“Millions of people will die,” said Andy Harrington.

Governments are drastically slashing their international development assistance budgets to focus on domestic concerns and military spending.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warns that global funding for humanitarian aid fell by a third in 2025.

“It’s really quite catastrophic,” said Harrington.

WHY IT MATTERS: Millions of people will die.

Harrington said he was standing outside a childhood malnutrition centre in South Sudan earlier this year where there was a lineup of children suffering from hunger.

“We’re not talking, ‘we missed a meal here;’ we’re talking seriously acute malnutrition with consequences for life,” he said.

As he was taking in that disturbing scene, he was informed that the centre would be shutting down in 24 hours with no prior notice.

It was one of 1,100 centres being shuttered in South Sudan alone, all casualties of budget cuts at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

The Lancet, a medical journal published in the United Kingdom, estimates that 14 million people will die by 2030 because of the USAID belt-tightening.

But it is not just USAID. The UK, Germany, the European Union and many other governments around the world are also chopping their humanitarian aid budgets.

The Canadian government announced in its 2025 budget that it will be reducing foreign aid spending by $2.7 billion between 2026 and 2030.

Harrington has been told that most of the cuts will be to long-term development programs rather than emergency assistance.

In the meantime, global hunger is spreading at a pace not seen in decades.

“Gaza crossed into famine, following Sudan, where famine started in 2024 and grew in 2025,” he said.

“These are stark reminders of the human cost of inaction, and how quickly hunger can escalate when the world chooses to look away.”

The number of acutely food insecure people nearly tripled to 295 million people in 2024 from 105 million in 2016, according to the Global Report on Food Crises.

“We get lost in the numbers, but these are real human beings,” said Harrington.

“These are mothers and fathers with children that they’re watching starve.”

Harrington fully expects that the number of acutely food insecure people grew in 2025 and will only get worse in 2026 as more funding cuts take effect.

He believes it is not too late for Canada to reverse course and drop the looming cuts to its international aid budget.

“Before we make these cuts, we have to question ourselves as a country and say, ‘who do we want to be?’ ” he said.

“When others are stepping back, we need to be stepping forward and standing with the world.”

Future funding

Harrington understands that Canadians are facing a cost-of-living crisis at home, but he noted that the average inflation rate in the countries where the Canadian Foodgrains Bank works is 45 per cent.

That is a harrowing statistic for a family living on a few dollars per week.

He worries what impact the government cuts will have on his organization, which receives about 40 per cent of its funding from Ottawa and the remainder from private donations.

In the 2024-25 budget year, the organization provided $74.6 million of assistance to 1.18 million people overseas.

He doesn’t anticipate much of a funding reduction for the upcoming fiscal year, but he is concerned about future years as the proposed government cuts take effect.

Harrington said it is going to be hard for organizations such as his to fill the massive gaps that have been created in humanitarian aid programs because they are already overstretched.

He is grateful that private donors appear to be stepping up to help fill the void.

However, if governments don’t reverse course in a few short years, people around the world will be asking themselves, “what have we done?” when they turn on their televisions.

“The pictures are going to be horrific,” said Harrington.

He is confident those disturbing pictures will trigger a wave of public empathy and support.

However, it will be far more costly in terms of both money and human lives to address the horror at that stage rather than preventing it from happening today.

The Canadian Foodgrains Bank is a partnership of 15 churches and church agencies that works with local partners in 37 countries.

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“This is a devastating situation for millions of civilians impacted by the conflict on both sides, and we are deeply aware of the escalating humanitarian need in Gaza,” said Foodgrains Bank executive director Andy Harrington in an Oct. 23 news release.

Over 6,000 men, women and children in Israel and Gaza have died in two weeks of conflict, the Foodgrains Bank said. More than 1.4 million people have been displaced.

As a member of the Humanitarian Coalition, the Foodgrains Bank is working with partner organizations and local groups to bring humanitarian assistance to the area.

