Recommandations
To minimize the number of lives needlessly lost due to hunger and malnutrition, and to
assert Canadian leadership on the global stage, Action Against Hunger Canada makes the
following recommendations for the 2026 budget:
Recommendation 1: That the Government of Canada reaffirm its leadership in global
humanitarian and development assistance by maintaining predictable, flexible, multi-year
nutrition and food security financing.
Recommendation 2: That the Government of Canada champion a comprehensive approach to nutrition support.
Recommendation 3: That the Government of Canada prioritize the highest-impact
interventions and critical infrastructure. They should invest in resilient nutrition data and
Early Warning Systems to maximize efficiency, effectiveness, and impact of nutrition
support.
Introduction and Context
Action Against Hunger Canada is a global humanitarian organization committed to ending hunger and malnutrition in our lifetime. With operations in over 50 countries, we provide life-saving services in nutrition, health, food security, and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) to the world’s most vulnerable communities. We serve as a proud, longstanding, and critical partner to the Government of Canada in responding to global crises.
The need is real. According to the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2025
report, 673 million people are hungry, and more than 2.3 billion people are experiencing
moderate or severe food insecurity. One in five people in Africa is undernourished. An
estimated 150 million children under five are affected by stunting, and millions more suffer from wasting, the deadliest form of malnutrition.
Unfortunately, at a time of heightened need, many governments around the world are
pulling back from foreign aid. Sweeping aid cuts made under the Trump administration are driving this shift, with cuts to foreign aid totalling $49.1 billion. The U.S. once accounted for 42 percent of international aid. Its retreat has undermined every aspect of delivery, including logistics and infrastructure.
Several European countries have followed suit, and Canada also announced plans to cut aid spending in its 2025 budget. According to Oxfam, the most recent G7 aid reductions are the steepest since records began in 1960.
The results of these fundamental shifts have forced the United Nations to make its deepest ever cuts to humanitarian assistance, nearly one-third of its entire aid spending. As the UN’s top humanitarian official put it: “We have been forced into a triage of human survival.”1
To put this in perspective, in 2025, humanitarian nutrition financing faced a 72 percent
shortfall across twenty priority countries, leading to reduced coverage and quality of
services. Reductions in donor funding for severe acute malnutrition treatment could
eliminate access to lifesaving care for millions of children and result in approximately
369,000 preventable child deaths each year.
That is unacceptable.
Canadian Leadership is Required
Canada cannot fill the funding void left by the U.S. and others, which extends to all aspects of foreign aid – not just hunger and malnutrition. Therefore, the critical question is where and how Canada can focus its efforts in this environment to save the most lives.
Addressing hunger and nutrition should be prioritized for two primary reasons. First, this is an area where Canada has longstanding, world-class expertise. If resources are scarce, then it makes sense to focus them in areas of proven strength.
Second, the solutions to addressing hunger and nutrition are known: families need
nutrition-rich diets, reliable access to essential health services for prevention and treatment of disease, and investments in poverty reduction, which directly combats the root causes of malnutrition.
To put it another way, a life lost to hunger or malnutrition is a political choice; it is not
because solutions do not exist.
Faced with the challenges posed by the current global context, last fall Action Against
Hunger Canada and the Canadian Partnership for Women and Children’s Health brought
together leading global nutrition experts for a two-day retreat to consider a path forward
within this radically changed environment.
Participants recommended four interconnected priorities for Canadian aid: deliver lifesaving nutrition services and protect the critical infrastructures and systems needed to provide them; bridge the divide between humanitarian response and long-term
development; build predictable and diversified financing models; and support resilient
national systems and local leadership.
The deliberations from that retreat are directly linked to our recommendations for the 2026 budget.
Recommandations
Recommendation 1: That the Government of Canada reaffirm its leadership in global
humanitarian and development assistance by maintaining predictable, flexible, multi-year nutrition and food security financing.
The 2026 budget should:
- Maintain Canada’s allocations to global nutrition and position it as a core pillar of
Canada’s global health engagement and as part of the child survival continuum,
ensuring sustained support for high-impact nutrition programs and partnerships.
- Expand flexible, multi-year financing with crisis modifiers. Longer-term, adaptable
funding enables partners to bridge emergency needs with system strengthening and
to scale activities quickly when shocks occur.
- Link emergency response with long-term system strengthening so that gains are
protected during crises and partners can plan for sustained impact.
In pursuing the above, Canada should strengthen coordination with like-minded nations at a time of unprecedented retreat and hyper-prioritization by traditional donors.
Recommendation 2: That the Government of Canada champion a comprehensive
approach to nutrition support.
