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food insecurity
Aid Group Warns US-Israeli War on Iran Has Unleashed ‘Triple Emergency’ With Devastating Consequences for Millions
“With global humanitarian needs already at record levels, further escalation of the conflict in the Middle East and wider region will have grave ramifications for crises across the world,” said one advocate.
Mar 20, 2026
The US-Israeli war against Iran has unleashed a "triple emergency" that is draining the global humanitarian aid system of resources and putting millions of the world's most vulnerable people at even greater risk, according to a dire warning issued Friday by the International Rescue Committee.
The war has already resulted in the deaths of thousands and the displacement of millions of people in Iran and Lebanon. But the IRC says that the ripple effects of the war are beginning to spread to conflict zones across the world.
The conflict has caused many nations in the region to partially or fully close their airspace, leaving critical cargo stranded.
Meanwhile, Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for US and Israeli attacks has disrupted the flow of more than 20% of the world’s oil exports, sharply raising transport costs and straining budgets that could go toward lifesaving aid.
“Medical aid is highly dependent on international transport,” said Willem Zuidema, Save the Children’s global supply chain director. “The blockage in the Strait of Hormuz, combined with spiking cost for insurance and fuel, is directly impacting patients in our health facilities, at the worst time possible.”
IRC said $130,000 worth of pharmaceutical aid intended for its humanitarian response to the conflict in Sudan has been left stranded in Dubai due to the strait's closure.
According to Save the Children, this delay has put 90 primary healthcare facilities across Sudan at risk of running low on supplies.
More than 400,000 children, the group estimated, could be affected by the inability to receive antibiotics, antimalarial drugs, pain and fever medications, and other treatments.
The group said it has been forced to deliver the aid using the much more costly method of transporting it across Jeddah, where it will be carried by sea freight to Sudan, which the group said could add as much as $1,000-2,000 per container.
The same is true of humanitarian zones in Afghanistan and Yemen, where treatments for thousands of children must now be delivered by air or by land, dramatically raising the costs.
The closure of the strait has also forced many vessels carrying aid to find alternative routes. IRC said its shipping partners have been forced to reroute their operations to instead travel around Africa's Cape of Good Hope, adding up to a month for ocean freight deliveries to war zones on the continent.
"What we are seeing is the war in Iran unleashing a triple emergency," said David Milliband, the president and CEO of IRC.
"First, a surge in humanitarian need, with Lebanon now the most visible humanitarian scar and one of the fastest-growing displacement crises in the world, with over one million people forced from their homes in weeks," he said.
"Second, a global economic shock, as disruptions to food, fuel, and fertilizer markets, putting up to 30% of fertilizer trade at risk, threatens more than 300 million people already facing acute food insecurity," said Milliband, and "third, a system under strain, with more than 60 conflicts stretching diplomatic attention and funding to a breaking point, pushing crises like Sudan and Gaza further down the list of priorities."
Milliband marveled at the priorities of the powers prosecuting the war. He pointed to a recent estimate from the Pentagon that the first six days of the war alone cost $11.3 billion, noting that "just $4 billion is enough to pay for treatment for every acutely malnourished child in the world."
Zuidema said that the "grave ripple effects" caused by the war are exacerbated by the fact that "governments are cutting vital foreign aid budgets."
He called on all parties to the war to cease hostilities and to adhere to their obligations under international law, including allowing the free flow of humanitarian aid.
“There should be no barriers to lifesaving supplies: Exemptions should be put in place to allow humanitarian supplies, fertilizer, and food to be able to move through the Strait of Hormuz,” Zuidema said. “With global humanitarian needs already at record levels, further escalation of the conflict in the Middle East and wider region will have grave ramifications for crises across the world.”
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Why Federal Food Aid Became Politically Polarizing—and What to Do About It
By focusing on the facts and the program’s broad benefits, Americans can move past partisan divides and recognize the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for the bipartisan, practical tool it truly is.
