Humanitarian aid, contested access, and market collapes in Yemen & Sudan
I work in the world of wheat, and most of what I deal with is practical rather than theoretical. My lane is Washington soft white wheat and the markets where it competes. In my role with the Washington Grain Commission, I plan international market development programs and work directly with stake-holders across the wheat supply chain, from growers and elevators to exporters, millers, and end users. It forces a practical mindset: how wheat moves when the world is calm, and what happens when trade, logistics, or politics start to interfere.
Alongside my civilian work, I’ve spent the past six years as an enlisted airman in the Air National Guard. Most of my service has focused on maintaining an aerial refueling aircraft, a role that lives in logistics, contingency planning, and reliability. That work teaches you how dependent large systems are on access, coordination, and timing, and how quickly small constraints turn into major limitations when conditions deteriorate. I’ve seen that dynamic up close, in deployed environments, and it’s the same lens I bring to humanitarian food aid: once a system starts degrading, outcomes become less predictable and far harder to control.
I want to be clear about the boundaries of that perspective. I haven’t attended the National War College, and I don’t work on policy or claim the authority of those whose careers are spent designing national security strategy. I most definitely do not have a crystal ball. Instead, I have an instinct to interrogate assumptions, identify waste, and ask what the system is truly optimizing for. My combined experiences have given me a practical way of thinking about how complex systems behave under stress, and how intentions and theories often diverge from outcomes once real-world constraints show up.
When it comes to food aid, Yemen and Sudan are great examples of where those constraints show up in the most consequential way. These are not places where the market can be counted on to fill the gap when conditions deteriorate. In Yemen, U.S. humanitarian food assistance, much of it being soft white wheat, has become structurally central as import dependence and conflict have hollowed out normal food markets. In Sudan, humanitarian food assistance from hard red wheat has played a similar role as violence, displacement, and fragmented territorial control have rapidly dismantled what remained of a functioning food system.
In both cases, food does not move freely. It moves through contested space, negotiated access, and systems shaped as much by power and leverage as by supply and demand. This is the environment in which humanitarian food aid is forced to operate: not functioning markets, but their collapse.
This is where my discomfort and my interest sit. Humanitarian food aid is morally necessary in places like Yemen and Sudan, but it does not operate in a clean or neutral environment. It moves through collapsed markets, contested access, and systems shaped by power as much as need. The question isn’t whether food aid should exist; it’s what we expect it to accomplish and whether we are optimizing for moral intent, strategic leverage, or measurable outcomes. In these environments, you rarely get all three at once.
How humanitarian food aid works
Modern U.S. humanitarian food aid did not emerge in response to conflicts like Yemen or Sudan. It grew out of post-World War II agricultural policy, Cold War surplus management, and an early recognition that food could function as both a domestic stabilizer and foreign policy tool. Programs that would later be consolidated under Food for Peace were designed to move U.S.-produced commodities off domestic balance sheets while advancing strategic objectives abroad. Over time, those programs were reoriented toward humanitarian response as conflicts, state collapse, and chronic food insecurity replaced surplus disposal as the dominant driver. What remained constant was the basic structure: U.S.-grown commodities purchased under federal authority and delivered outside normal commercial channels when markets could not function.
When the U.S. decides to send food aid to places like Yemen or Sudan, it does not move through a typical commercial transaction. There is no commercial importer placing an order, and no private sale contract priced and settled like normal trade. Under Food for Peace Title II, commodities are procured under U.S. program rules and donated through implementing partners for distribution, not repaid through commercial sales, though some nonemergency programs may monetize commodities to fund operations. Historically, this authority has been exercised through statutory humanitarian programs such as Food for Peace Title II and USDA-managed initiatives like McGovern-Dole, with responsibility for procurement, oversight, and implementation shifting over time across federal agencies and multilateral partners depending on policy, structure, and mandate.
