Aid cuts have left hundreds of thousands without food aid and other vital humanitarian services. Although major impacts have been documented by researchers and the media, the damage to the humanitarian sector’s ability to track and monitor global food crises has received less attention. Each year, bodies like FEWSNET and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) track emerging food crises around the world, helping direct scarce resources to those who need them most. Their analysis is underpinned by data collected by the World Food Programme (WFP), based on interviews with over a million survey respondents across the world. But WFP’s data collection efforts were another victim of last year’s cuts, and without that information, the reduced finance left for humanitarian response will be less effective in saving lives.

Agencies like WFP (where one of us, Jean-Martin, works) have done everything in their power to continue reporting on the major food crises in the world, perhaps giving a sense of business as usual. But the frequency and depth of data collection has suffered in an increasing share of the 60 countries covered by these information systems.

Primary data collection is down, as WFP offices have cut down on costly surveys. Only 800,000 WFP interviews took place in 2025, down from 1.1 million in 2024. Only 18 WFP offices conducted real-time monitoring in 2025, down from 35 in 2022, making it more challenging to target aid in risky, rapidly evolving humanitarian contexts. WFP still monitored prices and functionality of over 2,000 markets in 2025, similar to 2024, collecting information that’s essential for early warning systems. However, the number of times enumerators visited these markets dropped by a third in 2025.