Feeding the hungry will be harder than ever for the world’s largest food aid agency

The United Nations World Food Programme is by far the largest international organization fighting hunger. It reports that it served more than 100 million people in 2024. FIve years ago, it won the Nobel Peace Prize.

But WFP is about to radically downsize in the wake of dwindling donations and the Trump administration’s cuts to foreign aid.

WFP spent $9.8 billion on aid last year — nearly half of the funds were contributed by the U.S. But this year, it’s facing a projected 40% reduction in funding.

In a memo emailed to all WFP employees on April 24, leadership told staff to expect job cuts of 25-30%, or about 6,000 positions. The email, obtained by NPR, said the cuts would affect every level of the organization and every place they operate.

WFP is funded by voluntary contributions. Countries contribute the bulk of the budget, with some additional funds from the U.N. and foundations and other sources.

Prior to 2025, donor countries in Europe began reducing their contributions, reflecting a global trend of prioritizing military and national security needs. The latest and most abrupt blow came when the U.S., by far the largest funder, canceled hundreds of millions in grants.

“I’ve been working in the humanitarian field for nearly 30 years now, and I’ve never seen such a situation before,” says Paul Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University.

He says even though funding shortfalls are not new in the humanitarian sector, drastic cuts to the world’s food safety net will be devastating.

“I understand the humanitarian and donor fatigue, because there seem to be so many emergencies, often at the same time,” he said. “But [the WFP cuts are] different, and we’re going to see enormous amounts of, sadly, increased numbers of deaths in these humanitarian settings because of both the magnitude of these cuts and the abruptness of these cuts.”

In a statement to NPR, a U. S. State Department spokesperson said that USAID has canceled only a small number of its WFP contracts, mainly due to concerns about money ending up in the hands of terrorist groups. That’s the rationale for cutting $680 million for Afghanistan and Yemen.

A pullback in Afghanistan

The WFP warned in an April post on X that planned U.S. cuts to programs in 14 countries would amount to a “death sentence for millions of people.” The Trump administration later undid some but not all of those cuts, declining to restore contracts in countries such as Afghanistan and Yemen due to “concerns about funds benefiting terrorist groups like the Houthis and Taliban, or because they did not align with America First priorities,” according to the State Department.

Grants to WFP programs in Afghanistan through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) totaled about $280 million in 2024, before the Trump administration zeroed them out.

“In the past there have been crises where funding has dried up for various reasons but not on the sort of global scale we’re seeing now,” says Harald Mannhardt, WFP’s deputy country director in Afghanistan.

The U.N. says about half the Afghan population depends on humanitarian aid to survive and warns that more than 3 million people are on the brink of starvation. Mannhardt says WFP lacked the funds to keep up with the country’s desperate need, even before the U.S. cuts.

“There’s so much concern from the people that I meet about the end of food assistance,” he says. “Whenever I’ve been visiting over the last six months or so distribution sites, there’s a lot of people outside there asking why they can’t be included in the programs. We’re already only feeding half, or less than half, of who we should be assisting,” he says.

The situation is especially desperate for women, whose rights under Taliban rule have been severely curtailed, and for children. In its 2024 country report, WFP said Afghanistan was experiencing a record-high spike in child malnutrition, affecting some 3.5 million children. According to UNICEF, 41% of Afghan children experience “stunting” — slowed-down growth due to malnourishment.

“The acute malnutrition means, sadly, a lot of children are going to die,” says Spiegel of Johns Hopkins. “And the chronic malnutrition, the stunting, has generational effects. It’s not just those children: Sometimes the children of those children also can be stunted.”

The WFP also acts as a primary coordinator of logistics for other aid groups and U.N. agencies. Those groups rely on the WFP’s U.N. Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) to get into remote places.

UNHAS now has the money to operate just two aircraft for all of Afghanistan, down from five.

Implications for future food crises

Besides logistics and emergency food aid, the WFP provides support for farmers and nutrition assistance, which are intended to build the self-sufficiency of low-resource countries.

Caitlin Welsh, director of food and water security at the bipartisan think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, says U.S. funding cuts to the WFP will hurt the poorest countries in both the long- and the short-term.

“[The U.S.] is cutting the emergency assistance for those in most need, and the other types of assistance [that are] intended to make sure that people wouldn’t need that assistance in the first place,” she says.

Welsh says the Trump administration’s turn away from humanitarian assistance represents a major policy realignment.

“Since the 1960s, the U.S. has expressed that it’s in the U.S. interest to support agriculture, to support food security and provide lifesaving food and nutrition assistance,” she says.

“It’s a moral, economic and national security imperative. This is a matter of the country with far and away the highest GDP in the world using its resources to stave off some of the worst forms of suffering in other populations.”

Meanwhile, WFP said in a statement that it plans to “prioritize its limited resources on vital programs that bring urgently needed food assistance to the 343 million people struggling with hunger and increasingly facing starvation.”