Title II has historically been the backbone of U.S. emergency food aid. Authorized under the Food for Peace Act of 1954, it allowed the purchase of U.S.-grown commodities, including wheat, for direct distribution in humanitarian crises. In Yemen, this resulted in soft white wheat moving not because a market demanded it, but because the humanitarian system required a calorie source that could be procured at scale, shipped reliably, milled into flour, and turned into culturally appropriate staple foods like flatbread under constrained conditions. In Sudan, hard red wheat played a similar role, tied to bread consumption and whatever milling capacity remained accessible. These were not symbolic choices; they were operational ones.
Once a Title II response was triggered, wheat was procured from U.S. commercial suppliers under program rules that prioritized accountability and traceability over speed. That procurement was paired with shipping requirements, including cargo preference under the Cargo Preference Act of 1954, which requires that at least half the annual tonnage move on U.S.-flag vessels, and shaped both timeline and costs. From there, commodities were transferred to implementing partners, most often the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), which assumed responsibility for moving food from ports into country and ultimately to distribution points. At each stage, oversight was layered deliberately. Monitoring, reporting, and compliance requirements were not add-ons to the system; they were central to how it was designed to function in high-risk environments.
Separately, the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program is designed for a different operating environment. Managed by the USDA, McGovern-Dole is a development-oriented food aid tool designed to support school attendance, child nutrition, and longer-term food security in relatively stable environments. It relies on predictable access, functioning education systems, and multiyear continuity to achieve its objectives. As a result, it is structurally mismatched to active war zones. In places like Yemen and Sudan, where schools are disrupted, populations are displaced, and access is negotiated day by day, U.S. food assistance has been delivered overwhelmingly through Food for Peace Title II rather than McGovern-Dole. The distinction matters because it underscores that different food aid tools are built for different conditions and that emergency responses operate under fundamentally different constraints than development programs.
What distinguishes humanitarian food aid from commercial trade is not just who pays for the wheat, but why it moves at all. Wheat markets are shaped by supply and demand, but also by weather, energy and input costs, currency risk, and freight rates, because you can’t trade wheat at scale without financing, fuel, and a reliable way to move it. In Yemen and Sudan, those conditions did not gradually deteriorate; they collapsed. Currency instability, fuel shortages, port disruptions, insecurity along transport corridors, and fractured authority made normal import transactions either prohibitively expensive or outright impossible. When private trade contracted, it didn’t leave behind a thinner market. In some areas, markets and economic activity effectively ground to a halt. That is the point at which food stops moving by price and starts moving by permission, bringing the humanitarian system directly into a threat environment.
Threat environments: Why food doesn’t move freely
In Yemen and Sudan, commercial markets still exist on paper, but access is controlled by actors who can impose friction at will. This is not a setting where humanitarian systems fail because they are poorly designed. It is a setting where they are forced to operate inside active threat conditions, which are inherently unpredictable. The result is that food aid enters a security landscape first and a humanitarian one second, which means leverage and coercion often precede meeting needs.
Yemen: Maritime interdiction and external constraints
Yemen’s food crisis cannot be separated from the fact that the country’s most important supply lines run through a contested maritime chokepoint. Yemen is heavily import-dependent for staple foods, which means access to ports and shipping lanes matters as much as production or price. Over the past year, that access has been shaped by a sustained maritime interdiction campaign carried out by the Houthi movement, whose ability to threaten vessels in the Red Sea — and at the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the narrow gateway between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden — has changed how shipping operates in the region. Since Nov. 1, 2023, the U.S. Maritime Administration has assessed at least 113 separate Houthi attacks on commercial vessels, including mariner fatalities’ and a vessel seizure, enough to push risk calculus well beyond normal commercial tolerance.
The relevant variable is not only the total volume of food eventually delivered, but the reliability of delivery over time. Shipping has responded the way it usually does when risk becomes persistent: it routes around it. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) notes that shipping has continued to avoid the Suez Canal, with tonnage transit levels by early May 2025 still around 70% below the 2023 average. The most common workaround is to send vessels around the Cape of Good Hope, the southwestern tip of South Africa near Cape Town, rather than transiting the Red Sea and Suez. That route trades security for time, as one assessment of the disruption notes it adds 10 to 12 days of sailing time. In a humanitarian system that depends on predictable arrival windows, that added time and uncertainty matter as much as price.