Feb 02, 2026
On January 31, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson requested that Congress pass federal legislation to make the Food Stamp Program permanent. Up to that point, the program had operated as a pilot in select counties and states, serving about 380,000 participants. The Food Stamp Program expanded dramatically in the ensuing decades, driven largely by a recognition of domestic hunger. It has also undergone many changes—notably 2008 legislation that changed the name to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, in part to fight the politicized stigma of receiving food assistance.
Today, the program is without a doubt one of the most effective food assistance programs in reducing food insecurity and poverty across the United States. The US Census Bureau reports that supplemental nutrition assistance lifted nearly 3.6 million people out of poverty in 2024, the most recent year for which full data are available.
What’s more, every dollar in SNAP benefits generates about $1.50 in economic activity, as recipients spend their benefits at grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and small businesses. This ripple effect strengthens communities, keeping businesses open and workers employed.
Looking solely at the data, it would seem the anti-hunger program would be viewed by the vast majority of US voters as a practical solution that helps families put food on the table while also supporting local economies. After all, the vast majority of SNAP recipients are children, seniors, and people with disabilities, not the able-bodied adults who are often misrepresented as the main beneficiaries in political debates. And many rural communities, which tend to vote conservatively, rely heavily on this nutrition assistance, with some of the highest SNAP participation rates found in states that lean Republican.
The politicization of social welfare programs generated long-lasting shifts in voting behavior.
Yet in spite of its broad social and economic benefits, food assistance has been a politically contested issue ever since it was enacted more than five decades ago, often shaped by ideological and racialized narratives. This polarization persists today, exemplified by the massive cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in the 2025 Republican budget reconciliation bill (commonly referred to as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”) that was passed by the 119th US Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump in July 2025.
In new research, I, together with co-authors Troup Howard at the University of Utah and William Mullins at the University of California, San Diego, examine the process through which policy-based polarization emerges and persists over time. Using the historical expansion of the federal Food Stamp Program between 1961 and 1975 as a case study, we provide empirical evidence that the politicization of social welfare programs generated long-lasting shifts in voting behavior. Understanding this history and its persistence is essential to making sense of current debates over the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
The Rollout of the New Federal Food Stamp Program Amid the Civil Rights Movement
The historical rollout of the Food Stamp Program provides a case study in how social and economic policies become polarized and how those divisions persist across generations. Political views on food assistance are emblematic of the deeply partisan divide over social insurance programs and racial attitudes, which consistently emerge as key fault lines in US politics, reflecting deep-seated ideological and historical divisions.
Even though political polarization is often framed as a natural consequence of personal preferences and ideological sorting, such an interpretation overlooks the strategic role of political parties in shaping public perception for electoral advantage. We find that these behaviors persisted well beyond the first two decades—through 2020, as detailed in our research, and arguably even more so today.
The Food Stamp Program, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, has played a critical role in the network of US social programs for more than half a century. After state- and federal-level experimentation, the program was rolled out nationwide between 1964 and 1975 to combat food insecurity and improve nutrition among low-income Americans. The program currently supports 42 million people, including nearly 1 in 5 American children. Research consistently demonstrates its effectiveness in reducing poverty, stabilizing household food consumption, and improving long-term health and economic outcomes.
The initial rollout of the Food Stamp Program coincided with a period of intense legal and political transformation, marked by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the broader dismantling of Jim Crow laws that legally discriminated against Black Americans across the South. In this context, the introduction of a federal food assistance program was not merely a policy shift but also became a political flash point.
Our analysis provides, to the best of our knowledge, the first causal estimates on the racial politicization of social programs. Using individual-level voting data, we find three key results:
- The introduction of the Food Stamp Program heightened racial polarization in voting behavior.
- This effect was strongest among individuals who were adults at the time of the rollout of the Food Stamp Program.
- The resulting political divide persists in voter registration patterns and electoral outcomes today, more than a half a century later.
