UN food agency funding cuts leave world ill-equipped for looming food crises

SINGAPORE — Other nations will have to fill the funding gap at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization as Washington pulls back, according to Phil Hogan, a former European Union commissioner who is now running to lead the world’s biggest food agency.

“It is important to continue to support [the agency] financially … as the United States pulls back from some of these programs, other member countries of the FAO will have to step in to ensure all the animal disease issues and food safety issues remain in place,” Hogan told CNBC in an exclusive interview in Singapore on Wednesday.

The Trump administration has drastically scaled back U.S. foreign aid by dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), once the world’s largest humanitarian donor.

Hogan, Ireland’s former EU agriculture and trade commissioner, is now the frontrunner to become director-general of the Rome-based agency that oversees global rules for food security and sounds alarms over looming famines. He is on a weeks-long tour in Asia to meet regional leaders, ahead of a vote among member countries next summer when current chief Qu Dongyu’s term expires in July.

UN agencies and virtually all international humanitarian response NGOs and research organizations are struggling for funding as donors, notably but not only the U.S., have sharply reduced foreign assistance, said Chris Barrett, an agricultural and development economist at Cornell University.

The funding shortfalls mean “less monitoring and surveillance for early warning of looming problems,” and limit the world’s ability to cushion the blows to poor families suddenly facing higher food prices,” said Barrett. That ultimately leads to more severe hunger problems and sociopolitical unrest as populations grow frustrated with governments that cannot safeguard their food security, he warned.

More than a quarter of the world’s population faced moderate or severe food insecurity in 2025, and over 266 million people face acute hunger this year, according to the World Health Organization and UN World Food Programme.

The Middle East war and the subsequent crisis in the strategically vital Strait of ‌Hormuz have stoked fears of a global agrifood ​catastrophe as flows of fertilizer and energy exports essentially ground to a halt. The FAO sounded the alarm that poor countries were most exposed, as delayed commodity supplies could lead to lower output, higher inflation and weaker global growth.

The prolonged war in Ukraine has also snarled global wheat trade through the Black Sea, compounding economic effects and undermining food security in vulnerable countries. Forecasts of a powerful El Niño weather event may further threaten global food security.

Any reform plan for the agency must reckon with a tighter budget, Hogan said. “We have to be conscious of the fact that we have less money.” His first 100 days would focus on moving staff out of headquarters and into offices in so-called “hunger hotspots” characterized by severe food shortages.

The candidate also stressed cost efficiency and collaborations with other UN agencies in implementing the organization’s mandate of providing regular access to enough high-quality food and ending hunger and malnutrition.

He argued the agency had been too quiet in the Black Sea Grain Initiative — a now-suspended agreement between Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and the UN to get food and fertilizer exports from Ukraine flowing after Russia’s attacks since 2022 largely halted vessel traffic through Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, previously responsible for around 90% of Ukraine’s agricultural exports.

“Perhaps the FAO was a bit behind the curve in not elevating this issue and becoming more centrally involved in solutions around food security within the United Nations family,” he said. The UN played a key role in the Black Sea agreement but the FAO “was not at the table.”

Climate shocks, geopolitical conflict and a global fuel crisis, on top of surging interest rates and donor cuts, leave the world poorly placed to respond, said Chris Newton, food security analyst at International Crisis Group.

“We’re going into this on our way to being blind and with one hand tied behind our back, in terms of global capacity to foresee and respond to major food crises.”

Some experts are less alarmed. Even with an “exceptionally strong” El Niño, “we are currently well short of the conditions for a global food crisis,” said Ian Mitchell, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development. Global grain stockpiles remain healthy by historical standards, and futures markets aren’t signaling a supply crunch, he said.