaster/risk management, health, water and sanitation, shelter, food and nutrition security, social cohesion, inclusion, economic opportunities, infrastructure and services, natural resource management, and connectedness. It allows resilience comparisons by community and by demographic categories such as gender and education.

These approaches to resilience are oriented largely toward relief-to-development programming, assuming recurring disasters at the population level.

“Resilience” is widely used but used differently for measuring ecological and environmental change as well as human psychology.  Meanwhile, engineers and architects measure resilience in precise ways such as structural integrity.

A decade ago, a large roundtable, or symposium, of 100 experts from government agencies, NGOs, and academia was held to share progress in measuring resilience.  The summary can be found here.  Among its conclusions:  “There are no single metrics. There is a need for evaluations to tell us what resilience is and what works. So far — “Resilience has been episodic and serendipitous through extraordinary people in missions.” (The symposium was hosted by American University, World Vision, Mercy Corps, Catholic Relief Services, the American Red Cross, IBTCI, the Wilson Center, and Management Systems International.)

USAID’s last resilience policy update, building on a legacy focused on disaster risk reduction, was updated in 2024, here  It covers a wide range of sectors and topics:  “USAID long ago recognized that resilience is not simply a food security issue; it is essential for managing risks across a range of goals across the areas of climate, health, peace, education, democracy and governance, poverty alleviation, and economic growth. While earlier resilience efforts focused on community-level programming, this policy emphasizes that we are also now investing more in host-country and local systems, with an eye toward development, diplomacy and policy solutions such as expanding social protection systems, enabling displaced persons to access jobs, and reforming national policies to better serve marginalized groups. So, what resilience means in practice will continue to evolve and will be revisited in this column.”

As the USG reboots its foreign aid, it will be challenged to define resilience more cleanly and usefully, or it will fall out of use.

 

New Food for Peace (FFP) Food Aid Programming 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

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

A Promising Model to Predict Rates of U.S. Food Insecurity

As  covered in a September 20 Hunger Notes article, the USDA announced that they would no longer be collecting the annual data measuring household food insecurity and cancelling the Household Food Security Reports. This means that the 2024 report will be the last under the current format. However, at the same time, food insecurity has been on the rise in the U.S. for the past two decades, 17% from 2001 to 2023.  Ending this annual data collection and report will result in a critical gap in the ability to understand and address food insecurity in the U.S.

Sophie Collyer, Director of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy, at Columbia University, in a brief published Oct 22, 2025, outlines a model to predict food insecurity rates at the population level, adult, and child levels, in the absence of the USDA’s annual data set.  The model uses secondary data of poverty, unemployment, specific food inflation rates, all of which are highly correlated with food insecurity. When the model was tested against the past 14 years of historical food insecurity rates, it was shown to align closely.  The model was also used to predict food insecurity rates for 2024, which at the time the brief was published, the USDA report was still unavailable.

Figures 1 (above) and 2 (below) are taken from Collyer’s report and demonstrate how close the model’s predictions are to the USDA official rates among the share of all individuals, adults, and children, living in food-insecure homes.

For the results shown in Figure 1 (share of all individuals living in food-secure homes), in all but four of the years, the model was within 0.4 percentage points of the official USDA rate, with the largest difference in those four years 0.7 percentage points.

For the prediction of rates of adults, shown in Figure 2, in all but three years, the model is within 0.4 percentage points or less of the official USDA rates.

The model’s prediction of rates among children was within 0.4 percentage points in half of the years, with the largest difference 1.2 percentage points, the lowest performing among the three predictions.

Collyer indicates that the model will continue to be refined.

With the 2025 cancellation of the USDA’s historic, official household food insecurity dataset, this model offers a promising substitute for providing credible estimates of food insecurity for policy and program planning.

Reference:  https://povertycenter.columbia.edu/sites/povertycenter.columbia.edu/files/content/Publications/Predicting-National-Rates-Food-Insecurity-CPSP-2025.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com

https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details?pubid=109895

CSIS Reviews Implications of the Final U.S. Hunger Report

A new Jan. 6 report from the think tank, CSIS, reviews the recent U.S. Government study about hunger in America, noting that this until-now annual food security or hunger report will no longer be conducted by the US Government which deemed it political and inducing fear.

Caitlin Welsh, the author of this review observes that “the end of the report represents a rupture in long-standing data on food security among Americans, as there is no report that provides the same information to the public and policymakers today.”  This survey had been created with bipartisan support and helped advise Congress about anti-hunger programs.

The USDA Household Food Security in the US publication looks back at 2024 found that roughly 1 in 7 Americans were food insecure, and that “5.4 percent of households experienced very low food security.”  Hunger was not uniform everywhere in the U.S.  For example, 36% of families in the Washington DC area experienced food insecurity in 2024 and “the Greater Boston Food Bank found that in 2024, 37 percent of Massachusetts households faced food insecurity in 2024.”

