Nearly 28.8 million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo face acute food insecurity through December 2026, according to the latest IPC assessment cited by the humanitarian group CARE, with the number projected to climb to 30.3 million by early 2027 as conflict, displacement and an Ebola outbreak compound each other.
The crisis is unfolding alongside an Ebola outbreak that has now passed 10,000 cases nationally. The Fourth Plate reported in late October that the virus had reached an eighth province, straining food access as markets closed and movement restrictions disrupted farming and trade in affected areas.
Conflict and displacement remain the primary drivers behind the headline figures, with repeated population movements disrupting planting seasons and cutting off communities from markets and humanitarian supply routes across the country’s eastern provinces, where fighting has persisted for years.
A crisis compounding itself
What distinguishes the DRC’s current trajectory is how directly its two crises feed one another. Ebola containment measures — restrictions on movement and gatherings, and the closure of some markets — have cut off exactly the trade and farming activity that communities rely on to cope with conflict-driven displacement. Meanwhile, displacement itself raises the risk of further disease spread, as people move into crowded settlements with strained health infrastructure.
Humanitarian agencies have long warned that the DRC’s layered emergencies — conflict, disease outbreaks and chronic underinvestment in rural infrastructure — make it one of the hardest places in the world to deliver sustained food assistance, a pattern the latest figures appear to confirm rather than interrupt.
Why the toll keeps climbing
The projected rise from 28.8 million to 30.3 million people facing acute hunger between now and early 2027 suggests aid agencies expect conditions to deteriorate further before any stabilisation, rather than plateau at current levels. CARE’s figures place the DRC among the small number of countries, alongside Yemen and Myanmar, where food crises of this scale persist simultaneously with active armed conflict.
Aid organisations have not detailed how much of the funding needed to respond to the compounding crisis has so far been secured.
The DRC’s compounding crisis sits at one extreme of a continent-wide pattern: even in South Africa, far removed from active conflict, a national food security plan has sat lapsed and unfunded since 2023, a reminder that institutional neglect, not only conflict and disease, can leave millions exposed to hunger.
