The age of permanent emergency

The world has entered an age in which famine is no longer a rare, shocking aberration; it is becoming a recurring feature of our political and economic order. In the last 48 hours, the UN’s latest hunger hotspot warning has quietly delivered one of the starkest assessments of global food insecurity in recent memory: 13 countries are projected to face worsening acute hunger between June and November 2026, with Sudan, South Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Northeast Nigeria, and Gaza/Palestine at immediate risk of famine if urgent aid does not arrive. This is not an alarm bell on the horizon; it is a siren wailing in real time.

The numbers are brutal in their clarity. The World Food Programme projects that 266 million people are at risk of acute hunger worldwide in 2026. That figure is not confined to one crisis zone or one “failed state”; it spans continents and political systems, exposing how fragile our food systems are in the face of war, climate shocks, economic collapse and deliberate siege.

Sudan: famine as a war tactic

Nowhere is this more evident than in Sudan, which the UN identifies as the most severe famine‑risk case on earth. A joint FAO/WFP analysis has identified famine risk in 14 areas across North Darfur, South Darfur and South Kordofan through September 2026, with the threat expected to persist in 13 areas through the harvest period into January 2027. Behind these clinical geographic labels lie communities where markets have been destroyed, fields abandoned, and humanitarian routes turned into military targets.

Famine does not occur in a vacuum. It is rarely the simple outcome of “not enough food.” In Sudan, as in too many other hunger hotspots, famine is being manufactured by armed actors who understand precisely what starvation does to social cohesion, political resistance and civilian survival. Blocking aid convoys, looting grain silos, burning farmland—these are not collateral damages; they are strategies.

The haunting detail in the UN reporting is that some of these areas are expected to remain at famine risk through the harvest. That means that even the seasonal rhythm that used to offer a modicum of relief—the idea that harvest time would at least bring a temporary reprieve—is breaking down. When famine risk extends across planting and harvest seasons, what we are witnessing is the disintegration of the agricultural year itself.

Nigeria and Somalia: crisis normalised, catastrophe emerging

The latest data also pushes Nigeria into the highest‑concern group for the first time in this cycle. According to the FAO/WFP report, 34.8 million people in Nigeria are projected to be in Cadre Harmonisé Phase 3 or above—that is, crisis‑level hunger or worse—between June and August 2026. Of these, 1.8 million are expected to be in Emergency, and about 15,000 in Catastrophe in Borno State. “Catastrophe,” in the technical jargon, is the polite word used when people are starving to death.

We should linger on the significance of this. Nigeria is one of Africa’s largest economies, with vast agricultural potential and a sprawling internal market. Yet insecurity, displacement, climate shocks and economic strain have combined to push tens of millions into crisis. Food insecurity is not only a function of global poverty; it is a lens through which we can see how fragile middle‑income countries really are when public institutions corrode and conflict goes unresolved.

In Somalia, the picture is just as stark, and arguably more familiar—precisely because the country has been a byword for hunger in the Western imagination for decades. The UN now projects that around 6 million people in Somalia will face high levels of acute food insecurity between April and June 2026, including nearly 1.9 million at Emergency level. The Bay region of Burhakaba District faces a specific risk of famine.

Somalia’s crisis is not merely a repetition of the past; it is an intensification. Recurrent droughts linked to climate change, severe flooding in other seasons, entrenched conflict, and weak infrastructure have created a vicious cycle in which every new shock lands on a population that has never had the chance to truly recover from the previous one. In a world that prides itself on “resilience,” Somalia is the case study in what happens when resilience is treated as a slogan rather than a promise.

Gaza and the historic threshold

The broader UN food‑crisis framework underscores just how entrenched this emergency has become. The 2026 Global Report on Food Crises finds that 266 million people across 47 countries experienced high levels of acute food insecurity in 2025, and that famine was confirmed in Gaza and parts of Sudan last year—the first time famine has appeared in the report’s history.

This is a historic threshold, and not in a way the international community can be proud of. For years, humanitarian agencies were reluctant even to use the word “famine,” knowing its political and legal weight. That the label is now being applied to Gaza, in particular, must be understood not just as a humanitarian failure but as a diplomatic and legal one. Starvation of civilians, when used as a method of warfare, is prohibited under international law. If famine is confirmed, then accountability cannot remain an abstract discussion in conference rooms.

Food as a political choice

Food is often framed as a technical challenge: how to increase yields, improve logistics, reduce waste, strengthen supply chains. All of that matters. But the story emerging from the UN’s latest hunger hotspot warning is not primarily about agronomy or infrastructure; it is about power.

Sudan’s farmers are not starving because they forgot how to grow sorghum. Somalia’s pastoralists are not on the brink because they lack centuries of knowledge about coping with drought. Families in Borno State are not sliding into Catastrophe because they refuse to adapt. They are starving because wars are being prolonged, blockades maintained, and global attention diverted, while a food system built on fragile assumptions about peace and stability comes apart.

If 266 million people at risk of acute hunger in 2026 does not trigger a transformation in how governments and multilateral institutions treat food—above all as a political priority rather than a charitable add‑on—then we are not simply failing the present. We are building a future in which permanent emergency is the norm, and famine becomes just another line in the news ticker.

For now, the UN has done what it can: it has drawn the map, named the countries, quantified the risk. It has told us where famine may erupt next—Sudan, South Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Northeast Nigeria, Gaza/Palestine—and when. The question is no longer whether we have been warned. The question is whether anyone with power is listening.