How the Food Stamp Program Generated Decades-Long Political Polarization
When a government program is first implemented, voters are often uncertain about its long-term effects. This initial ambiguity provides political parties with an opportunity to shape public perception through strategic political moves, particularly in the early stages of a policy’s rollout. Politicians can change the narrative framing surrounding discussions about the program. Or they can steer political resources away from the program and bring into focus other politically polarizing issues. Or they can set agendas that cater to specific groups of voters in an effort to offset any political advantages the opposing party might be accruing from public discussion about the policy.
These are classic partisan political strategies, and we show in our research that political parties, recognizing the potential to consolidate their voter base, have incentives to selectively target different demographic groups with distinct messaging. Even when a policy itself does not explicitly favor one group over another, partisan political moves can amplify political divisions and solidify long-term realignments in voter preferences.
To implement our analysis, we used a comprehensive dataset covering the universe of US voters as of 2020. We then compared the voting behavior between individuals who were adults when the Food Stamp Program was introduced in their county and those who were younger at the time. This methodology, which incorporates a rich set of fixed effects and demographic controls, including age, race, and gender, ensures that our findings are not driven by geographic variation, cohort effects, or broader shifts in political attitudes between 1960 and 2020.
SNAP is often misunderstood or misrepresented, but at its core, it is a practical program that helps families meet basic nutritional needs.
The results reveal the lasting impact of the Food Stamp Program on partisan affiliations. White voters who lived through the Food Stamp rollout as adults were significantly more likely to be registered as Republicans—and less likely to be Democrats—in 2020, compared with White voters who were younger, especially those who were born in a world where the Food Stamp Program was already an established feature of US social programs.
In contrast, Black and Hispanic voters who lived through the Food Stamp rollout as adults were significantly more likely to be registered as Democrats or Independents than Black and Hispanic voters who were younger. Racial polarization in partisan affiliations is an order of magnitude larger than electorate-wide effects, underscoring the extent to which food assistance became a racialized political issue.
Further analysis of voting behavior conditional on party affiliation reveals additional layers of polarization. Exposure to the rollout of the program increased the likelihood of white Republicans turning out to vote while simultaneously boosting turnout among Black and Hispanic Democrats. This divergence suggests that the politicization of food assistance not only influenced party registration but also reinforced voting engagement along racial and ideological lines.
Moreover, when focusing on individuals who registered to vote before the age of 25—a group likely to be more politically engaged—we observe even stronger effects, highlighting the formative role of early political experiences in shaping long-term partisan identity.
Taken together, these findings illustrate how social policy can serve as a catalyst for enduring political realignments. The case of the Food Stamp Program suggests that initial framing and partisan efforts can have consequences that extend well beyond the policy itself, shaping voting behavior for generations.
The program’s name shift in 2008 to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and its catchy acronym SNAP was intended to partially address this polarization that had developed over many decades. Beyond reducing the stigma associated with “food stamps,” the rebranding sought to counter the racialized and partisan narratives that had taken root during the program’s early rollout by emphasizing nutrition, work, and temporary assistance. By reframing food assistance as a modern, employment-adjacent social support rather than a form of welfare, policymakers aimed to make the program more politically durable amid persistent partisan scrutiny—even as the underlying political divisions documented in our analysis continued to shape debates over the program’s scope and funding.
How to Bridge the Partisan Divide over the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
As contemporary debates over social programs continue—not just about SNAP benefits but also in the context of the expansion of Medicaid in the Affordable Care Act of 2010 and the recent cuts to Medicaid in 2025—understanding the historical roots of this polarization is critical. The long-run political consequences of early policy framing should be a central consideration in both policymaking and electoral strategy. And the long-run economic fallout if partisan politics are successful in further diminishing social insurance programs could include substantial contractions in local economic activity as federal SNAP dollars are withdrawn from communities.
To make discussions about SNAP benefits less partisan, it is important that views about the program become decoupled from partisan politics. Yet separating the program from political narratives and stereotypes can be challenging. SNAP is often misunderstood or misrepresented, but at its core, it is a practical program that helps families meet basic nutritional needs.