A sustained threat environment raises costs, narrows available tonnage, and degrades schedule reliability. The result is not necessarily a complete stoppage of food aid, but an uneven cadence. Gaps are followed by playing catch-up, which creates mismatches in port scheduling, staging capacity, and convoy timing inland. Yemen’s port system has little slack to absorb that volatility; after recent hostilities, a UN official said operations at Hodeidah, a critical Red Sea entry point for aid and commercial imports, fell to about 25% of capacity. That volatility is the mechanism by which maritime insecurity translates directly into food insecurity in Yemen, well before any bag of wheat reaches a distribution point.
Sudan: Internal fragmentation and territorial control
Sudan presents a fundamentally different threat environment for food movement. Where Yemen’s constraint is maritime and external, Sudan’s is internal and territorial. Since open conflict erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), control over food movement inside the country has fractured along front lines that cut directly through agricultural areas, transport corridors, and major urban consumption centers. More than 12 million people have been displaced, making Sudan the world’s largest displacement crisis. According to UN estimates, 33.7 million people — roughly two-thirds of the population — now require humanitarian assistance. At least 19 million people face crisis-level food insecurity or worse, with pockets of famine already confirmed in parts of Darfur.
In this environment, food does not move because markets clear or contracts are honored; it moves because armed actors allow it to move. Unlike Yemen, where insecurity delays arrival, Sudan’s conflict constrains movement after food is already inside the country. The result is a system where food aid can exist in aggregate but remain immobilized in practice, trapped behind front lines, checkpoints, or shifting bureaucratic controls that determine who eats, where, and when.
What makes Sudan especially difficult for humanitarian food aid is that access is not denied once but negotiated repeatedly. Even when food is already inside the country, humanitarian agencies report that roughly one-third of planned food movements are delayed, rerouted, or blocked outright by access controls imposed by armed actors, while over 635,000 people are already experiencing famine conditions. Permissions must be secured at checkpoints, border crossings, warehouses, and distribution sites, often from different authorities whose incentives are ambiguous and ever-changing. Airstrikes, shelling, and drone attacks have damaged storage facilities and fuel infrastructure, while displacement has severed the link between where food is available and where people are located. In this context, internal geography and bureaucracy function less as logistical challenges than as instruments of leverage.
The UN system, donors, leverage, and neutrality
Humanitarian food aid in Yemen and Sudan is often described as “UN-led,” but that phrase hides the wiring. The UN system is not a single wallet, but a collection of agencies and programs, some funded by assessed dues (obligatory payments tied to membership), and many funded by voluntary contributions (discretionary money aimed at specific programs). The U.S. sits on both sides of that ledger. On the assessed side, the U.S. assessment has been capped at 22% of the UN regular budget for decades, and peacekeeping assessments have been in the high-20% range in recent scale periods.
On the voluntary side, where most humanitarian operations actually live, the U.S. has been the dominant actor. In the 2024 fiscal year, the U.S. was the single largest financial contributor to the UN system overall and within that, the largest donor to the WFP. U.S. contributions totaled more than $14 billion across the UN system, including roughly $4.4 billion to WFP alone.
The next-largest contributor, Germany, provided about $4.8 billion in total UN funding that same year, including roughly $1 billion to WFP. At that scale, it is fair to ask: when one country supplies several multiples of the resources of the next donor, how much influence should it reasonably expect over how those resources are used?
Those numbers matter because donor money is leverage. While it cannot force armed actors in Yemen or Sudan to behave a certain way, this leverage can determine how much capacity exists inside the humanitarian system before that system collides with the threat environment. In the last year, the U.S. has demonstrated that this leverage is enforceable. In early 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order directing a review of U.S. support to all international intergovernmental organizations, while specifically ending U.S. participation in the UN Human Rights Council, prohibiting U.S. funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), and initiating a membership review of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). At the State Department level, that posture became explicit policy language: an “America First” rationale for narrowing participation to organizations not judged to advance U.S. interests, including a formal notice of U.S. withdrawal from UNESCO (effective Dec. 31, 2026).
