Belgium’s Queen Mathilde and World Trade Organization Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala joined ministers and senior officials at a closed-door UN General Assembly side-event on 22 September, part of a coordinated push by the Global Network Against Food Crises to keep hunger on the agenda during UNGA81’s high-level week.
The 75-minute session, titled United Against Hunger: Realigning Global Action for Food Crises in Times of Disruption, was held at UN headquarters in New York and organised jointly by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Global Network Against Food Crises, and the World Food Programme. It was moderated by Helder Da Costa, secretary-general of the g7+ grouping of conflict-affected states.
A restricted, ministerial-level format
Germany’s Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, Reem Alabali Radovan, opened proceedings alongside Queen Mathilde, whose engagement on nutrition issues at the UN dates back several years. The scene-setting panel that followed brought together Okonjo-Iweala, IFAD President Alvaro Ilario, and WFP’s acting executive director, Carl Skau, a lineup that placed trade, agricultural finance and emergency food assistance in direct conversation rather than treating them as separate policy tracks.
The event’s restricted, ministerial format reflected its purpose: rather than a public advocacy platform, organisers designed it as a working session on “how the international community can collectively address” food security challenges stemming from funding cuts, conflict-disrupted trade routes and climate shocks, three pressures agencies say are increasingly compounding one another rather than arriving separately.
Ministers from crisis-affected states at the table
The roundtable segment featured ministers directly managing food crises on the ground: Somalia’s planning, investment and economic development minister, Mohamud Abdirahman Sheikh Farah, and Sierra Leone’s planning and economic development minister, Kenyeh Barlay, both countries that feature regularly on FAO and WFP hunger hotspot lists. Saudi Arabia’s KSRelief was represented by its supervisor-general, Abdullah A. Al Rabeeah, reflecting the Gulf state’s growing role as a humanitarian food-aid donor.
Additional participants were drawn from the African Union, FAO, UNICEF, the World Bank, Save the Children and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, underlining the breadth of institutions now coordinating under the Global Network Against Food Crises umbrella. Ireland’s minister of state for development, Neale Richmond, delivered closing remarks.
Realignment, not just more funding
The event’s subtitle, “realigning global action,” signalled an emphasis on coordination and efficiency rather than simply calling for larger sums, a framing that has become more common among donor governments facing their own domestic budget pressures. Whether that realignment translates into faster, better-targeted responses on the ground in Somalia, Sierra Leone and other hotspot countries will be the practical test of a session that, for now, remains largely a diplomatic one.
Why GNAFC convenes rather than simply advocates
The Global Network Against Food Crises was established to coordinate humanitarian, development and peacebuilding responses to food crises under a single framework, rather than leaving agencies to run parallel, uncoordinated appeals for the same crisis-affected populations. Its convening of a ministerial-level session at UNGA, rather than a lower-profile technical briefing, reflects the network’s stated aim of keeping food crises visible to heads of state and foreign ministers who might otherwise treat hunger as a purely technical or humanitarian-agency issue rather than a matter for direct diplomatic attention.
The network’s structure, spanning UN agencies, bilateral donors and affected-country governments under one coordinating body, is itself a response to years of criticism that overlapping, poorly sequenced appeals for the same crises wasted donor money and confused recipients. Whether that coordination model measurably improves outcomes in Somalia and Sierra Leone over the coming year remains to be seen, but its ministerial-level backing at UNGA81 signals sustained institutional commitment to the approach.
