By Dominus Owen Markham
Let me tell you something that’s been sitting uncomfortably in my chest for a while now.
We live in an age of extraordinary noise. News alerts. Breaking stories. Geopolitical theatre that refreshes every forty-eight hours like a particularly grim social media feed. And somewhere in all of that noise, between the war correspondents and the economic summits and the strongly-worded statements from people in expensive suits… we’ve collectively decided to look the other way on something enormous.
Not enormous like “concerning trend in quarterly earnings” enormous.
Enormous like 318 million people facing crisis levels of hunger right now, this year, in 2026 enormous.
I want to talk about that. I want to talk about what we’re ignoring, why we’re ignoring it, and what it actually says about the kind of civilisation we’ve built… or rather, the kind we’ve failed to build, despite having every resource, every tool, and every opportunity to do so.
The Convenient Visibility of War
Here’s why war dominates the conversation, and I say this not to be cynical but because I think it matters to understand it honestly.
War is visible. It has footage. It has a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and a cast of characters we can assign roles to. Heroes and villains. Sovereignty and aggression. The kind of moral clarity that makes for compelling television and unambiguous outrage.
We are wired for this. Genuinely, neurologically wired. Humans evolved to respond to immediate, visceral, nearby threat. A lion in the field triggers every alarm. A child going to bed hungry in a city you’ll never visit… that requires a different kind of moral muscle. A more deliberate one. One that most of our institutions, media ecosystems, and political incentive structures are not particularly interested in exercising.
And so the noise continues. And the silence underneath it grows.
Because while the world debates borders and alliances and who said what to whom at the latest emergency summit… the quiet catastrophe keeps rolling. Unhurried. Unfilmed. Largely unreported.
The Food Question Nobody Wants to Answer Honestly
Let’s start with a fact that should, by rights, end the entire conversation about global hunger in about thirty seconds.
The world produces enough food to feed every single person on the planet.
All 8.2 billion of us. Right now. With what we already grow, manufacture, and distribute. We are not facing a scarcity problem. We never were. What we’re facing is a distribution problem, a political will problem, and… if we’re being really honest with each other… a “who counts as a person worth feeding” problem that nobody in power has the stomach to say aloud.
295 million people are facing acute food insecurity across 59 countries. Not in some dusty historical account you’d find in a library. Now. This April. And nearly 70 percent of them already lived in fragile or conflict-affected countries before the current wave of crises even began. They were already drowning when the tide came in again.
Nigeria alone — one country — has 31.8 million people in acute food insecurity. That’s more than the entire population of several European nations combined, going hungry in a single place, and I genuinely cannot tell you the last time I saw it lead a news cycle.
Two simultaneous famines were confirmed in 2025. In Gaza and Sudan. Two. At the same time. A devastating first this century, and yet somehow it didn’t become the defining moral story of our era. We noted it. We moved on. We had other things to look at.
The climate dimension makes all of this worse, of course. Climate shocks aren’t future projections anymore, they’re present-tense catastrophes. Pakistan flooded. Somalia dried out. Afghanistan shook. Yemen, already on its knees after a decade of conflict, now faces its worst drought in living memory alongside ongoing war. These aren’t separate stories. They’re the same story told over and over, in different languages, to audiences who’ve quietly stopped listening.
The Funding Scandal That Isn’t Being Called One
Now here’s where I genuinely start to feel the cynicism taking hold, and I want to be transparent about that, because I think cynicism about humanitarian crises is actually one of the more dangerous cultural luxuries we’ve allowed ourselves.
The World Food Programme needs $13 billion to do its work in 2026. That sounds like a lot until you remember that it’s approximately what a mid-sized tech company spends on share buybacks in a single quarter. Current forecasts put WFP’s funding at just under half of that figure, leaving the agency able to reach roughly a third of the people who need them.
Half the money. A third of the people.
That’s not a humanitarian response. That’s triage with a shrug and an apologetic press release.
And then — and this is the part that I find genuinely difficult to sit with — the United States announced an 83 percent cut to its support for humanitarian programmes around the world. Not a trimming. Not a restructuring. Eighty-three percent. Followed swiftly by significant cuts from Germany, France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
Every wealthy nation, queuing up in an orderly fashion to reduce the budget that keeps people alive. Not the defence budget. Not the subsidy for an industry that doesn’t need it. The budget for food. For the people who have nothing.
And we did this quietly. With spreadsheet language and policy frameworks. Not with the kind of language that might actually convey what was happening, which is that we looked at hundreds of millions of hungry people and decided we had better uses for the money.
I keep coming back to a sentence from the WFP that I think deserves to be repeated until it becomes genuinely uncomfortable: hunger drives displacement, conflict, and instability, and these not only threaten lives, but disrupt the very markets that businesses depend on.
We’re not even being asked to care about this for purely moral reasons. The economic argument is right there. Hungry, displaced, destabilised populations create the very chaos that then costs wealthier nations vastly more to manage — in military spending, border infrastructure, refugee support, and security apparatus — than it would have cost to simply not let people starve in the first place.
We’re not even choosing the moral option. We’re not even choosing the economically rational option. We’re just choosing the option that doesn’t require us to look.
Homelessness and the Employment Myth
Let me shift to homelessness for a moment, because the story here has its own particular flavour of maddening.
318 million people are homeless worldwide. Another 2.8 billion… more than a third of the entire human population… lack access to adequate housing. They’re sleeping in conditions that most of us wouldn’t consider appropriate for a garden shed, and they’re doing it in a world of extraordinary architectural achievement, property development, and real estate investment portfolios worth trillions.