“As a humanitarian organization with members and partners working in some of the most challenging regions of the world, we believe all people have a right to receive life-saving assistance, and ongoing access to basic necessities including food, water, medical care and shelter,” Harrington said. ”

“These necessities are quickly running out in Gaza, and an urgent humanitarian response is desperately needed.”

One of the greatest challenges groups face is the issue of access, said Stefan Epp-Koop, the Canadian Foodgrains Bank’s senior humanitarian manager.

“At this stage, there is almost no access into Gaza for humanitarian organizations to provide aid, or for local partners in Gaza to access desperately needed supplies. The provision of humanitarian assistance is also tremendously challenging given the risks involved amid the current conflict,” he said.

On Oct. 21 a convoy of trucks carrying humanitarian aid crossed into southern Gaza for the first time since Israel began the siege.

Twenty flatbed trucks, flying white flags and honking their horns, exited the Rafah crossing after checks and headed into Gaza’s southern area which includes the major towns of Rafah and Khan Younis where hundreds of thousands of people made homeless by Israel’s unrelenting air war are sheltering. 

Israel’s “total siege” of Gaza, launched after the Oct. 7 cross-border attack on southern Israel by militants of the Islamist movement Hamas, has left the enclave’s 2.3 million people running out of food, water, medicines and fuel. 

Palestinian officials were disappointed that fuel supplies were not included in the consignment of food, water and medical supplies and added that the aid was only 3% of what used to get into Gaza before the crisis. 

“Excluding the fuel from the humanitarian aid means the lives of patients and injured will remain at risk. Gaza hospitals are running out of the basic requirements to pursue medical interventions,” the Gaza health ministry said. 

The United Nations said the convoy included life-saving supplies would be received and distributed by the Palestinian Red Crescent, with the consent of Hamas, which rules Gaza. 

By Oct. 23, aid and security sources reported that two more convoys had arrived via the Rafah crossing from Egypt.

–with files from Reuters.

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“The Ukraine crisis is creating shock waves when it comes to supply chain and especially food security and impacting the most vulnerable at the most difficult time,” said Harjit Sajjan, minister of international development.

“We are making adjustments to reflect this… People are going hungry because the prices of food have gone up,” Sajjan told Reuters in an interview in Jordan, the first leg of a regional tour that also takes him to Egypt and Lebanon.

He did not give the new aid figure but the Ottawa-based Canadian International Development Platform said there was a 27 per cent rise in foreign aid last year to around $6.6 billion.

The United Nations has said a global food crisis fuelled by conflict, climate shocks and the COVID-19 pandemic is growing because of the ripple effects of the war in Ukraine driving rising prices of food, fuel and fertilizer.

Over 50 million people in eastern Africa will face acute food insecurity this year, according to a new study backed by the U.N.’s World Food Program (WFP) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Sajjan said Canada is boosting aid to the WFP, whose annual requirements have reached an all-time high of $22.2 billion, without taking away from other development programs.

“We have increased our support for the Middle East region when it comes to food,” he said citing as one example Lebanon, which has a significant reliance on Ukraine wheat and is facing bread shortages.

He described as a positive step an agreement brokered with Russia and Ukraine last month by the United Nations and Turkey to unblock grain exports from Black Sea ports but said the few shipments so far were not enough to ease the crisis.

Canada was also increasing aid to Egypt, typically the world’s biggest wheat importer, and to Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria that have been riven by conflict.

Canada was also looking at how to help improve resilience in African countries, noting in particular the continent’s shortage of food storage.

— Suleiman Al-Khalidi is Reuters’ chief correspondent for Jordan and Syria.

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The U.S. Treasury Department in a fact sheet outlined that Americans can engage in transactions related to agricultural and medical exports, the work of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), COVID-19 relief, humanitarian assistance and telecommunications and internet services to support the free flow of information.

