Nov 9, 2026 Promoting ACF’s new Hunger Hotspot report, the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) hosted an event last week: From hunger hotspots to political action: what should the UK do when a hunger crisis is coming? The keynote presentation was given by Kirsty McNeill MP, UK Minister of State for International Development, Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) and Scottish Labour and Co-operative MP for Midlothian.
Kirsty McNeill did not say she was sad about world hunger. “I feel absolutely furious,” the UK’s Minister of State for International Development told an audience at ODI Global on the evening of 28 October. Last year, she said, an estimated 645 million people went hungry, a third of humanity could not afford a healthy diet, and famine was confirmed in two places in the same year, “in a world that grows enough food for everyone.” “So let’s not pretend any of this is bad luck,” she said. “In the 21st century, people make famine.”
McNeill, a former Save the Children executive who took the development brief in July, came with an argument and a recruitment pitch. Food security, she said, is one of five connected “securities” (health, climate, human, economic and food) that will organise her work, and the security lens matters because it forces attention onto risks that cross borders. A harvest in East Africa, a shipping lane in the Gulf and a UK supermarket shelf are one system. When Hormuz is disrupted, “a family in Khartoum and a family in my constituency of Midlothian both feel it,” though not in the same way or to the same degree.
Her second claim was the one the evening kept returning to. Hunger is not mainly a supply problem. It is about who can reach nutritious food, at what price, and who goes without, which makes it a story of inequality and therefore of power. She named both forms. One is siege: El Fasher and Kadugli encircled, markets attacked, convoys blocked, and more than 140 Sudanese volunteers killed for what she called “the so-called crime of helping feed their neighbours.” The other is quieter: a food system in which markets steer away from risk and towards returns. “That’s not a conspiracy, but it is a market failure. And choosing not to fix that market failure is a political choice.”
Dustin Barter of the Humanitarian Policy Group, ODI Global chaired panelists who commented for the rest of the meeting.
Awssan Kamal, advocacy campaigns manager at Action Against Hunger UK, had the job of following the minister with the numbers. He framed them with the question that he said the Hunger Hotspots report kept bringing him back to: “If we can see these crises developing, why do we still wait until people are running out of options?”
The figures he cited run in opposite directions. Some 266 million people in 47 countries and territories faced acute food insecurity in 2025, double the number in 2016. Over just three years, humanitarian funding for food security fell by more than half. Ten crises account for 170 million of those people, two in every three.
To make 30 million acutely malnourished children imaginable, Kamal, whose son has just started secondary school in Oxford, reached for classrooms. The figure is roughly three times the number of pupils in UK state schools. “Can you imagine 1 million classrooms with 30 children in each classroom?” Every one of those children, he said, is acutely malnourished. He came to Britain from Yemen at the age of ten, he said, and still could not picture it.
He added two cautions that matter to anyone who reads these reports for a living. First, falling numbers are not always good news. Where recorded caseloads have declined, in Nigeria, Sudan, Pakistan and Syria, the declines have to be read through shrinking data coverage, because the surveys and monitoring programmes are losing funding too. Second, real progress is fragile. Bangladesh recorded the largest improvement, 7.6 million fewer people in need, which he linked to climate-resilient agriculture, yet climate shocks earlier this year showed how exposed it remains.
He singled out South Sudan, new to the top ten, where he said more than 80% of the population now needs humanitarian assistance, as the crisis most easily forgotten beside its neighbor. For the full ACF report, see: https://www.actionagainsthunger.org/press-releases/acute-hunger-has-doubled-worldwide-in-last-decade-as-aid-falls-new-action-against-hunger-report-finds/
The report notes that “Action Against Hunger has been innovating more efficient ways to collect data and to predict hunger hotspots. By responding early, we can prevent acute hunger and save countless lives. Now, we need donors to stay the course.” In the 10 countries, nearly 30 million children under five suffered from acute malnutrition in 2025, 
Acute wasting Hunger Has Doubled Worldwide in Last Decade as Aid Falls, New Action Against Hunger Report Finds. Hunger is concentrated. 177 million of the 266 million people facing acute food insecurity globally are in just 10 countries, with Nigeria, DRC and Sudan alone accounting for 82.9 million — the Top 10’s share jumped from 28.1% to 31.2% in one year. Food-sector humanitarian assistance in crisis contexts fell 59% between 2022-2025 back to 2016 levels, while global ODA fell 23% (-$52B) in 2025, leaving Humanitarian Response Plans funded at 15.9% in Syria to just 67.8% in Afghanistan. The biggest deteriorations, in Burma +2.3M, the Democratic Republic of Congo+2.1M, Afghanistan +1.6M, Yemen +1.4M, among them have 17.97M internally displaced persons and 10.3M returnees, where loss of homes, land and market access pushes families deeper into hunger.
– Edited by Steven Hansch, WHES board
