FSLC’s mission is to reimagine the U.S. approach to global food security, including humanitarian food assistance. With the support of the Boston Foundation and in partnership with the Council on Strategic Risks, FSLC has embarked on a year-long endeavor to unpack the many complex policy challenges inherent in U.S. humanitarian assistance, in consultation with a wide array of experts and thought leaders.
As a starting point, we must decide what it means to deploy humanitarian food assistance in the national interest. It is a core premise of FSLC that global food security advances both the national interests and humanitarian values of the United States—that it is a strategic objective we can pursue without any attendant moral dilemma. Yet the interplay between the self-interested and values-based drivers of our international humanitarian assistance can potentially have real ramifications for how we deploy it—who receives aid and under what conditions.
It is FSLC’s contention that the most effective way to deploy humanitarian food assistance in the national interest is to do so primarily based on need. A commitment to needs-based humanitarian assistance is not a radical notion—it is enshrined in the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, formalized for years in State and USAID operating guidance, and declared repeatedly in resolutions of the UN General Assembly. But in an era when leaders across the political spectrum scramble to embrace a narrow and oversimplified vision of the national self-interest, it is worthy of reaffirmation.
In May 2026, the State Department announced significant new humanitarian assistance funding and affirmed its “sovereign right to invest in places where it aligns with our national interest.” This contention is longstanding.
The first U.S. foreign disaster aid followed an earthquake that devastated Caracas in 1812. President Madison shipped food to Venezuela, as “strong proof of the friendship,” with an eye to “the mutual advantages of commerce.” The modern architecture arrived in 1954, with Public Law 480 establishing our primary food relief program to make “maximum efficient use of surplus agricultural commodities in furtherance of the foreign policy of the United States.” From the start, American food aid served humanitarian, economic, and strategic ends.
How the interplay of those goals manifests is less settled. In some cases, the United States has deployed food assistance to places in genuine need, without political strings. It does so as an investment, primarily for the purpose of enhancing international goodwill, strengthening U.S. soft power, or broadly seeking to redress fragility—sometimes while benefiting from the outlet for surplus U.S. commodities. At its 1922 peak, the United States was feeding 10.5 million people a day in famine-struck Soviet Russia, a regime Washington did not recognize. President Truman made the case in introducing the Marshall Plan that a “principal concern of the people of the United States is the creation of conditions of enduring peace throughout the world.” And, in 1984, declaring that “a hungry child knows no politics,” President Reagan made the United States the largest donor to Marxist Ethiopia’s famine relief.
In other cases, the United States has prioritized emergency food assistance as a diplomatic tool. It directed assistance to countries where it sought to prop up a particular regime or deepen its influence. For years, the United States set eligibility criteria to deliberately include strategic—though less food insecure—partners: Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and South Korea. During that period, South Korea received three times the amount programmed for all of Africa. In 1974, an NSC official was reported to say that “to give food aid to countries just because people are starving is a pretty weak reason.” Around the same time, a senator accused the administration of using food aid to prop up puppet regimes. In the 1990s, Presidents Bush and Clinton chose to provide disproportionately large amounts of food aid to Russia to signal support for its economic transition and solidify the bilateral relationship.
At times, the United States has descended from using food relief as a tool of grand strategy—building soft power, investing in relationships, advancing containment—to transactionalism and politicization. President Johnson sought to use grain shipments to India to influence its position on the Vietnam War. In 2019, the United States deployed food aid for Venezuela as part of a staged political stand-off between the incumbent president and his opposition, prioritizing political theater over helping those in dire need.
It is not clear which approach the current Administration is taking, but it is not needs-based. The Food for Peace program, now known as “America First international food assistance,” announced food aid for seven countries, among them two countries not facing a food emergency: Rwanda and El Salvador. Not included were five countries facing a food emergency or worse in 2025, including one of the year’s two famines.
FSLC’s reimagination of U.S. humanitarian food assistance will be based on the fundamental premise that the most effective way to deploy humanitarian assistance in the national interest is to do so primarily based on need. A needs-based approach is an investment in U.S. soft power and global stability.
First, needs-based emergency aid builds trust, while politicized emergency aid breeds resentment. By prioritizing emergency funding according to need, the United States lives up to its self-image as a force for good in the world, building international goodwill that will serve it across its foreign policy agenda. The returns are measurable. When the United States responded to Pakistan’s 2005 earthquake with swift relief operations, public approval doubled in just six months. And just a year earlier, after Indonesia’s tsunami, American humanitarian efforts, most notably emergency food aid, helped boost favorable perceptions from 15% to 38%.
Such an approach also eschews the resentment that a transactional—and in a crisis innately coercive—approach fosters. When President Johnson tied emergency food assistance to India during a multi-year famine to strict political conditions, the pressure sparked domestic backlash, helped defeat candidates aligned with U.S.-backed reforms, and set off a lasting chill in bilateral relations, pushing India closer to the Soviet Union. An Indian official’s verdict was that the “United States always gives but doesn’t give graciously.”
Second, needs-based emergency aid inherently targets resources where instability is most likely to emerge or spill over. Food insecurity and conflict are closely linked. A needs-based lens to emergency food aid will generally direct dollars to the most fragile places.
Among the greatest protracted food emergencies are Yemen, Afghanistan, Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, and Haiti. These are all places that have generated instability well beyond their own borders, whether through civil conflict, piracy, terrorism, or irregular migration. FSLC Distinguished Fellow Dr. Michelle Jurkovich warned that turning our backs on the humanitarian crises in Afghanistan and Yemen could harm U.S. national security: falling food supplies weaken Yemen’s recognized government in its fight against the Houthis, and growing hunger in Afghanistan is more likely to strengthen ISIS-K than to hurt the Taliban.
Third, a needs-based standard for emergency assistance does not require abandoning political interests or common sense. A needs-based approach to emergency food aid does not foreclose a more political approach to other forms of assistance. Development assistance and financing, security assistance, and trade policy are all better suited to a more subjective balancing of recipient need and benefit to the United States. Unlike with lifesaving assistance—where the recipient is left with no meaningful choice—the more political use of these tools is not as likely to be inherently coercive.
Nor does a commitment to need-based humanitarian assistance mean ignoring the challenges of aid in emergency situations. The United States will still need to weigh whether its aid is achieving its goal of helping those in need, or whether it is being diverted or fueling conflict in other ways. Needs-based or not, it must do no harm.
FSLC's inquiry over the coming year will build from this foundation: a needs-based approach to emergency food assistance is the surest means of advancing the national interest. But that is only a starting point. It leaves open how to measure need, and how that measurement translates into implementation decisions—an area rife with difficult trade-offs. It leaves open how the United States can most effectively execute its assistance, and with whom. And it leaves open how humanitarian aid should connect to longer-term development efforts. Answering these questions together, not in isolation, will determine how well America's future investments in humanitarian food assistance achieve their goals, both operational and strategic.
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