The origins of the following quote are debated, but variations of it have been used for close to a century: “You give a poor man a fish and you feed him for a day. You teach him to fish and you give him an occupation that will feed him for a lifetime.”
Remarkably, however, in this new era of global retreat from Overseas Development Assistance, there are still some who suggest this should not be the approach to nutrition support, instead hyper-prioritizing commodities and/or emergency support. There is a role for these, but they alone will not address the global hunger crisis.
The most impactful and cost-efficient aid is preventative. The goal of development spending has always been to help countries reach a point where they no longer require aid, becoming self-sufficient and economically productive. We need to move beyond a crisis-only model as it does not support sustainable, life-saving support in the medium-term.
To those who cry “waste” every time aid is mentioned: what’s more wasteful—sending
emergency rations to a country in constant famine or helping it build food systems that
prevent hunger in the first place?
Therefore, Canada needs to champion a comprehensive approach to nutrition support that:
- Aligns humanitarian and development investments and funding modalities with
national nutrition priorities.
- Strengthen prevention alongside treatment. Maintain lifesaving treatment for acute
malnutrition while scaling proven prevention interventions, particularly for
maternal, adolescent, and early childhood nutrition.
- Fund integrated, multisectoral programming. Nutrition outcomes depend on health,
food systems, WASH, education, and social protection systems. Canada can increase
support for integrated programming that links these sectors and strengthens the
delivery systems that sustain nutrition outcomes over time.
- Support resilient national systems and local leadership. Help partner countries
protect nutrition budgets, strengthen service delivery, and build durable systems
that can withstand shocks and fiscal pressures.
Recommendation 3: That the Government of Canada prioritize the highest-impact interventions and critical infrastructure. They should invest in resilient nutrition data and Early Warning Systems to maximize efficiency, effectiveness, and impact of nutrition support.
As a result of the U.S. cuts to foreign aid, there is an enormous global data deficit when it
comes to hunger and nutrition. This significantly undermines the efficiency of nutrition
spending.
Additionally, the best time to intervene is before a situation reaches crisis levels, ensuring
early detection is the least expensive option. It is no different than a home: do you fix a
leaky pipe now or wait for it to burst and have the ceiling collapse? The answer is obvious. It is the same with hunger and nutrition. Early warning systems are required to ensure crises and mitigated. As with a leaky pipe, this is the much less expensive approach.
Therefore, we recommend the Government further invest in nutrition data and early
warning systems so Canada can help ensure that governments and partners have the
reliable, timely, quality information required to detect risks early and target limited
resources effectively.
There are many benefits from investments in data and early warning systems:
- Strengthening nutrition data and early warning capacities is essential for preventing
crises, protecting program quality, guiding coherent action across humanitarian and
development settings, and where return on investment is at its highest.
- High-quality, timely data is essential for targeting and prioritizing interventions.
Implementing partners should invest in Nutrition Information Systems, strengthen
routine monitoring, and use high-quality data to adapt programs as conditions
change.
- Accelerated development of early warning systems to address acute malnutrition
caused by climate shocks, conflict, worsening economic instability, and declining
humanitarian resources enables local, national and international actors’ capacities to
foresee and mitigate crises in vulnerable settings.
- Building on National Information Systems, rather than creating new tools, improves
the quality of data and strengthens government led monitoring.
Conclusion
Foreign aid is facing its most challenging moment in decades, but this also presents an
opportunity to reassess priorities to determine how Canada can achieve the greatest impact for its aid investments.
Action Against Hunger believes the focus should be on proven solutions to known problems around hunger and nutrition. We know what works. These are life-saving investments that strengthen capacity and support low- and middle-income nations in becoming stronger trade partners. Without addressing hunger and nutrition, other humanitarian and development efforts are undermined. You simply cannot have a productive, healthy population that is hungry or malnourished.
The recommendations made here are designed to move beyond the crisis-focused response to hunger and nutrition and build long-term, sustainable solutions that support populations to self-sufficiency, which in turn supports advancing their goals of economic development and greater integration into the global economy.
Canada faces a clear choice. It can respond repeatedly to escalating nutrition emergencies at an increasing cost, or it can continue to expand its investment in preventing crises, protect women and children, and strengthen systems for the long term. The evidence is clear. The solutions are known. Canada can play a decisive role in safeguarding global nutrition when it is needed most and prevent needless suffering and death.
Pour plus d'informations, veuillez contacter :
Onome Ako, directeur général
Action contre la faim Canada
oako@actionagainsthunger.ca
Note:
1) https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/06/1164421