The Treasury on Tuesday also authorized transactions necessary for certain activities, including for humanitarian projects in Russia and Ukraine, by NGOs despite U.S. sanctions on Moscow.

Washington has imposed several rafts of sanctions targeting Moscow since its Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, including targeting the country’s largest lenders and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It has also issued general licenses alongside the sanctions, authorizing certain transactions related to humanitarian assistance, agricultural and medical trade and other support.

The biggest attack on a European state since 1945, the invasion has killed or wounded thousands. More than 12 million people need humanitarian assistance in Ukraine, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday.

Since starting what it calls a special operation to demilitarize Ukraine, Russia has bombed cities to rubble and hundreds of civilian bodies have been found in towns where its forces withdrew. It denies targeting civilians and says, without evidence, that signs of atrocities were staged.

Western countries and Ukraine accuse Putin of unprovoked aggression.

The U.N.’s World Food Programme has warned that the conflict will have a global impact on food security, as the Black Sea basin is one of the world’s most important areas for grain and agricultural production.

World Bank president David Malpass on Tuesday urged advanced economies to boost food aid to developing countries, and work to increase production of food, energy and fertilizer to address shortages and rising prices caused by the war.

The Treasury said it was working to address food security risks, including through strengthening countries’ domestic food production and unlocking trade finance to smooth disrupted supply chains.

“Treasury is deeply concerned about the risks to global food supplies and food prices at a time when many emerging market and developing countries are still struggling to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic,” the fact sheet read.

— Reporting for Reuters by Daphne Psaledakis in Washington.

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During a U.N. Security Council meeting, Guterres urged Ethiopia’s government to allow “unrestricted movement of desperately needed fuel, cash, communications equipment and humanitarian supplies” into Tigray, Amhara and Afar.

“Our colleagues on the ground are sharing increasingly alarming eye-witness testimony of the suffering — including growing accounts of hunger-related deaths,” Guterres said.

“In locations where screening has been possible, we are seeing acute malnutrition rates that remind us of the onset of the 2011 Somalia famine,” he said.

The 15-member Security Council met after the Ethiopian government last week expelled seven senior U.N. officials for meddling in internal affairs. The United Nations has rejected the move and said there was no proof to back up the accusations.

Guterres it was “particularly disturbing” given the looming famine, while U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield described it as “reckless,” adding: “There’s no justification for the government of Ethiopia’s action, none at all.”

War broke out 11 months ago between Ethiopia’s federal troops and forces loyal to the TPLF, which controls Tigray. Thousands have died, millions have fled their homes and the conflict has spilled into neighbouring Amhara and Afar.

Guterres said up to seven million people in Tigray, Amhara and Afar need help, including five million in Tigray where some 400,000 people are estimated to be living in famine-like conditions.

“Ethiopian children are starving. People are dying because they cannot access food, water and basic health care. This is not a situation caused by natural disaster. It is caused by those who continue to choose the path of war,” Ireland’s U.N. Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason told the council.

Guterres urged the Security Council to back U.N. aid efforts. However, any strong action by the body — such as sanctions — is unlikely as Russia and China have made clear they believe the Tigray conflict is an internal affair for Ethiopia.

China’s U.N. Ambassador Zhang Jun on Wednesday called for “quiet diplomacy in order to prevent a deadlock” over the expulsion of the U.N. officials.

— Reporting for Reuters by Michelle Nichols at the U.N.

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Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who flew to visit the worst-affected town of Les Cayes in southwest Haiti soon after Saturday’s quake of magnitude 7.2, had praised the dignity shown by survivors and promised a rapid escalation of aid.

But following another night of rains, residents in Les Cayes, including those camped in a mushrooming tent city in the centre of the town, complained of scant help on the ground.

Dozens of people showed up at the local airport demanding food after a helicopter arrived carrying supplies, according to a Reuters witness. Police intervened to allow a truck carrying aid to leave.