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) shockwave fits into the same frame. One assessment notes that the administration terminated over 5,300 foreign aid projects, including an estimated 211 awards to UN agencies, and cut 49 programs classified as lifesaving, totaling at least $529 million. The immediate effect was a sharp drop in funding to the organizations that deliver food aid. U.S. payment records show how quickly capacity shrank: World Food Programme obligations fell from $4.4 billion (FY2024) to $325 million (FY2025-todate), and UNICEF from $1.1 billion to $168 million.
This is where neutrality and measurable outcomes come into direct tension. The U.S. can reasonably argue that it has the sovereign right to stop funding institutions it considers misaligned, ineffective, or compromised, and the record shows it has both the tools and the political will to do so. But the trade-off is built into the system. Cutting funding can expose waste and impose discipline, yet it also shrinks capacity and limits what a donor can shape once funds are committed, and operations move into multilateral channels governed by neutrality and one-country-one-vote rules. In Yemen and Sudan, U.S. funding does not determine who controls checkpoints, ports, or shipping lanes. It influences how much food exists in the system before those constraints take effect, and how large, resilient, and conditioned the aid system is when it enters contested environments. That is the leverage donors actually hold; not control over outcomes on the ground, but influence over the scale, structure, and operating constraints of the system they choose to fund.
What this analysis leaves me with is not a conclusion, but a set of trade-offs that are difficult to avoid and even harder to resolve. In Yemen and Sudan, humanitarian food aid is necessary because markets have collapsed, and conflict has severed normal supply chains. Yet that same aid is forced to operate inside systems where access is contested, neutrality limits leverage, and doing the “right thing” does not guarantee good outcomes.
The U.S. sits at the center of this system as its largest financial backer, but with deliberately constrained authority once food enters conflict-affected space. Cutting funding can impose discipline, expose waste, and reassert accountability to taxpayers and, in some cases, to producers whose commodities underpin these programs. It also means less food moving into regions where people are already living on the edge of survival. Sustaining funding keeps food moving and systems intact, but it requires accepting outcomes that are messy, incomplete, and largely beyond donor control. That is the tension at the heart of humanitarian food aid today: actions that strengthen the system’s accountability can reduce the amount of food reaching people who need it most, while actions that save lives in the short term can weaken markets and deepen long-term dependence on aid.
In Part 2, I want to narrow the lens — from humanitarian systems to wheat as a commodity, to the thresholds borne by producers and taxpayers, and to the uncomfortable questions about diversion, quality, misuse, and accountability that arise when food aid substitutes for markets over long periods of time.
The article originally appeared in the January issue of Wheat Life Magazine.
Jake Liening
Market Development Specialist, Washington Grain Commission
Sources
All analysis and interpretations are the author’s own, based on publicly available reporting and official government and United Nations documentation.
U.S. Government and Statutory Authorities:
- Food for Peace Act of 1954 (Public Law 83-480)
- Cargo Preference Act of 1954
- U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD), Red Sea Incident Advisories
- Congressional Research Service (CRS), U.S. Contributions to the United Nations
- U.S. Department of State, Executive Orders and UNESCO Withdrawal Notices
- USAID / State Department Budget & Obligations Reports (FY2024–FY2025)
United Nations and Multilateral Agencies:
- World Food Programme (WFP), Operational Updates & Funding Dashboards
- UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Yemen & Sudan Humanitarian Needs Overview
- UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Suez Canal & Global Shipping Disruption Briefs
- United Nations Secretariat, Scale of Assessments & Peacekeeping Budgets
Conflict, Security, and Displacement Data:
- Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED)
- UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Sudan Displacement Estimates
- Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), Yemen & Sudan Analyses
Independent Reporting and Analysis:
- Reuters reporting on Yemen port capacity and Sudan access constraints
- Al Jazeera and maritime risk assessments on Cape of Good Hope rerouting
- Institute for the Study of War (ISW) briefs on Red Sea interdiction and Sudan conflict dynamics