UN food agency funding cuts leave world ill-equipped for looming food

SINGAPORE — Other nations will have to fill the funding gap at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization as Washington pulls back, according to Phil Hogan, a former European Union commissioner who is now running to lead the world’s biggest food agency.

“It is important to continue to support [the agency] financially … as the United States pulls back from some of these programs, other member countries of the FAO will have to step in to ensure all the animal disease issues and food safety issues remain in place,” Hogan told CNBC in an exclusive interview in Singapore on Wednesday.

The Trump administration has drastically scaled back U.S. foreign aid by dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), once the world’s largest humanitarian donor.

Hogan, Ireland’s former EU agriculture and trade commissioner, is now the frontrunner to become director-general of the Rome-based agency that oversees global rules for food security and sounds alarms over looming famines. He is on a weeks-long tour in Asia to meet regional leaders, ahead of a vote among member countries next summer when current chief Qu Dongyu’s term expires in July.

UN agencies and virtually all international humanitarian response NGOs and research organizations are struggling for funding as donors, notably but not only the U.S., have sharply reduced foreign assistance, said Chris Barrett, an agricultural and development economist at Cornell University.

The funding shortfalls mean “less monitoring and surveillance for early warning of looming problems,” and limit the world’s ability to cushion the blows to poor families suddenly facing higher food prices,” said Barrett. That ultimately leads to more severe hunger problems and sociopolitical unrest as populations grow frustrated with governments that cannot safeguard their food security, he warned.

More than a quarter of the world’s population faced moderate or severe food insecurity in 2025, and over 266 million people face acute hunger this year, according to the World Health Organization and UN World Food Programme.

The Middle East war and the subsequent crisis in the strategically vital Strait of ‌Hormuz have stoked fears of a global agrifood ​catastrophe as flows of fertilizer and energy exports essentially ground to a halt. The FAO sounded the alarm that poor countries were most exposed, as delayed commodity supplies could lead to lower output, higher inflation and weaker global growth.

The prolonged war in Ukraine has also snarled…