In a speech hosted by ODI Global, Action Against Hunger and Shabaka, Development Minister McNeill argued that looming hunger crises should be treated as a political and security question rather than a narrow humanitarian file. The address placed current risks in Sudan, Somalia and Yemen alongside higher transport costs through the Red Sea and Strait of Hormuz, high sovereign debt burdens and pressure on the World Food Programme. The speech was delivered as the Labour government marked 100 days in office and used food security to illustrate its wider governing method. McNeill said recurring shocks, including an intensifying El Niño, require governments to act before harvest failure, price spikes and displacement push already fragile countries towards famine.
McNeill linked food security to a broader set of policy concerns: climate, health, economic stability and human security. The argument was that food prices are not confined to agriculture departments or aid budgets. They shape household living standards, public confidence, migration pressures and the stability of states. That framing matters for domestic policy as well as foreign policy. The speech drew a direct line between harvests in East Africa, shipping routes in the Gulf and prices on British supermarket shelves, and cited the UK's Nature Security Assessment to argue that forests, soils, freshwater systems and oceans outside the UK remain material to national resilience at home. It also defended open and predictable trade as a stabilising feature of the global food system when local production comes under pressure.
A second theme was inequality. McNeill said the world already produces enough food, but access to nutritious diets is distributed unevenly by income, debt, geography and gender. Countries that rely heavily on food imports, face high borrowing costs or lack access to finance and technology are more exposed when fertiliser, fuel or grain prices rise. Within countries, the burden falls most heavily on households that spend a large share of income on food. The speech also highlighted the role of women in food production and the repeated pattern in which women and girls are the first to absorb scarcity inside low-income households. In policy terms, hunger was presented less as a simple supply problem than as a question of purchasing power, resilience and political choice.
To support that case, McNeill pointed to the scale of current need. The speech cited an estimated 645 million people going hungry last year, around one third of the global population unable to afford a healthy diet, and 35 million children experiencing acute malnutrition, with nearly 10 million in the most severe category. The speech treated these figures as evidence of system failure rather than unavoidable scarcity. It cited famine confirmed in two places in the same year, the siege and obstruction of aid in Sudan, and the shift in Gaza from around 17,000 children treated for acute malnutrition each month at the peak to fewer than 3,000 less than a year later. The message was that extreme hunger is frequently the result of conflict, blocked assistance and the failure to protect civilian access to food and treatment, and that recovery depends on political decisions as much as food supply.
McNeill also used the speech to set out the UK's domestic preparedness case. Around 60 per cent of food consumed in the UK is produced domestically, a position the minister described as an important source of resilience but not a guarantee against global shocks. The government has therefore established a Food Preparedness Group with farmers, businesses and civil society to identify gaps and strengthen contingency planning. The wider point was that domestic production cannot insulate the UK from disruption in international shipping, commodity markets or environmental decline overseas. For departments concerned with resilience, the speech effectively places food alongside energy and public health as an area where cross-government preparation is required.
On international response, the speech focused on the gap between early warning and early action. McNeill noted that 33 countries have appeared in every edition of the Global Report on Food Crises for a decade, suggesting that repeated food emergencies are neither sudden nor unknowable. The criticism was directed at a system in which climate analysis, conflict analysis, finance and political decision-making are too often kept apart. The minister said the UK is pushing for a shared picture of risk led by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Programme, with greater use of pre-arranged finance, insurance tools and earlier intervention by governments, UN agencies and international financial institutions. The speech also referenced UK support through the Global Network against Food Crises, including backing for countries such as Somalia when warning signs intensify.
That approach is already being applied through UK spending. McNeill referenced up to £15 million for anticipatory action ahead of El Niño, including livestock vaccination and cash assistance before shocks land rather than after livelihoods are lost. In Bangkok, the Foreign Secretary was said to have pressed international financial institutions to use crisis financing tools more actively. The speech linked that financial shift to reform of the humanitarian system itself. Local organisations were described as first responders that remain underfunded, with Sudan's volunteer-led Emergency Response Rooms cited as an example of community structures reaching people beyond the reach of large agencies. The policy message was that funding, decision-making and accountability should move closer to affected populations.
McNeill argued that aid cannot substitute for diplomacy where conflict is driving hunger. The speech said the UK should use its place on the UN Security Council, its diplomatic network and its role in the G7, G20 and multilateral development banks to press for access, protect civilians and humanitarian workers, support mediation and hold to account those who deliberately starve civilian populations. Nutrition was presented as a parallel test of whether the system can follow through on repeated commitments. McNeill referenced the Action Review Panel on Child Wasting and the Child Nutrition Fund, which the speech said has helped mobilise more than $1 billion for countries with the highest burdens of undernutrition.
The closing section moved from crisis response to longer-term reform. McNeill argued that fragile and conflict-affected countries need stronger social protection, clearer land ownership arrangements, better water and soil management, resilient crops, functioning supply chains and local institutions capable of pooling risk. Co-operatives in Palestine, Ukraine, Kenya and Sudan were cited as evidence that organised producers can retain more value locally and absorb shocks more effectively. The speech also pointed to UK-backed science through CGIAR, Brazilian work on bio-inputs and family farming, and joint efforts such as the Belém Declaration on Fertilisers and the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty. It added that trade policy should support workers' rights so that the people producing food are paid fairly. For policymakers, the practical consequence is that food security is being recast as a standing item in resilience planning, international finance and diplomacy, not only as an issue for aid budgets when crisis has already arrived. The speech ended with a request for scrutiny as well as partnership. Research bodies, campaign groups and delivery organisations were invited to supply evidence, test policy claims and hold ministers to account as the government's food security agenda develops.