Pierre Cenel, a local judge in Les Cayes, a town of some 100,000 inhabitants, aimed his ire at the government in Port-au-Prince, echoing the bubbling frustration in the hardest-hit regions.

“As a judge, I must not have a political opinion. But as a man, as a man concerned about the situation of my country, nothing is working. They didn’t do anything to prepare for this disaster,” Cenel said in downtown Les Cayes.

Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, is still recovering from a quake 11 years ago that killed more than 200,000. The latest calamity comes just over a month after the July 7 assassination of President Jovenel Moise plunged the country into political turmoil.

Jerry Chandler, the head of Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency, which handles emergency response, said he was aware that aid had yet to reach many communities but said officials were working hard to deliver support and appealed for patience.

“The frustration and despair of the population is understood, but… the population is asked not to block the convoys so that the Civil Protection can do its job and help those in need,” he told a news conference.

There were at least 600,000 people in need of humanitarian assistance and 135,000 families displaced, Chandler said, adding that the goal was to deliver aid to everyone in need within a week.

In an effort to avoid what it said was a confused response to the 2010 quake, Haiti’s government has sent a list of humanitarian needs to partners and is sorting the international aid as it arrives to distribute it to the most needy, Chandler said.

On Wednesday morning, four U.S. Coast Guard helicopters landed in Les Cayes, bringing patients from more remote areas for treatment, according to an airport worker. The United States has dispatched humanitarian supplies as well as search and rescue teams to Haiti.

Latin American countries such as Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela have also sent food, medicine and supplies, and Taiwan — which has diplomatic relations with Haiti — also swiftly dispatched aid. Puerto Rican authorities said they were sending more rescue workers and doctors who were expected to arrive on Wednesday.

Risk of disease

In the fast-expanding tent city in Les Cayes, residents desperately pleaded for assistance. Aid workers have also warned about the risks of waterborne diseases, such as cholera.

“We need help,” said Roosevelt Milford, a pastor speaking on radio on behalf of the hundreds camping out in soggy fields since the quake destroyed their homes.

Milford and others complained that they lacked even the most basic types of aid, such as food, clean drinking water, and shelter from the rain. Tanks of drinking water were destroyed during the quake, impacting reserves, authorities said.

Tropical Storm Grace, which sloughed across southern Haiti this week, had swept away many shelters and inundated the field, adding to the misery.

In a country with high levels of violent crime, residents had set up their own security teams to keep watch at night, paying particular attention to the safety of women and girls, he added.

Security concerns about the gang-controlled areas on the route from the capital Port-au-Prince, as well as quake damage to some roads, have slowed access to some of the worst-affected zones difficult for aid and rescue teams.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Tuesday that successful negotiations with armed groups had permitted a humanitarian convoy to reach Les Cayes.

Chandler said the government was now escalating the number of aid convoys travelling by land, and hoped to soon reach three per day.

However, he said flash flooding and landslides in the wake of Grace, which swept past Jamaica by Tuesday afternoon, worsened the difficulties of reaching remote communities.

In the smaller town of L’Asile, some 60 km to the northeast of Les Cayes and home to more than 30,000 people, community leader Aldorf Hilaire said government help had yet to arrive, and survivors were reliant on support from charities such as Doctors Without Borders.

“We are desperate,” he told Reuters. “The springs are dirty: the water is not drinkable… We had a bad night during the storm and the people need tents and tarps.”

Hospitals damaged

Authorities said on Wednesday that the earthquake had killed at least 1,941 people and injured some 9,900 others, but with rescuers still pulling bodies from the rubble the tally looks set to rise.

In a rare piece of good news, 34 people had been rescued from under the rubble in the last two days, Chandler said, though as time passes, hopes for survivors dim. It was difficult to carry out search and rescue operations due to landslides in some areas, he added.

Quake damage has hampered the work of several major hospitals. Doctors in makeshift tents have battled to save the injured, from young children to the elderly.

