Fragile countries are paying for crises they did not cause

Fragile countries are paying for crises they did not cause | Photo: Dulana Kodithuwakku

Published on 9 April 2026 at 05:02 GMT

By Editorial Team SDG10

In many of the world’s most fragile countries, the emergency is no longer a single failed harvest, one conflict, or a temporary rise in prices. It is a layered crisis in which drought, hunger, shrinking aid, inflation and geopolitical disruption now arrive at once, reinforcing each other and narrowing the room for recovery. Fragile countries are being hit by shocks they did not create. The burden is cumulative, not temporary. That matters not only as a humanitarian story, but as a question of global political responsibility.

The countries under the greatest pressure are often those with the least fiscal space, the weakest infrastructure and the highest dependence on imported food or fuel. In these places, a drought does not stay a climate event, it becomes a nutrition crisis, a public health crisis and then a debt and governance crisis. When aid falls at the same time as household prices rise, the result is not simply hardship, but institutional exhaustion. A drought becomes a debt crisis. A food shock becomes a political shock. The World Bank now projects that by 2030 nearly 60 per cent of the world’s extreme poor could be living in fragile and conflict affected settings, a sign that poverty and fragility are increasingly concentrated in the same places.

Food insecurity is the clearest expression of this convergence. The 2025 Global Report on Food Crises found that more than 295 million people in 53 countries and territories faced acute hunger in 2024, an increase on the previous year, with conflict, economic shocks, climate extremes and displacement acting together rather than separately. The latest FAO and WFP hunger hotspot warnings have been equally stark, describing acute food insecurity as deepening across multiple hotspots and explicitly identifying conflict, economic shocks, extreme weather and funding shortfalls as mutually reinforcing drivers. Hunger is no longer driven by one factor alone. In fragile states, the market, the climate and the battlefield increasingly move in the same direction.

Somalia offers a sharp example of how these pressures now overlap. UNICEF warned in March 2026 that Somalia faced a worsening emergency driven by drought, conflict, displacement and severe funding cuts. Humanitarian needs remain acute, with millions requiring health and nutrition assistance, while reduced funding has already affected service delivery. In such conditions, families who lost livestock to drought are pushed into displacement, and displacement then raises the cost of getting food, water and medicine to the very people who need them. When aid contracts, vulnerability expands. This is not an abstract policy failure, but a daily narrowing of survival options.

South Sudan and Sudan show the same pattern in an even harsher form. The World Bank said in its March 2026 food and nutrition update that about 9 million people in South Sudan, roughly three quarters of the population, were food insecure, with violence, humanitarian access constraints and deteriorating economic conditions worsening the outlook. In Sudan, war has driven mass displacement on a historic scale, while destroying livelihoods, disrupting markets and making local food production less reliable. Conflict turns scarcity into catastrophe. Where there is already weak state capacity, a shock in one sector quickly spreads into every other.

At the same time, the international relief system is being asked to do more with less. OCHA reported that humanitarian funding was projected to decline by up to 45 per cent by the end of 2025 compared with 2023 levels. That is a structural shift, not a marginal shortfall. The June 2025 update to the Global Humanitarian Overview described what officials called the “cruel math” of hyper prioritised aid, meaning agencies were being forced to decide not how best to respond, but which urgent needs to leave unmet. Aid reductions are now part of the crisis itself. This has profound consequences in fragile countries where public services were never robust enough to absorb a donor retreat.

This is where civil society organisations have become both more important and more constrained. NRC, the International Rescue Committee, Oxfam and the ICRC have each warned in different ways that the contraction of aid is colliding with rising needs in conflict and climate exposed settings. NRC has described a growing displacement crisis as the world abandons aid. The International Rescue Committee has argued that poverty, climate vulnerability and conflict are becoming increasingly concentrated in places already under severe strain. Oxfam has pointed to deepening cuts by major donors, especially across Africa, while the ICRC has stressed that food security in conflict is inseparable from protection, access to water, and respect for international humanitarian law. Local resilience cannot replace missing finance. Humanitarian agencies cannot stabilise entire economies. 

Inflation adds another layer. While headline inflation has eased in some low income countries, the IMF says macroeconomic conditions remain highly uneven, with many states still carrying high debt service burdens, weak reserves and tighter financing conditions. Food importing and lower income economies remain exposed to price transmission even when global commodity trends look less alarming in aggregate. The World Bank noted last week that cereal prices had risen since its previous update, even as broader agricultural indices fell, and earlier projected fertiliser prices to rise sharply during 2025 because of supply issues and trade constraints. Fragile households do not live inside average global prices. They live in local markets shaped by transport costs, insecurity, currency weakness and import dependence.

Geopolitical disruption then magnifies those vulnerabilities. Countries already facing hunger and debt are often net importers of fuel, grain or fertiliser, which means wars elsewhere can become inflation at home. Recent reporting on the spillover effects of conflict in the Middle East has shown how disruptions in trade, energy and fertiliser supplies are once again raising fears of a wider cost of living shock across parts of Africa and Asia. For fragile states, such disruptions are especially punishing because they arrive through shipping, insurance, exchange rates and fiscal pressure long before any political settlement is reached. They are absorbing the external costs of other people’s wars. 

The public interest question is not only why these countries are vulnerable, but why the international system keeps reproducing vulnerability. Many fragile countries have contributed little to the emissions driving climate stress. They did not create the commodity dependence built into global trade. They did not choose a donor architecture in which assistance can be abruptly cut for domestic political reasons in richer states. Yet they are expected to absorb the consequences with almost no buffer. This is where the issue connects directly to SDG 2 (zero hunger), SDG 1 (no poverty) and SDG 16 (peace, justice and strong institutions). Hunger in fragile contexts is not simply a food problem, it is a governance, financing and protection problem as well. There is also a clear link to SDG 13 (climate action), because climate shocks in fragile settings have become development reversals with cross border consequences.

What is often missing from public debate is the slow violence of sequencing. A farming household loses income after drought. It sells assets. Food prices rise. A clinic loses donor funding. A road becomes unsafe because conflict spreads or transport costs jump. Children become malnourished. The state, already indebted, cuts further. That is how fragility deepens, not only through headline events, but through the collapse of ordinary coping mechanisms. The real story is the loss of recovery time. By the time one shock recedes, the next has already arrived.

The policy response, therefore, cannot be limited to emergency appeals after each new disaster. It requires more predictable humanitarian finance, serious protection of civilian infrastructure in conflict, investment in water and food systems that can withstand climate extremes, and debt and macroeconomic policies that give poor countries some room to act when import costs surge. It also requires richer states to recognise that “efficiency” in aid budgets can mean life threatening scarcity elsewhere. These crises are interconnected, and the response has to be as well. The countries least responsible remain the most exposed. That imbalance is now one of the defining facts of global inequality.

Further information:

·       World Food Programme, publishes the hunger hotspot and food crisis assessments that track where acute food insecurity is worsening. https://www.wfp.org/

·       Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, provides global analysis on food systems, drought, agricultural stress and hunger trends. https://www.fao.org/

·       Norwegian Refugee Council, documents how aid cuts, displacement and conflict are affecting neglected crises. https://www.nrc.no/

·       International Rescue Committee, reports on how conflict, poverty, aid reductions and climate vulnerability are converging in fragile states. https://www.rescue.org/

·       International Committee of the Red Cross, focuses on food security, civilian protection, water systems and humanitarian access in conflict settings. https://www.icrc.org/