OCHA Warns About Rising Global Food Insecurity

In what it dubs a ‘hyper-prioritized report’, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) warns that nearly 300 million people around the world are in urgent need of assistance in light of global humanitarian funding cuts, climate disasters, and conflict.

In its ‘Global Humanitarian Overview 2025’ report, OCHA said the world is “on fire.”

“In the first months of the year, conflicts and violence intensified in multiple countries—deepening needs and driving many people to the brink of death—while natural disasters wreaked havoc on the lives of millions of people,” the report reads. “Conflict and violence: multiple crises were characterized by systematic violations of international humanitarian law, including mass atrocities, with catastrophic consequences for civilians.”

Forced displacement—primarily driven by conflict—has reached its highest ever levels, according to the report, which notes that the number of people forced to flee persecution, conflict,  violence, and human rights violations rose in 2024, reaching a record 123.2 million people, or one in 67 people globally.

The figure, according to the report, included 83.4 million people who remained internally displaced within their own country as a consequence of conflicts and natural disasters, a 12 percent increase compared to 2023.

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“In 2025, refugees continued to flee crises—particularly Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Myanmar and Sudan—and internal displacement rose rapidly. In the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were repeatedly forcibly displaced and confined into ever-shrinking spaces,” the report reads.

In the DRC, the M23 offensive in the east of the country, beginning in January 2025, displaced over a million people. In Burkina Faso, over 60,000 people were internally displaced in April alone and in Colombia; over 50,000 people were displaced in just two weeks due to the Catatumbo crisis.

“With every displacement, urgent shelter needs arise. Shelter is a foundation for survival—without it, people remain exposed to violence, disease, and exploitation. Despite 40 percent of IDPs globally still residing in displacement sites, the support provided to these locations is minimal,” reads the report.

Close to 300 million people are facing high acute food insecurity, according to OCHA.

The report also featured grim realities of gender relationships with the year witnessing rampant sexual violence against women and girls.

“In the DRC, it was estimated that a child is raped every half hour; in Haiti, there was a tenfold increase in sexual violence against children between 2023 and 2024; in Sudan, the scale and brutality of sexual violence escalated, and around 12.1 million people—nearly one in four, most of them women and girls—are now at risk of gender-based violence,” it reads.

The horrifying toll of war on children continued to mount, with 50,000 children reportedly killed or injured in Gaza, between October 2023 and May 2025, and April 2025 marking the deadliest month for children in Ukraine in nearly three years.

“Attacks against health care disrupted vital and life-saving care for millions of people throughout the first months of 2025, with over 500 attacks recorded—over 300 of which involved the use of heavy weapons—across 13 countries and territories,” reads the report. “The use of explosive weapons in urban areas caused devastating harm for civilians and impacted services essential for their survival, including in Myanmar, OPT, Sudan, Ukraine and Yemen. It is estimated that some 50 million people suffer the horrific consequences of urban warfare worldwide.”