Dozens in the Les Cayes tent city hailed from the nearby poor neighbourhood of Impasse Filadelfia, where crumbling cement homes, contorted tin roofs and soaked mattresses lined narrow dirt roads.

Water surged into the modest homes after a fast-moving river that edges the neighbourhood burst its banks during the quake.

“We are crying out for help,” said one of them, Claudel Ledan. “All our houses collapsed and we need help from the government urgently.”

— Laura Gottesdiener is a Reuters correspondent covering Mexico and Central America.

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The destruction of the 120,000-tonne capacity structure at the port, the main entry point for food imports, meant buyers must rely on smaller private storage facilities for their wheat purchases with no government reserves to fall back on.

Kuwait’s ambassador to Lebanon, Abdulaal al-Qenaie, said in comments to local radio VdL at the weekend that the silo was first built in 1969 with a Kuwaiti development loan.

The Gulf monarchy will now rebuild the silo so it remains a symbol of “how to manage relations between two brotherly countries that respect each other,” Qenaie was cited as saying.

The port explosion killed at least 180 people, injured thousands and wrecked swathes of the Lebanese capital, pushing the government to resign.

The now-caretaker economy minister, Raoul Nehme, has reassured the public there would be no flour or bread crisis in Lebanon, which buys almost all its wheat from abroad.

Plans for another grain silo in Lebanon’s second largest port Tripoli were shelved years ago due to a lack of funding, a United Nations official, port official and regional grain expert told Reuters earlier this month.

Humanitarian aid has poured into Lebanon. But foreign donors have made clear they will not bail out the state without reforms to tackle entrenched corruption and negligence.

Gulf Arab states who once gave Lebanon financial support have grown weary in recent years of the Iran-backed Hezbollah’s expanding role in state affairs.

— Reporting for Reuters by Ghaida Ghantous and Ellen Francis.

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Tomas Ojea Quintana, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, urged the U.N. Security Council to reconsider sanctions imposed on the isolated country over its nuclear and missile programs, so as to ensure food supplies.

North Korea, where a famine in the mid-1990s is believed to have killed three million people, does not report COVID-19 cases to the World Health Organization.

The pandemic has brought “drastic economic hardship” to North Korea, Ojea Quintana said, with a 90 per cent fall in trade with China in March and April leading to lost incomes.

Expressing concern about reports of an increase of homeless people in large cities and skyrocketing medicine prices, he said in a statement: “An increasing number of families eat only twice a day, or eat only corn, and some are starving.”

Ojea Quintana urged Pyongyang to allow humanitarian aid to be delivered “without restrictions.” Operations have been suspended outside the capital, leaving vaccine stocks and other aid “stranded” at the border.

He urged North Korea to free prisoners during the pandemic, citing accounts of prisoner deaths caused by hard work, lack of food, contagious diseases and overcrowding.

Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the U.N.’s World Food Programme, told reporters the humanitarian situation in North Korea remained “bleak.”

More than 10 million people, or 40 per cent of the population, need humanitarian aid, she said. The WFP hopes to reach 1.2 million people there with food rations this year.

Byrs said widespread malnutrition had damaged the health and development of children — with one in five under the age of five stunted — as well as pregnant and nursing mothers.

— Reporting for Reuters by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva.

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The decision comes amid rising pressure from the U.S. farm lobby for government purchases as growers and ranchers struggle to get their goods to market because of disruptions caused by the pandemic, forcing some of them to throw out their supplies.

“We want to purchase as much of this milk, or other protein products, hams and pork products, and move them into where they can be utilized in our food banks, or possibly even into international humanitarian aid,” Perdue said in an interview on Fox Business Network.

Reuters reported on Monday that USDA will spend up to $15.5 billion in the initial phase of its plan to bolster the nation’s food supply chain against the impacts of the outbreak, the first big push to ensure the pandemic doesn’t trigger consumer food shortages (all figures US$).

