Intelligence Agencies Pivot to Food System Fragility as 2025 Famines Strike Gaza and Sudan

By late 2025, global food crises had escalated to the point where intelligence communities began treating agricultural and nutritional data as core national security priorities. Official reports confirm that approximately 266 million people faced high levels of acute food insecurity across analyzed countries and territories, driven primarily by conflict, economic shocks, and climate factors. The Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC) 2025 September Update documented this figure, noting it represented about 22.9% of the analyzed population in 47 countries/territories.

Most critically, 2025 marked the confirmation of famine (IPC Phase 5) in parts of both the Gaza Strip and Sudan—the first simultaneous famines verified in the 21st century under IPC standards. In Gaza, famine was confirmed in Gaza Governorate in August 2025, with projections of expansion and over 500,000 people in catastrophic conditions at peak. In Sudan, famine was ongoing in areas like El Fasher and Kadugli, persisting into 2026 in some projections. IPC analyses and the GRFC detail how conflict restricted humanitarian access, leading to exhausted coping mechanisms and elevated mortality risks. Earlier projections had placed around 1.9 million in Phase 5 before adjustments reduced the total to about 1.4 million across six locations including these two.

The U.S. Director of National Intelligence's 2025 Annual Threat Assessment reflected broader shifts in threat prioritization, though explicit emphasis on food system fragility appears more implicit amid evolving priorities. Historical precedents like the 2011 Arab Spring and Syrian drought-migration dynamics underscore how food insecurity can fuel instability, migration, and radicalization—factors now modeled in security assessments.

Fertilizer supply disruptions compounded vulnerabilities, with price spikes in urea and other inputs linked to conflicts and logistics issues affecting developing regions' yields. While specific 2025 baselines vary, ongoing analyses tie these to broader supply chain strains.

This convergence highlights how traditional security mandates now overlap with humanitarian and agricultural monitoring, as satellite data on crops and soil, alongside hunger metrics, inform assessments of state fragility and potential spillover effects.