‘Restaurants Against Hunger’ is back – here’s how and where you can show your support by eating out

On Sunday 18 October, at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, a full day of events open to the whole family will be organised to say ‘enough is enough’ to hunger being used as a weapon of war, featuring good food, talks, music and activities for children.

The organisers state that the funds have supported the project “No More Hunger: from emergency to self-sufficiency”,, which “combats food poverty and promotes employment in Italia, reaching over 500 people in Milan, Naples and Bari”. International projects in various countries have also been funded: “from the Sahel, with initiatives to tackle the effects of climate change, to Lebanon, with programmes focusing on social cohesion, nutrition and health, and on to the Central African Republic, to prevent malnutrition among mothers and children under five”. In 2026, this commitment will continue with targeted initiatives in Italia (with the project being extended to other cities) and in Venezuela, which was recently hit by a devastating earthquake.

Unfortunately, worldwide, global hunger in its most acute form has doubled in ten years, is increasingly concentrated in a small number of countries and now affects 266 million people in 47 countries and territories. “But just as needs are increasing, the resources to respond are dwindling and humanitarian access is becoming increasingly difficult.” This is the warning issued by Action Against Hunger Italia with the “Map of the 10 Main Global Food Crises 2026”, compiled on the basis of data from the 2026 edition of the Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC), the FAO-WFP Hunger Hotspots reports and the experience of the organisation’s teams on the ground.

In 2025 alone, according to the report, 266 million people in 47 countries and territories faced acute food insecurity. Furthermore, hunger is increasingly concentrated: the top 10 countries – Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan, South Sudan and Syria – account for 177 million people, around two-thirds of the global total. Added to this are other emergencies such as the tragedy in Gaza.

The figure for the top ten countries is lower than the 196.5 million recorded in the previous edition of the GRFC. However, this apparent improvement, Action Against Hunger warns, must be interpreted with caution: “The reduction largely reflects gaps in data availability, rather than a real decrease in hunger. Some countries were not included in this year’s tally: among them is Ethiopia, which in 2024 had nearly 22 million people facing acute food insecurity. The decline in humanitarian aid has also affected the capacity to collect and analyse data. Measuring hunger is therefore part of the response to hunger: without robust and continuous monitoring systems, it becomes more difficult to understand how crises are evolving, to identify the most serious situations in a timely manner and to direct resources where they are most needed’.

Among the crises that have seen the sharpest increases in the number of people affected are Myanmar (+2.3 million), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (+2.1 million), Afghanistan (+1.6 million) and Yemen (+1.4 million).

Furthermore, the global hunger situation is worsening at a time when international response capacity is declining. The Map shows that humanitarian aid allocated to the food sector in crisis contexts has fallen by 59 per cent between 2022 and 2025, returning to levels last seen in 2016–2017.

“On the ground, a cut in funding is not just an abstract figure. It quickly translates into decisions about where we can operate and where we cannot, how many people we can reach and how many we cannot, and which activities we can carry out and which we cannot,” says Simone Garroni, director of Action Against Hunger Italia. “We are increasingly forced to prioritise immediate interventions to save lives, whilst scaling back or postponing programmes that would help communities recover and become more resilient. The risk is that we become trapped in a vicious cycle of short-term responses: repeatedly responding to the same emergency because we lack the resources needed to tackle its root causes.”