14th Annual Middle East Rounds 2025-2026

Global food security has deteriorated sharply since the late 2010s, reversing decades of progress against hunger. The FAO's 2023 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report estimated that between 691 and 783 million people faced hunger in 2022, with acute food insecurity concentrated in conflict zones, drought-prone regions, and economies battered by currency shocks. The convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, climate-driven crop failures in the Horn of Africa and South Asia, and rising fertilizer and energy prices created what the UN Secretary-General termed an 'unprecedented global food crisis.' The Black Sea Grain Initiative, brokered by Türkiye and the UN in July 2022, briefly stabilized wheat and sunflower oil exports from Ukrainian ports before Russia withdrew in July 2023, sending prices and shipping insurance costs higher again. The Middle East and North Africa region is uniquely exposed: it is the world's largest net importer of cereals, with countries such as Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, and Sudan dependent on wheat from Russia and Ukraine. Active conflicts in Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, and Syria have compounded the problem, with the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) declaring famine conditions in parts of Gaza in 2024 and warning of catastrophic hunger in Darfur. Beyond emergency hunger, structural threats — water scarcity, soil degradation, the collapse of seed-system diversity, and the loss of smallholder agriculture — undermine long-term resilience. Initiatives such as ICARDA's gene bank (which was famously duplicated to Svalbard after the Syrian war), the African Union's Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme, and the UN Food Systems Summit follow-up tracks attempt to address these structural vulnerabilities. Today the debate centers on how the international community can shift from reactive humanitarian relief toward durable resilience: protecting seed sovereignty and agro-biodiversity, financing climate-smart agriculture, reforming grain trade and stockholding, and ensuring humanitarian access in conflict zones. Disagreements persist over export restrictions, subsidies, the role of biotechnology, and whether wealthy states are meeting their Official Development Assistance and climate-adaptation finance commitments under the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals.