WFP Acting Executive Director's briefing to the UN Security Council on Conflict and Hunger - Remarks as Delivered

Remarks as delivered by Carl Skau, Acting Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), during the United Nations Security Council open debate: Food Under Fire: The Security Council’s Role in Mitigating Global and Local Food Crises.

25 August 2026

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. President, and thanks to the Government of Denmark, to you, Minister Rasmussen, for convening us on this timely and important topic. And let me also recognize and thank the Secretary General for his leadership.

It was your letter, Mr. Secretary General, that triggered the discussion back in '17 that led to this important resolution, the Resolution 2417, a year later. Indeed, a landmark resolution adopted by consensus, recognizing the vicious conflict-hunger cycle, how conflict drives hunger, but also how hunger fuels conflict. Excellencies, I was one of you back then, representing a member state on this Council.

Today I am proud to represent the World Food Programme, an organisation awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020 for its efforts to combat hunger, but also for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict areas. That was a time of optimism for the World Food Programme. With the strong support of this Council and with the recognition of the Nobel Committee, we thought a world without hunger was within reach.

But fast forward to today, 2026, only six years later, and the picture is very different. The vicious conflict-hunger cycle is instead accelerating. In this short period of time, the number of acutely food insecure has increased threefold while funding for operations has plummeted.

And as the SG just pointed out, it's more dangerous than ever for our colleagues in the field. In my role at WFP, I have the privilege to frequently visit frontline teams in the most complex of environments. Today, I will draw from that firsthand experience, sharing with you what the conflict hunger cycle really looks like in practice, and of course, point to how the Security Council, in our view, can and should respond.

Excellencies, I spent last week in Somalia, literally speaking to you with the dust of Burhakaba still on my shoes. I saw camps full of families who had their lives and their homes and their lands taken away when non-state armed groups arrived.

One family with four children that I sat down to speak with had left a multi-generation farm where they had farmed, fed themselves, and made an income. Armed groups had rolled in, demanding taxes to keep farming. So they had decided it was safer to flee to displacement camp some 100 kilometers by foot.

They had lost everything, including one child on that journey. The other three kids were now growing up in a camp and without a school to go to. These sudden insurgencies keep erupting across Somalia.

Like in Baidoa last week, fighting prevented my planned visit there. But much worse, it prevented our operations. Some 5,000 kids did not get WFP nutritious food in Baidoa that day.

In addition to insecurity, hunger in Somalia is also driven by two consecutive droughts. And the Super El Nino is expected to bring heavy flooding in November. This all adds to a catastrophic malnutrition and food crisis.

Nearly two million children suffering from acute and severe malnutrition. A third of the population, six million people, face acute hunger or worse. And Somalis are facing this perfect storm at the very moment that global engagement is at its lowest.

As you well know, the UNSAR's mandate beyond the end of '26 is uncertain. And support from humanitarian action is shrinking. One key donor no longer provides any funding, and no others are stepping in.

In 2022, facing a similar situation, WFP and partners prevented famine. Thanks to generous donor support, not least from the U.S., we scaled up assistance to nearly 10 million people. Today, WFP is only assisting some 600,000, one in 10 in acute need.

And millions are left out. Many could die. Famine is getting closer.

This should be a wake-up call for everyone. It's not only an issue for Somalia, because when families can't put food on their table, they are left with three choices - starve, move, or rebel. These are perfect conditions for armed groups, criminal gangs, exploitative businesses, to recruit vulnerable young people.

So in Somalia, but also in places like Guatemala and the DRC over the past few weeks, I've spoken to parents terrified that their children will soon be in military camps, street corners, or mines instead of in schools. Excellencies, beyond this vicious cycle that we have been warning you for years now, there is a new dimension that needs your attention and your action. Consequences of conflict are now also being transmitted thousands of miles through interconnected economies and trading systems, across borders and seas.

Some have spoken about a double chokepoint crisis, the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. But yesterday, the Secretary General rightly came with warnings about a triple chokepoint crisis, adding the recent escalation in the Black Sea. These serious disruptions to maritime trade now threatens to push tens of millions more people into food insecurity.

Starting with the conflict in the Gulf, an oil tanker anchored in the Strait of Hormuz can mean one less meal a day for a child in Sudan, where basic food costs are up almost 40% since February this year. And food systems rely on fuel, irrigation, transport, milling. So when oil prices go up, so does the price of flour, rice and vegetables.

And suffocation of fertilizer exports has also hit this planting season hard across Africa and Asia. We are deeply worried about the lag effects this will have on upcoming harvest. At WFP, we have also been exposed to 20% higher shipping costs, 35% more on fuel for our airdrops and our humanitarian flights, meaning less assistance for the people we serve.

Second, the de facto Houthi authority strikes on commercial vessels in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. This has led to further reduction of trade in the Red Sea and is compromising another export route, regional transit to the Suez Canal. It means further rising prices for people across the globe, but it is also hitting Yemen itself particularly hard, a country that imports 90 percent of its food.

And third, escalating Russian and Ukrainian attacks in the Black Sea. Russian and Ukrainian exports equal one third of global wheat supply. Grain shipments through the Bosphorus Strait are now down 40% year on year.