In the United States, several beef and pork packing plants have shut down as workers fall ill or die from the virus. Smithfield Foods, for example, the world’s biggest pork processor, said on Sunday it will shut a U.S. plant indefinitely due to a rash of coronavirus cases among employees and warned the country was moving “perilously close to the edge” in supplies for grocers.

Some dairy farmers have also been dumping milk because of a loss of their regular buyers, and labourers and truckers are in short supply to work farms and deliver produce, according to Reuters reporting.

On Tuesday, the National Pork Producers Council, which represents U.S. hog farmers, called on the administration to help by purchasing more than $1 billion in pork, and using it to supplement food bank programs facing increased demand due to rising unemployment.

Lawmakers and other industry groups have also supported the idea of government purchases of farm goods.

Separately on Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security announced an easing of H-2A visa restrictions that it said would make it easier for U.S. agricultural businesses to hire immigrant workers who are already legally in the country.

— Reporting for Reuters by Richard Valdmanis.

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By 2050 the Food and Agri­culture Organization (FAO) anticipates food production must rise 60 per cent globally to feed a population projected by then at 10 million.

The good news is there have already been declines in hunger worldwide, even as world populations continue to rise, said Catherine Bertini, 2003 World Prize Laureate told the Agricultural Bioscience International Confer­ence last week.

Food and Agricultural Organ­ization (FAO) data from 2016 now pegs some 815 million in the world not having enough to eat. It’s a number that’s gone up since 2015 but down from 900 million in 2000. The trend lines for the numbers of hungry people or percentage of hungry people are generally going down, she said.

“We’ve had significant population increases, yet we have actually had decreases over all in the number of hungry people, which is really good news,” said Bertini.

The main reason for the declines is economic development worldwide, she said, and in her half-hour address outlined multiple areas she considers key in sustaining that trend line, including ways to tackle global poverty.

“It you’re hungry you’re poor, and if you’re poor you’re usually hungry,” she said. “And it is multi-generational. If a young woman is hungry when pregnant she is not going to give birth to a healthy child. That child gets a bad head start and is probably not going to live to full potential.”

World Bank studies show agricultural productivity to be two to four times as effective at alleviating poverty than other sectors.

Meanwhile, the FAO estimates by closing the gender gap in agriculture it would cut the present number of 815 million hungry in the world down by 100 to 150 million people.

Yet, women remain “invisible” from a policy perspective even as they are “ubiquitous in areas of preparing food, primary providers of meals, growing food, serving food, taking care of children and a large percentage are farmers,” said Bertini.

If she had her way every girl on the planet would go to school, she said. That’s because there would be so many positive outcomes.

“If women know how to count and read they’ll be more productive farmers,” she said.

That closure of the gender gap would also lead to great gains.

“And if women had access to land… access to landownership, if they could inherit land, take loans… all of this which now inhibits them… would give them more opportunities and then they could become more productive.”

Another action needed is a new focus on nutrition, said Bertini, who calls nutrition the “stepchild” of agriculture and health right now.

“I never believe there is enough discussion about nutrition in the context of agriculture or health,” she said. “It seems, bureaucratically almost forgotten. No one claims responsibility for working in this space, and yet it’s critically important.”

That’s because in addition to global hunger, food-related causes of death are rampant. Child malnutrition, anemia, and obesity are huge issues, she said. Non-communicable deaths take a huge toll when so many children and adults are now overweight and obese.

Seventy per cent of worldwide adult deaths occurring between the ages of 30 and 69 are due to non-communicable diseases.

Bertini was one of multiple speakers during the “Solutions Start Here” convention, with sessions focused on how to work within our existing footprint to feed nine billion.

Discussions throughout the three days ranged from reducing food waste, protecting pollinators, and building sustainability into animal systems, and a new vertical farm being developed in northern Manitoba to produce vegetables year round.

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