The sheer juxtaposition of that should be keeping more people awake at night than it apparently is.
But here’s the detail that I think cuts through the noise better than any statistic about sheer scale. In the United States — one of the wealthiest nations in human history — between 40 and 60 percent of people experiencing homelessness have a job. They are working. They are getting up and going somewhere and doing something and earning money. And they still cannot afford a roof.
There is no county, no state, in America where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a modest apartment. At minimum wage, you’d need to work 86 hours a week to cover a one-bedroom. And this is the country that spent most of the twentieth century telling the world that hard work was the answer. That if you just worked hard enough, the system would reward you.
The system was redesigned. Nobody sent a memo.
And it’s not just America. From 2001 to 2023, median rents in the US increased by 23 percent after adjusting for inflation, while renters’ median incomes rose just 5 percent. That gap… that yawning, structural gap between what housing costs and what work pays… is not an accident. It’s the predictable result of decades of policy decisions that prioritised asset appreciation over human stability.
We built economies that are extraordinarily effective at generating wealth. Genuinely impressive, world-historical wealth. And we built systems that are equally effective at ensuring that wealth stays concentrated, that housing becomes an investment vehicle rather than a human right, and that the people at the bottom of the income distribution find themselves working harder for less security than any generation in recent memory.
And then we have the audacity to call this a complicated problem.
The Solutions We’re Pretending Don’t Exist
This is perhaps the most infuriating part of the whole conversation, and I want to linger here because I think it matters.
We know how to fix this.
Not hypothetically. Not in theory. We have actual, tested, evidence-based, real-world examples of these problems being substantially reduced.
Finland introduced its Housing First initiative in 2008. The principle was radical in its simplicity: give people housing first, unconditionally, and then provide support services. Don’t make them earn the right to a safe place to sleep. Don’t attach conditions that exclude the most vulnerable. Just house them, and then help them stabilise. The result was a 76 percent reduction in homelessness. Not a marginal improvement. Not a promising early trend. Seventy-six percent.
The solution exists. It has been demonstrated. It works.
On hunger, the WFP and local communities managed to turn 158,000 hectares of barren land in the Sahel region into farmable and grazeable territory in just four years. Climate-resilience programmes have benefited hundreds of thousands of vulnerable households across three continents. Women’s agricultural cooperatives are helping families rebuild their livelihoods in communities that had been written off entirely.
The knowledge is there. The methodology is there. In many cases, the infrastructure is being quietly, determinedly built by organisations that are simultaneously having their funding slashed by the very governments who commission the reports about how serious the situation has become.
What is not there is political will. And political will, as we well know, follows attention. It follows pressure. It follows the things people are loudly, persistently, inconveniently unwilling to let go of.
The Pace We’re Moving At
Here’s the number that I find genuinely haunting, and I’ve been sitting with it since I first encountered it.
At the current pace of progress, the world will not reach even low hunger levels until 2137.
Not zero hunger. Not the ambitious target. Low hunger. The basic, minimum version of the goal.
That’s five or six generations. That’s your grandchildren’s grandchildren still inheriting a world in which hundreds of millions of people go to bed without enough to eat. That’s not a failure of ambition, it’s a failure of basic moral seriousness. The Zero Hunger target by 2030 is, at this point, not just missed, it’s a historical curiosity. A thing we said we wanted, in rooms with good lighting and catered lunches, and then quietly failed to fund.
I am not, by nature, someone who reaches easily for catastrophism. I think there’s genuine progress happening in the world on many fronts, and I think the story of human development over the long arc is more positive than the daily news would suggest. But this particular corner of the conversation is one where I think the catastrophism is not only warranted, it is underemployed.
What It Actually Says About Us
I want to come back to where I started, because I think the real question here isn’t policy. Policy is downstream of something deeper.
The real question is: who do we decide counts?
Because the policies that have led us here are not random. The funding cuts, the housing markets that price out the workers who build the houses, the food systems that produce abundance and distribute scarcity… these are choices. They were made by people with the power to make different choices. And they were made, at least in part, because the people most affected by them don’t have lobbyists, don’t have significant electoral leverage in the countries making the decisions, and can’t make the news cycle uncomfortable enough for long enough to change the calculation.
War gets covered because powerful nations have interests in war. Economic volatility gets covered because powerful institutions have exposure to economic volatility. Hunger and homelessness… the structural, persistent, solvable hunger and homelessness of hundreds of millions of people who happen to be poor… gets covered when there’s a particularly dramatic famine or a particularly photogenic tent city.
And then we move on.
I don’t say this to make you feel hopeless. I genuinely don’t. I say it because I think the first step in taking any of this seriously is being honest about why we haven’t been. Not blaming abstract systems or faceless forces, but sitting with the uncomfortable fact that the noise we consume and the silence we accept are both, to some degree, choices.
We choose what to pay attention to. We choose what to demand of the people who represent us. We choose whether the fact that 318 million people are facing crisis-level hunger in 2026 is something that sits in the background of our awareness like a low hum we’ve learned to tune out… or something that actually, honestly, properly bothers us.
The world isn’t short of food.
It isn’t short of housing solutions.
It isn’t short of evidence about what works.
What it appears to be short of is the collective decision that the people suffering from these things matter enough to do something about it, with the urgency and the funding and the political capital that the problem actually demands.
That’s not an economic failure.
That’s a moral one.
And we’re all, to varying degrees, implicated in it.
If this piece made you think, made you uncomfortable, or made you want to push back on something — good. That’s the point. Share it with someone who needs to read it.
Until Next Time
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