Risk and Resilience

As the Israel-Hamas conflict rages on in the Gaza Strip, the territory’s entire population of more than 2 million remains under threat of severe food crisis. The latest alert from the IPC Integrated Phase Classification for Acute Food Insecurity reports that one in five people in the Gaza Strip—upwards of 500,000—are on the brink of  starvation (IPC Phase 5 Catastrophe) due to the March 18, 2025 end of the ceasefire and the resumption of blockades of humanitarian aid and commercial supplies. The entire population is facing crisis-level acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3 or worse). 

The world faced a stark inflection point in 2024, as the continued rise in the number of people facing crisis-to-catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity meets sharp reductions in funding for humanitarian assistance. The 2025 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC), released today, reports that 295.3 million people across 53 countries/territories faced acute food insecurity in 2024. This represents a tripling of the number of people facing acute hunger since 2016 and a doubling since 2020 (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Food systems around the world face growing challenges. They must be transformed to sustainably feed a growing global population and made more resilient to shocks from extreme weather to conflict. Efforts on those fronts are increasingly interlinked—and depend on well-targeted local interventions.

In 2022, Central America experienced significant surge in food prices, a trend that was evident in Honduras. The country saw  year-on-year monthly food inflation exceeding 12% from May 2022 to May 2023, with rates surpassing 17% in eight of those months. 

In the following lines, we address the underlying causes of the food and fertilizer price surges, and the actions that can be taken to mitigate this situation in Central America.

As Gaza continues to experience unprecedented food crisis, a new commentary published in Nature takes a look at how research can forecast the long-term impacts and help policymakers develop more effective humanitarian support networks and systems to ensure post-conflict resilience.