Food Security

The number of people facing crisis-level or worse acute food insecurity has nearly doubled over the past 5 years, to encompass 300 million people. During the same period, however, funding for humanitarian assistance has almost halved. While these opposing trends have put humanitarian agencies in deficit and struggling to respond to urgent global needs, there is also the question of whether we know how much food assistance is actually needed to prevent starvation. Existing early warning systems for food crises merely identify the number of people in need of food assistance.

A new alert from IPC reports that over 5.83 million Haitians—more than half the country’s population—will experience acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3 or above) by June 2026. That includes almost 1.9 million people in emergency levels of food insecurity. While these numbers show evidence of slight improvement from IPC estimates published in September 2025, the latest alert emphasizes that these improvements are highly localized.

The attack on Iran by U.S. and Israeli forces and Iranian retaliation against U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf have roiled energy markets by disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz—the Gulf’s only sea passage to the open ocean. About 27% of the world’s oil exports, 20% of global liquified natural gas (LNG) exports, and 20%-30% of global fertilizer exports, including urea, ammonia, phosphates, and sulfur, pass through the Strait.

Natural language processing (NLP), a subfield of artificial intelligence that uses computational techniques to interpret, analyze, and generate human language, encompasses a range of tasks and techniques. These include the large language models (LLMs) that power chatbots and other types of systems, as well as specific approaches (some employed by LLMs), including information extraction and text mining.NLP offers powerful opportunities to support the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—including SDG2 (Zero Hunger).

The global poverty landscape is increasingly shaped by conflict, climate shocks, displacement, and market disruptions—forces that are concentrating extreme poverty in the most fragile settings. At the same time, humanitarian and development financing is under pressure, heightening the need for  scalable and cost-effective approaches to poverty reduction. Graduation models—multifaceted interventions designed to help extremely poor households to “graduate” from poverty—are emerging as a particularly promising response in this context.