Food Crisis and Related Risk Factors

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.

Food security conditions in the Gaza Strip have improved since August when the IPC Famine Review Committee confirmed the existence of famine conditions. Despite this improvement, however, 1.6 million people—most of Gaza’s population—still face unacceptably high levels of acute food insecurity, according to the IPC’s latest alert.

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) convened its first workshop for the Google.org–funded project “Prediction of Food Crisis Risks” on November 3, 2025. The hybrid meeting, moderated by Dr. Betina Dimaranan, brought together researchers from across IFPRI and partner institutions to share early findings, discuss technical progress, and chart the project’s strategic direction.

Hunger and food crisis have reached catastrophic levels in multiple places around the world, according to the Global Report on Food Crises Mid-Year Update. Famine has been confirmed in the Gaza Strip and the Sudan, with parts of South Sudan at risk of famine and Yemen, Haiti, and Mali experiencing catastrophic levels of hunger.

In all, 1.4 million people faced IPC Level 5 (Catastrophe) food insecurity and hunger as of August 2025.

With food crises on the rise, with an estimated 295.3 million people facing high levels of acute food insecurity in 2024. In the face of these stark hunger levels, policymakers, humanitarian organizations, development practitioners, and private sector actors urgently need knowledge about how to effectively enhance the resilience of local and regional food systems.