Welsh writes that food insecurity in the US has in the past tracked the health of the U.S. economy.  In recent years, hunger has increased, in significant part because of increasing retail food prices.  Welsh says “alongside elevated food prices, experts may be right to assume a continued rise in food insecurity in 2025.  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 among U.S. families.”

CSIS is the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an independent, non-partisan think tank based in Washington, DC.  See:  https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-us-hunger-data-what-we-lose-termination-usdas-household-food-security-united-states

For the full US Department of Agriculture report, published on Dec. 30, 2025, see:  https://ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/publications/113623/ERR-358.pdf?v=89918  authored by Matthew P. Rabbitt, Madeline Reed-Jones, Laura J. Hales, Shellye Suttles, and Michael P. Burke who are economists in the Economic Research Service of USDA.

See also, the related Hunger Notes article on this issue by Kathy Goss:  https://www.worldhunger.org/united-states-cancels-household-food-security-report/

United States Cancels Household Food Security Report

In the United States, domestic hunger has been surveyed annually by the United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA, since 1995.  For 30 years, the USDA’s Economic Research Service has measured the level of food insecurity among U.S. households.

On September 20, 2025, the USDA announced that they are cancelling the Household Food Security Reports, meaning the 2024 report will be the last under the current format.  In its announcement, the U.S. administration stated they were cancelling the survey because “These redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger”.   Additionally, the announcement indicated that “trends in the prevalence of food insecurity have remained virtually unchanged…between 2019 – 2023”

However, according to the USDA Household Food Security Report of 2023, food insecurity has been on the rise since 2020.  Across the 4-year period, the prevalence of food insecurity (those with low and very low food insecurity) among US households rose from 10.5% in 2020 to 13.5% in 2023, an increase of just less than 5 million households – representing 47.5 million Americans.  The same trend is seen with the prevalence of households with very low food security rising from 3.9% in 2020 to 5.1% in 2023, representing 1.7 million households.  According to the USDA, the definition of a food insecure household is one which had difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members because of a lack of resources.  A household with very low food security was one in which the food intake of some members of the household was reduced, and normal eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year because of limited resources.

The cessation of this report occurs at a time when the USG’s 2026 federal budget expands the work requirements for those receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.  According to the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, approximately 6% of beneficiaries, or 2.4 million Americans could lose benefits because of these changes to the law.  The loss of this key data source will likely make it more difficult to understand the scale of food insecurity in the U.S.

Various food security policy, advocacy and research experts are arguing that the cancellation of this annual survey will result in the loss of a significant data source that is used to inform policy on how to combat food insecurity in the U.S..  For example, Bread for the World issued a press release urging USDA to reverse the decision.  They argued that the survey/report has been foundational for understanding how families experience food insecurity, especially children, and for making evidence-based policy decisions.  The Food Research and Action Center criticized USDA’s decision as “shortsighted” and warned that eliminating the report hides the struggles of millions of families. They emphasized the importance of data in assessing policy impacts (e.g. SNAP cuts).

Ending the USDA Household Security Report eliminates one of the few consistent measures of household hunger at a time when food insecurity data is more important than ever. As Megan Lott, a food policy researcher, notes, “the report is an irreplaceable tool for assessing how policy decisions shape families’ lives.”   Protecting robust food insecurity data is not just a technical question, it is a matter of public accountability and an investment in evidence-based policymaking that prioritizes the well-being of households nationwide.

Update: Independent news sources indicated that the final set of data for 2024 would be released in part or whole on October 22, 2025, which has not yet happened.  The U.S. government was shut down from Oct 1-Nov 12.  Watch this space for additional updates.

References:

1. USDA Press release, “USDA Terminates Redundant Food Insecurity Survey September 20, 2025” https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2025/09/20/usda-terminates-redundant-food-insecurity-survey

2. USDA Economic Research Service, “Household Food Security in the United States in 2023”
https://ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/publications/109896/ERR-337.pdf?v=33413

3. Congressional Budget Office Congressional Budget Office, “Estimated Effects of Public Law 119-21 on Participation and Benefits” August 11, 2025 https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-08/61367-SNAP.pdf

4. Bread for the World Press Release “Bread Urges the USDA to Retain the Annual Food Security Survey and Report” September 23, 2025. https://www.bread.org/article/bread-urges-the-usda-to-retain-the-annual-food-security-survey-and-report/

5. Food Research and Action Center Press Release “USDA’s Decision to End 30-Year Food Security Report Will Hide the Struggle of Millions of Families to Put Food on the Table” September 23, 2025
https://frac.org/news/foodsecuritysurveyterminationsept25

