Food Crisis and Related Risk Factors

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.

Over the past 10 years, food and nutrition crises have shifted from one-off emergencies to protracted conditions in many regions around the world, according to the 2026 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC) released today. Since 2016, the global share of people facing acute food insecurity has nearly doubled. In 2025, 266 million people across 47 countries/territories experienced acute food insecurity; what’s more, 33 of those countries have appeared in every GRFC edition released since the report’s inception in 2016.

Key takeaways •Reduced traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is squeezing farmers. Energy and fertilizer prices are climbing faster than food prices, eroding producer profitability.•Mexico is highly exposed to fertilizer import shocks. Heavy reliance on imported nitrogen and potash makes the sector vulnerable to external disruptions like the Iran crisis.•High-value and staple crops face different pressures.

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 FAO Food Price Index rose for the second month in a row in March, up by 2.4 percent from February. As the conflict escalates in the Near East, global energy prices have surged, with varying impacts on commodity prices. The Index reached 1 percent above its March 2025 level but remains nearly 20 percent below the peak of March 2022. The Cereal Price Index increased by 1.5 percent in March, with all major cereals except rise seeing a rise in prices. Wheat prices rose by 4.3 percent due to concerns over drought in the U.S.