Import dependent countries like Somalia, who buys 90% of its cereal, are highly exposed. Also, there are longer term risks if the Black Sea ports and shipping lanes stay shut. Farmers will simply have less income and incentives to plant crops for 2027.

The world simply cannot afford these layers of crisis. How many choking points before we are completely suffocated? Excellencies, there is just no time to lose.

Building on the Secretary General's call today, WFP looks to the Security Council for urgent and concrete action, just like the response you took to the SG's letter back in 2017. To break the conflict-hunger cycle and building on the SG's call, I'm coming to you with five circuit breakers.

First, instigate measures to stop conflict in one region creating hunger in another.

Initiatives that ensure free flow of humanitarian aid, commercial food exports, agricultural via maritime or land corridors are urgently needed.

Second, use Resolution 2417 much earlier. Act on warning signs.

Take action before famine is declared and before agricultural seasons are lost. Just look at Sudan. With decisive early action, we may have prevented famine last year in the world's worst hunger crisis.

We all saw the atrocities in El-Fasher coming, but the international community, including this council, failed to act on those warnings. It's hard to do justice to the scale of suffering in Sudan, but it really hit me in April when I visited the Tawila camp in Darfur, where survivors of El-Fasher have gathered. I have never seen anything like it.

700,000 people in a super city of grass huts. They arrived from El-Fasher with absolutely nothing, traumatized, and they now depend on a trickle of aid to survive. The people I met there felt completely abandoned.

I can't say this strongly enough. Waiting for famine to be declared is a total failure of duty. In the last Somalia famine in 2010 to 12, nearly 260,000 people died, half of them children.

We avoided this in 2017 and in 2022 because we acted early on warnings and scaled up assistance.

Third, stronger protection for civilians, civilian infrastructure and food systems. The principles of distinction and proportionality must be respected.

I was in Lebanon in March, just a few days after the war started, meeting people whose lives had again been snatched away by strikes and evacuation orders. Overnight, they went from daily commute to a life in shelter. Like the family I met in the dingy abandoned hotel in Beirut, in the south of Beirut, as missiles ran down, Their world had shrunk to the size of that small hotel room. They told me that the only time they went outside was to collect the daily WFP hot meals.

Fourth, protect humanitarian personnel. In northern Yemen, there is a growing acute hunger.

But the UN is unable to intervene at this moment of extreme fragility. We have been forced to pause humanitarian work because the operating environment is simply non-existent with the targeting of our staff. Currently, 73 UN staff, including 38 from WFP, are denied by the de facto Houthi authorities.

Not a day goes by without thinking of them and of their families.

Fifth, and finally, more solidarity with the world's most vulnerable. For every story I've told you here today, there are millions untold.

I'm thinking about the women and girls I met in Afghanistan back in May. I will never forget my visit to a rural clinic outside Jalalabad. The exhausted cries of babies, the panic in the voices of their mothers.

Some had worked for hours with skeletal babies in their arms. But at this clinic, normally supported by WFP and UNICEF, we had nothing to give them. Afghanistan is today's the world's worst malnutrition crisis, but there is an appalling lack of funds.

We're currently turning away six in seven malnourished women and children. WFP hotlines are flooded with calls from parents considering suicide as their children waste away. I used to talk about taking from the hungry to feed the starving, but in the very worst hunger crisis, We are now on the verge of having nothing to give at all.

We all risk becoming bystanders as parents, children, and babies starve. Excellencies, let me reassure you that at WFP and with our partners, we are doing everything possible to adapt to a new funding landscape. We are seizing the Secretary General's UN80 Reform Agenda and the humanitarian reset in full and with ambition.

We are doing our absolute best to do better with less. But we need member states to step up too, to correct course, fund humanitarian action, seek political solutions to conflicts, and reverse the normalization of hunger. We know this is possible.

A year ago, I visited Gaza around the time that famine was declared. It was like a dystopian film set. Everywhere we drove, obliterated rubble, every street filled with desperate children looking for food.

I returned in January this year, after the October ceasefire and adoption of Resolution 2803 in November. Still far from a rosy picture, that's for sure. But the ceasefire had improved somewhat food security and reversed famine.

And some people that I met had even started to have hope again. I spent time with one displaced family who had returned to the destroyed house in the southern parts of Gaza City. And they were busy trying to recultivate a vineyard amid the rubble to rebuild a family livelihood and tradition.

I spoke with bright teenage girls getting WFP food in a UNICEF-run makeshift school. They told me they hope to grow up as doctors, pilots and business owners. But as the SG said, these are fragile gains, only a glimmer of hope.

Recovery and reconstruction are still far, far away. But it shows what is possible if there is political will. Excellencies, we simply can't fail the people of Gaza again, just when conditions are starting to improve.

We can't pull back in Sudan just as we secure access for scaling up. And we can't disengage in Somalia and wait for famine to unfold. This Council has shown before that it can be part of breaking the vicious cycle of hunger and conflict.

Let today's meeting be the starting point for new, bold action to give hundreds of millions of people a path away from hunger and violence, back to peace and stability. I thank you.