AN APPEAL TO THE DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE COMMITTEE OF THE OECD AT THEIR MEETING IN PARIS ON 11 AND 12 MAY

All credible sources — and direct observation — confirm that the world’s poorest populations are losing out in a period of profound global uncertainty. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, disruption to the Strait of Hormuz, food price inflation, and intensifying rivalry between the US and China are the primary concerns of the OECD world. For people in the poorest nations — the Fourth World — the primary concern is survival.

The war in Ukraine has significantly reduced the volume of food available on global markets. In the 2020/21 season, Ukraine and Russia together account for around 20% of cereals traded internationally. This has now been reduced to less than half. Those who can afford to buy will do so; the rest depend on the goodwill of those with the resources to provide food aid.

The World Food Programme — the planet’s principal food distributor — regularly reports that it receives only a fraction of the funding it needs. Dominated by the US, and sourcing from countries that are producing less and turning more isolationist, the WFP faces compounding constraints. The use of food aid as a geopolitical weapon risks leaving some countries without access to food assistance entirely.

Disruption to the Strait of Hormuz has curtailed the supply of fertilisers to farmers in the developed world, reducing agricultural output and worsening the outlook for global food supply.

In the Fourth World — the poorest countries, predominantly across sub-Saharan Africa — fertilisers are used not by smallholder farmers but mostly by foreign private investors producing export commodities such as coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar and vanilla. These exports generate the foreign currency poor countries depend on to service debts to international financial institutions. Supply disruptions will worsen their already precarious financial positions.

Beyond these structural pressures, deaths from starvation are currently running at an estimated 35,000–40,000 per day globally. An estimated 375,000 people face famine in Sudan as of early April 2026. In the wider Palestinian region as many as 500,000 are in the “catastrophic” phase of hunger, defined by extreme starvation and death.

The OECD has both the capacity and the responsibility to respond. The world’s poorest people now need the Development Assistance Committee to make the following commitments:

1. To make the eradication of starvation at the base its principal objective over the coming decade.

2. To support every eligible country in establishing emergency food reserves, including the infrastructure required to sustain them.

3. To direct local food reserve administrations to increase the proportion of purchases sourced from local farmers.

4. To establish, in each country that has signed the Maputo Declaration declaring their commitment to increase budget contribution to agriculture, regional hubs centred on primary schools, with the mandate to improve food security in their immediate surroundings. Each hub should include a school garden providing at least one meal per day to every child, supported by at least one seconded agricultural extension worker serving the wider school community — pupils, staff, teachers and PTA members — in order to broaden local productive capacity.

5. To ensure that school grounds, gardens, and associated facilities (seed nurseries, demonstration areas, warehouses, water wells, milling centres, small animal husbandry facilities and similar) are held in trust by local communities and registered with national land registries, protecting them against expropriation.

6. To work with national governments to establish at least one such hub per region of approximately half a million people, with explicit safeguards against discrimination on ethnic, religious or cultural grounds.

7. To establish a register of DAC-approved NGOs from which suitable partners will be invited to participate in local programmes. Foreign NGOs will be required to build local partner capacity and transfer their responsibilities within one decade.

8. To commit to a minimum ten-year funding horizon for these initiatives, and to require the same of all partner NGOs. Funding should be structured as follows: DAC members 40%, partner NGOs 40%, host governments 20%.

9. To invite countries with appropriately qualified people to second volunteer personnel to work with and support the agricultural extensions workers.

10. To review results at three-year intervals and to establish new hubs every five years in areas where the model has demonstrated success.