6. Douglas, L. (2025, September 22). Impact of Trump cuts will be harder to track without USDA hunger survey, advocates say. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/impact-trump-cuts-will-be-harder-track-without-usda-hunger-survey-advocates-say-2025-09-22/

7. Datz, Todd. “Cancellation of food insecurity survey a blow to understanding hunger in U.S.” Harvard Crimson. October 16, 2025. https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/cancellation-of-food-insecurity-survey-a-blow-to-understanding-hunger-in-u-s/

Status of McGovern-Dole School Feeding Unclear

In May 2025, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) cancelled most of its existing foreign assistance programs, including those involving overseas school feedings.  These projects are referred to as “McGovern-Dole” that were projected for the future.

The overall program, named after former senators George McGovern and Bob Dole, has provided life-saving meals in a school setting to over 31 million of the world’s most vulnerable children and has been one of America’s signature child nutrition and food security programs.  In 2022, the program fed nutritious school meals to more than 2.7 million food-insecure children during the school year, while training teachers and rehabilitating schools, in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

All of these school feeding projects were implemented by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and/or the World Food Programme.  The recent, May 2025 cancellations occured abruptly, as NGOs were preparing to design and compete for new awards in more countries.  No rationale from the U.S. Administration was given, despite Congressional questions to USDA.  The Trump Administration has further deleted the program from its FY2026 budget request.  Currently, American NGOs, such as World Vision, Save the Children, Project Concern and Counterpart International are challenged by the loss sudden and unexpected loss of support.

Catholic Relief Services (CRS), one such NGO, announced how these terminations leave school-age children in the lurch:  “Beginning in July, more than 780,000 children across 11 countries will be left without their school meal, as 11 out of CRS’ 13 projects have been terminated—deepening the crises of hunger, malnutrition and poverty that already threaten their ability to learn, grow and thrive. …. In 2024, evaluations of our work highlighted increased literacy rates, economic growth and reduced absences due to hunger and illness. … A recent study in Guatemala and Honduras revealed that 76% of respondents cited three major benefits of USDA’s McGovern Dole School Feeding program that reduce migration: increased access to education, improved agricultural production and a stronger local economy.”

Civileats reports that “the canceled grants will mean less demand for U.S. farmer commodities, even as other trade policies are pinching growers.  And it will contribute to shrinking the United States’ soft-power influence around the world.”

McGovern-Dole school feeding programs have been seen as a way to encourage young girls to attend schools in settings where many girls find it difficult.

Evaluations of school feeding programs are common, such as by WFP, USDA, and NGOs.  A meta-analysis commissioned by the U.S. government in 2020 found that the effect of take-home rations on school participation is positive for all school children and is the same for girls as for boys, while the effect of in-school meals on school attendance is larger for girls than for boys.

Globally, an estimated 350-400 million children receive school feeding each year.  In years past, reviews by the World Bank and the respected International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) recognized the benefits of school feeding in terms of nutrition, educational gains, women’s empowerment, and long-term development.  In 2009, the World Bank published Rethinking School Feeding: Social Safety Nets, Child Development, and the Education Sector, cast school feeding as part of safety nets and as long-term investments.  In 2021, the World Bank and WFP launched an initiative that evaluated the efficacy of school feeding programs via experimental impact evaluations in countries like Burundi, Guatemala, Jordan, Malawi, and The Gambia.  Results from 2024 found that school meals, benefited an estimated 418 million children globally, enhanced educational outcomes (e.g., enrollment and retention) and acted as social safety nets during shocks.

Senators Bob Dole (Republican) and George McGovern (Democrat), who sponsored the enabling legislation for this school feeding aid, were both nominees of their respective parties for U.S. President, and both served in Europe during World War II.  Senator McGovern flew 35 precarious missions as a pilot during 1944-1945 from Italy over Germany and after the war flew food aid for the recovery of Europe.

Senator Dole championed humanitarian causes abroad.  He played a key role in mobilizing Senate support for Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 to 1996, pressuring the Clinton administration and NATO to address the Bosnian War.  Senator McGovern served as the first Director of the U.S. Food for Peace Program before becoming a Senator.  During that time, he worked with the White House to create the U.N. World Food Programme, which was approved by the U.N. General Assembly in 1961 and launched in 1963.

Update: However, on May 12, 2025 USDA announced a call for Fiscal Year 2025 applications for McGovern Dole programming.  The priority countries listed are: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Honduras, Mozambique, Pakistan, Senegal, and Sierra Leone.

– S. Hansch, WHES Board

 

This article was updated and corrected on Nov 11, 2025 to note the status of this program remains unclear and that a new funding opportunity was announced. This is a developing issue.