ROME — As of May 2026, the U.N. World Food Programme had received only half of the funding needed to meet its food assistance goals for the year, according to Cindy McCain, the agency’s executive director. McCain warned that two unprecedented famines had already occurred and that two more were anticipated.
McCain attributed the funding shortfall to a collective global pullback rather than the actions of a single country. "It's both, it's U.S. and the global pullback. It's not one country by any stretch, but it's collectively everybody," she said.
The agency faces escalating operational challenges due to conflicts and instability. In Sudan, described by the U.N. as the site of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, humanitarian access to Darfur remains minimal, with only slightly increased movement of personnel into the country rather than staging operations from Chad. Food deliveries in Sudan can be halted at any moment by armed factions, complicating relief efforts.
Regional instability has also severely disrupted supply chains. Delivery of food aid to Afghanistan, which previously took about three weeks, now requires nearly three months. McCain noted that if the Strait of Hormuz were shut amid ongoing hostilities, the consequences would be dire. "When you shut the Strait of Hormuz, and you've got bombings on both sides all the way up and down, people are going to not only become food insecure, but they're going to starve." She added that restoring food supply chains after such a closure would take months due to disruptions in prices, availability, and movement. She expressed hope that peace talks would lead to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and warned that the longer-term impact of destruction in the Middle East is "not good."
While a ceasefire in Gaza initially enabled large-scale food aid deliveries, the World Food Programme reported as of May 2026 that it could no longer get trucks into the territory at scale. The agency is also responding to an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where approximately 27 million people are food insecure. The World Food Programme provides logistics, supplies, and personnel for such emergency responses and is establishing a task force to improve duty of care and protection for staff deployed to the region. McCain emphasized that women and children are disproportionately affected by food insecurity in conflict zones and described the Ebola outbreak in the Congo as a "rampage."
No independent assessment of Cindy McCain’s claims was available.