ECOSOC HAS side-event on Underfunding and the cost of inaction: How to address one of the main challenges to humanitarian response?

FAO very much welcomes OCHA’s efforts to strengthen the visibility of this issue of lack of funding. Particularly, the work of both OCHA and ECHO in ensuring that anticipatory action is becoming a reality on the ground. But we need to do much, much more. 

Especially in a context of sustained and rising acute food insecurity. The number of people experiencing catastrophic and emergency levels of acute hunger are simply astounding in an age of such prosperity. And yet we are consistently told budgets have to be cut, they are being tightened. 

FAO believes that our responses should be smarter, better targeted and more responsive to people’s own priorities. Emergency agriculture is cost-effective and enormously impactful. Yet increasingly sidelined as funds are cut across the board – it is underfunded and overlooked.  

FAO has received just 13 percent of USD 2 billion requested under the humanitarian appeals. Last year, with less than USD 1 billion, we helped 56 million people produce their own food and make their own way out of crisis.  

Across the Sahel, the main planting season is underway and the funds received to support this have been paltry. In Burkina Faso and Mali, our appeals are just 6 and 4 percent funded. That means, from now through October 2025, people will not be able to produce their own food, millions of people will now rely on external food aid and the kindness of their neighbours – that will cost an awful lot more money. 

Food production is not “the next phase”. It does not come after life saving responses. It is life saving. It is the first phase, and the next phase and all phases of life. In Somalia, during the drought, we saw that people as they fled their homes – we all saw the images – pulling animals along with them. They were telling us what their priorities were and we overlooked those. We can save lives AND reduce needs at the same time, it is not either/or.  

In Afghanistan, significant funding to emergency agriculture, combined with humanitarian food assistance, since 2022 has helped improve food production amongst some of the country’s most vulnerable people. Finally, we are seeing a steady downward trend in acute food insecurity. Three IPC analyses in a row have shown a downward trend in food insecurity despite all the other issues in Afghanistan. Those gains are now under threat. 

With resilience funding, FAO has helped local seed enterprises to produce between 50,000 to 60,000 tonnes of seeds in 2023/24 (compared to 35,000 the year before). With those seeds, together with fertilizers, we can help over 1 million farmers produce their own food this year (that would be 7 million people). Unfortunately, our HRP for Afghanistan is severely underfunded.  

Thanks to the global decrease of fertilizers prices, economies of scale, savings and in efficiencies, FAO will be able – with our own resources and using existing funds – to procure and distribute about 35,000 tonnes of those seeds to 700,000 families.   

With no one other than FAO buying and distributing seeds, and with most farmers still too poor to buy them themselves, more than 15,000 tonnes of seeds will remain unplanted, if we do not get resources ahead of the winter planting. That is about half million tonnes of food that will not be produced.  

Thank you.