By focusing on the facts and the program’s broad benefits, as documented in this issue brief, Americans can move past partisan divides and recognize the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for what it truly is—a bipartisan investment in food security, economic stability, and the well-being of US families.
This piece was first published by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
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The Shutdown Proved That the USA Needs SNAP
The short, natural experiment we all witnessed reinforces that SNAP is the nation’s first line of defense against hunger and food insecurity.
Nov 27, 2025
Since the Food Stamp Act of 1964 and until the recent government shutdown, the Food Stamp program (renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP), had operated without interruption. Most SNAP participants have their grocery needs satisfied thanks to the SNAP subsidies, with only 35% of SNAP households also using community resources such as food pantries or food banks. That is, prior to the shutdown, 65% of the 22.4 million SNAP participating households (approximately 42 million people) did not rely on food pantries.
The shutdown created the conditions for a natural experiment where we could see what the USA would experience without SNAP outside of the conditions of a laboratory. We learned that the 12% of Americans who rely on SNAP find it vital for their household budgets. During the shutdown, lines at food pantries lengthened, and, to “stretch” resources, many food pantries provided households with less food. While many communities stepped up to provide food pantries with more resources, this short-term experiment left open the question of when donor fatigue would set in.
Consider that in 2023, 9.3 million households (24.4 million persons) received free groceries from a food pantry or other community resource. Without SNAP, the 65% of SNAP participating households that had not previously relied on food pantries would likely start relying on food pantries, adding approximately 14.6 million households to food pantry lines.
Adding another 14.6 million households to the preexisting 9.3 million households that use food pantries would entail scaling up the network to an unprecedented level and restructuring it. This would come at a high cost and cannot be accomplished in the short-term. Further, the long-term resources available for such scaling up are uncertain—while Americans are generous in the short-term, establishing an equitable and resourced scaled-up network would require long-term private donations to food assistance at a scale never before shown. Donor fatigue would likely set in.
Reductions in SNAP will fall on the shoulders of communities.
But even if food pantries could provide food to millions more households, the amount of food that pantries typically provide is far less than average SNAP benefits. SNAP provides to participants, on average, approximately $188 per person per month in electronic benefits available to purchase groceries. A family of four receives approximately $750 per month, or $9,000 annually. In contrast, food pantries or food banks typically provide anywhere between the equivalent of two to five days’ worth of food per month. The US Department of Agriculture “thrifty” food plan costs out one week of food for a family of 4 at $231. That is, even if a family were lucky enough to get a full week of food per month from a food pantry, that value would be far less than the value of SNAP benefits (e.g., $2,770 vs. $9,000 per year).
During the government shutdown and pause in SNAP benefits, I toured a large food pantry 30 miles outside of Pittsburgh. Staff reported a surge in new enrollees (in one week getting approximately seven times the number of new families to serve than usual), calls from people outside of the pantry’s service area needing help, and needing volunteers to direct traffic during open hours. The increase in monetary and food donations could not keep pace with the surge in demand, forcing a reduction in each household’s food allotment. Participants lined up well before the pantry opened due to anxiety about food running out.
While SNAP is intended to make it possible for households to meet their monthly food needs, the food pantry and food bank network is not designed to do such. The network was originally designed to cover the period between when one applied for Food Stamps and when expedited benefits would start to flow, which used to be approximately four days but has increased to seven days.
The Trump administration is exploring ways to reduce the number of SNAP participants such as having shorter periods for recertification or making it mandatory for all SNAP households to reapply. The administration hopes that such barriers will discourage people from receiving SNAP.
Reductions in SNAP will fall on the shoulders of communities. The short, natural experiment we all witnessed reinforces that SNAP is the nation’s first line of defense against hunger and food insecurity and food pantries can only be a secondary and supplemental source of food. Food pantries and food banks cannot substitute for a robust, reliable, government-funded food safety net.
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