The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is bracing for a funding shortfall as the Trump administration dismantles the U.S. Agency for International Development, once the world's largest humanitarian donor, and pulls back from multilateral programs.
Phil Hogan, the former EU trade commissioner and frontrunner to become FAO director-general, told CNBC that member countries will need to fill the gap left by Washington. "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," he said during an interview in Singapore.
Hogan, Ireland's former agriculture and trade commissioner, is on a weeks-long tour of Asia ahead of a vote among member countries next summer when current chief Qu Dongyu's term expires in July.
Chris Barrett, an agricultural and development economist at Cornell University, said the funding squeeze is affecting UN agencies and international humanitarian NGOs alike. The shortfalls mean "less monitoring and surveillance for early warning of looming problems" and limit the world's ability to cushion the impact on poor families suddenly facing higher food prices, Barrett said.
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 the UN World Food Programme.
Hogan warned that the conflict around the Strait of Hormuz and the war in Ukraine are "contributing towards potential disasters in 2027 in many parts of the world," with a forecasted powerful El Niño weather event compounding the risk. Fertilizer and energy export flows through the Hormuz strait have been disrupted, while Ukraine's wheat trade through the Black Sea remains snarled — the region previously accounted for roughly 90% of Ukraine's agricultural exports.
Chris Newton, a food security analyst at the International Crisis Group, said climate shocks, geopolitical conflict, a global fuel crisis and surging interest rates leave the world poorly placed to respond. "We're going into this on our way to being blind and with one hand tied behind our back, in terms of global capacity to foresee and respond to major food crises."
Hogan acknowledged that any reform plan must reckon with a tighter budget. He said his first 100 days would focus on moving staff from headquarters into offices in "hunger hotspots." He also criticized the FAO for being too quiet during the Black Sea Grain Initiative, a now-suspended agreement brokered by Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and the UN to restore grain and fertilizer shipments. "Perhaps the FAO was a bit behind the curve in not elevating this issue," Hogan said.
Not all experts share the alarm. Ian Mitchell, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, said even with an "exceptionally strong" El Niño, "we are currently well short of the conditions for a global food crisis," pointing to healthy global grain stockpiles and futures markets that are not signaling a supply crunch.
