Nutritional crises are reaching unprecedented levels worldwide. Today, nearly 70% of acutely food-insecure people — including women and children who remain disproportionately affected — live in fragile contexts where conflict, climate shocks, displacement, and the collapse of essential services converge. Yet, as acute malnutrition rates rise sharply, reported humanitarian official development assistance from OECD DAC members has continued to decrease sharply. (1)
This crisis persists not for lack of solutions, but for lack of prioritisation. Evidence consistently shows that nutrition interventions are among the most effective ways to save lives and strengthen resilience, yet they remainunderfunded and siloed.
The European Commission has recently adopted a Humanitarian Communication, structured around three pillars: Protect, Perform, and Partner, alongside three Staff Working documents, including one of the Integrated Approach to Fragility. This Communication sends out an important political sign that humanitarian aid remains a strategic priority for the European Union, at a time marked by shrinking humanitarian funding and space, rising levels of conflict and fragility, and declining respect for international humanitarian law.
The Communication reaffirms the importance of flexible, multi-year funding providing a potentially important signal ahead of the forthcoming discussion on broader EU external policy framework, and in the next MFF. At the same time, the Communication and its accompanying Staff Working Documents stop short of explicitly positioning nutrition as a core pillar of global humanitarian action.
To reflect on these critical issues, we invited three experts from different backgrounds to offer valuable insights, challenges, and recommendations:
- Adeline Lescanne-Gautier, CEO of the Nutriset group
- Stéphane Doyon, Operations Manager at Medecins Sans Frontières (Paris)
- Supriya Madhavan, Senior Health Specialist at the Global Financing Facility (GFF)
(1) Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ‘A historic decline in foreign aid: Preliminary 2025 ODA Data’, Data explainer, 9 April 2026. ‘DAC’ refers to Development Assistance Committee
;
