“We’ve known how to treat hunger for 45 years”: a campaign to raise awareness about the urgency of child malnutrition

2026: A Year of Alert

Throughout the year, Action Against Hunger sounded the alarm.

In April, Sudan became the country with the most areas experiencing famine in the world. In Um Baru, in North Darfur, more than half of the children were suffering from acute malnutrition. In Kernoi, 34% of children were affected. More than 4 million people were expected to suffer from acute malnutrition this year, while the humanitarian response plan was only 5.5% funded.

In July, in Pakistan, our nutritional assessment in Quetta revealed a rate of severe acute malnutrition of 8.1% among children under 5 – four times the emergency threshold. That same month, the SOFI report confirmed that in Africa, 1 in 5 people suffered from hunger in 2025: 309 million people, compared to 171 million in 2010.

In August, in Yemen, more than 2.2 million children were suffering from acute malnutrition, and health centers in the north of the country ran out of therapeutic food. In Afghanistan, where nearly 22 million people need assistance, our health and nutrition centers were facing an alarming surge in admissions.

In October, in Gaza, 90% of households did not have adequate access to safe drinking water, and 74,200 children aged 6 to 59 months will be at risk of acute malnutrition by mid-2027. In Afghanistan, projections indicated that more than 4 million children would need life-saving treatment in 2027—a record high over the past five years—including 1 million with severe cases (a 16% increase compared to 2026). In Ghor Province, a five-month-old baby was admitted to one of our centers for the third time in his short life.

Funding in Free Fall

While needs are skyrocketing, aid is declining. According to the UN, the global funding crisis could result in more than 22 million preventable deaths by 2030. In 2025, Action Against Hunger estimated that the sudden halt in U.S. funding would put 797,000 children suffering from severe acute malnutrition—who are being cared for through our programs—at risk. That same year, official development assistance from member countries of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) plummeted by 23.1 percent—the sharpest decline ever recorded. In France, the budget for the French Initiative for Food Security and Nutrition (IFSAN) plummeted by 68 percent.

For Action Against Hunger, the consequences were very concrete: 641 projects suspended or revised, 13 bases closed, and an operational presence reduced by about one-third. In Madagascar, the suspension of 10 mobile clinics deprived more than 5,000 malnourished children of care. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Ituri, our programs were temporarily suspended: patients were once again required to pay for care, and the number of consultations fell by half. The consequences were almost immediate: more than 250 children under the age of five suffering from severe acute malnutrition could not be treated, and six died.

And the trend is worsening: the 2027 budget bill, presented by the French government on October 1st, called for a further cut of 400 million euros in French development aid. “The future of international solidarity has never been so uncertain,” warned Perrine Benoist, co-executive director of Action Against Hunger.

The treatments exist

That is precisely what makes it so absurd. Severe acute malnutrition is neither an incurable disease nor an inevitable fate: it is a condition that we know how to treat, with appropriate medical care and treatment.

When there are no complications, children can generally be treated and back on their feet within a few weeks, thanks to ready-to-use therapeutic foods, that are sachets of enriched peanut paste.

Yet only a quarter of children suffering from severe acute malnutrition have access to this treatment, and 3 million children die of malnutrition every year. It’s not for lack of knowledge—it’s for lack of resources.

What is the purpose of this campaign?

For more than 45 years, Action Against Hunger has been screening for, treating, and preventing malnutrition. We have the protocols, the teams, and the experience. We are present in the most critical situations and the hardest-to-reach areas. What we lack is the funding to treat the children who need it. With this campaign, we want to highlight a simple truth that budget decisions often obscure: letting a child die from a disease that we know how to treat is unacceptable.

In France, we call on lawmakers to the planned cuts to Official Development Assistance and to reaffirm its commitment to international solidarity. We also urge Members of Parliament to oppose the reductions included in the 2027 budget and to reallocate a portion of the revenues from the Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) and the Solidarity Tax on Airline Tickets towards development financing. This historic mechanism of solidarity, which was eliminated in the 2025 budget, must be reinstated to ensure sustainable funding for aid. For the past two years, public development assistance has become a budgetary adjustment variable, and the fight against hunger has been relegated to a secondary priority. Yet every euro cut results in health centers closing and children going without medical care.