In the past year, the World Food Programme (WFP) has suffered the worst funding shortfalls in its 60-year history: we raised only US$10 billion of our projected costs of US$23.5 billion - a historic gap of almost 60 percent.
This has resulted in colossal reductions in the number of people we serve. With 333 million people around the world facing acute hunger, we were forced to cut rations outright for millions of people in countries such as Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti and Yemen, pushing families deeper into hunger.
The tragic irony is that many of the places where WFP operates should not only be thriving by themselves but producing food for people in other countries to consume too.
At the beginning of 2023, Matthew Hollingworth, WFP's Country Director for Ukraine, summed it up neatly: "We're delivering food assistance in one of the most fertile countries in the world. It's perverse. We shouldn't need to be here - but we are, and we do."
But with conflict and climate extremes showing no sign of abating, humanitarian assistance continues to be the only lifeline for millions of people. Below, we look at just some of the countries where WFP's had to cut assistance in 2023...
