The Sahel produced more cereals in 2025-2026 than in 2024. For June-August 2026, up to 54.8 million people were projected to face acute food insecurity, including more than 3 million in Food Emergency, Phase 4, though this does not signify famine. Production is rising, bellies remain empty: two curves diverging when they should be converging.
The Essentials
- Sahelian cereal production increased by 4% in 2025-2026, according to the Regional AGRHYMET Centre of CILSS.
- Between 50 and 54.8 million people remain in acute food insecurity, including 3 million in Phase 4 (emergency) over the same period.
- Local surpluses remain trapped in isolated production basins, without roads or purchasing circuits to link them to deficit areas.
- Humanitarian response plans are only 32% funded, leaving safety nets largely insufficient at the very moment they are most needed.
- Between 2028 and 2030, Sahelian agricultural growth will need to feed a rapidly growing population despite continued fragmentation of the distribution system.
Granaries Filling, Markets Not Connecting
The 4% increase in cereal production represents millions of additional tons of millet, sorghum and maize cultivated under often difficult conditions by farmers who have adapted their practices to late and uneven rains. In Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso and Chad, pockets of relative abundance exist. The region has significant production and a potential net surplus, but local deficits, economic access and logistical constraints prevent uniform food security.
Grain circulates within the region and through imports, but trade is hindered or disrupted in certain areas.
The Sahel is a space where distances are vast, roads are scarce, and markets are fragmented according to logics of conflict, formal and informal borders, and territorial control. When a bush granary fills in northern Burkina Faso, no truck comes to buy it and transport it to families in emergency situations in central Sahel camps. In certain areas, insecurity and transport costs disrupt commercial trade.
This fragmentation is not new. It is longstanding, documented, and worsened since 2020 by the geographic expansion of violence in central Sahel. What is new is the scale of the gap between production and access. The regional food system is severely disrupted in certain areas affected by conflict, climate shocks and transport costs, without data demonstrating a regional collapse.
Up to 54.8 million people were projected to face acute food insecurity for June-August 2026 on the basis of analyses from the Harmonized Framework consolidated mainly in late 2025; the conditions of market functioning vary by area. Food insecurity results from both access constraints and shocks affecting incomes, yields, local production, prices and markets.
3 Million People in Food Emergency: A Geography of Ruptures
Phase 4 of the Harmonized Framework designates emergency: households consuming assets to survive, reducing meals to two then one per day, sending their children to search for food days away on foot. More than 3 million people were projected at this level between June and August 2026 according to the consolidated Harmonized Framework analysis coordinated within the CILSS/AGRHYMET framework and its partners.
These 3 million are not randomly distributed. Phase 4 projected for June-August 2026 is concentrated mainly in Nigeria, then notably in Chad and Cameroon; data from this cycle do not permit inclusion of Burkina Faso. A fleeing family does not plant. A farmer displaced in a camp can no longer produce. And when displaced persons number in the millions in a region, the effect on local production and food demand is felt durably.
The link between armed conflict and food insecurity has been precisely documented for several years. The World Bank estimates that countries affected by conflict concentrate a disproportionate share of food poverty worldwide. In the Sahel, producing and deficit areas are affected variably by conflict.
This geography of rupture renders obsolete some traditional response tools. Food aid programs assume you can deliver food. Production support programs assume you can access fields. In certain areas, access to food aid and agricultural activities is compromised.
32% Funding: Humanitarian Plans Operating at One-Third Capacity
Humanitarian response plans in the Sahel are built to cover the needs of populations in Phases 3 and 4. They include food distribution, support for child nutrition, aid to vulnerable households and strengthening of local storage and marketing capacities. In March 2026, CILSS reported that needs outlined in national response plans remained far superior to available budgets.
This means that a substantial portion of planned resources is unavailable. Humanitarian agencies, Sahelian governments and their partners must therefore prioritize: choosing which areas to cover, which populations to reach, which programs to maintain. In certain remote areas, humanitarian access is complicated by road conditions, flooding and insecurity; funding deficits also limit response. Available sources do not, however, permit establishment that these areas receive less aid precisely because of an uncovered additional cost.
Global humanitarian funding has been under pressure since 2023. The United States has reduced its contribution to several multilateral funds. Certain European countries, facing internal budgetary constraints, have capped or reduced their envelopes. In 2026, conflicts, displacement and funding reductions aggravate needs; an annual uniform trend must be demonstrated by a series of multi-year data.
It is necessary to avoid the temptation to reduce this problem to a matter of political will. Humanitarian financing is also a question of competition between emergencies. In 2025-2026, crises in Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza and Burma mobilize a substantial portion of available attention and funds. The Sahel, which does not produce spectacular images of urban destruction, suffers from a form of relative invisibility in donor arbitration.
This invisibility has a direct cost, measurable in lives and lost recovery capacity.
Actors Holding the Ground
The image of an abandoned Sahel would be inaccurate. Several institutions and programs maintain active presence and achieve concrete results, even under degraded conditions.
CILSS itself, through its Regional AGRHYMET Centre based in Niamey, has ensured for decades the agrometeoroloical and food surveillance of the region. Its seasonal analyses, such as the July 2026 analysis that produced the data in this article, enable governments and agencies to anticipate crises rather than merely react to them. This early warning work is precious infrastructure, often underestimated, that conditions the quality of any humanitarian response.
The World Food Programme maintains operations in several Sahelian countries, with increasingly adapted logistics to reach areas of difficult access. Conditional cash transfers gradually replace physical food distributions in areas where markets still function, allowing beneficiaries to purchase locally and support traders and producers in the same movement.
Specialized NGOs such as Action Against Hunger, CARE and Mercy Corps invest in what are called “markets of last resort”: short circuits between surplus producers and nearby deficit areas, supported by purchase guarantees and working capital. These experiments show that grain can circulate when someone finances the commercial risk that private markets refuse to absorb alone.
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the African Union maintain regional storage mechanisms, the Regional Food Security Reserves, which permit a first rapid response before the arrival of international aid. These stocks remain undersized relative to needs, but have demonstrated their utility during the crises of 2012 and 2017.
Another actor often forgotten in analyses: Sahelian women themselves, who ensure the majority of local food transformation and trade. Programs targeting them directly—access to credit, storage equipment, training in nutritional practices—show sustained effects on household food resilience, far beyond what direct food transfers can accomplish. On this subject, the article published by this journal on African farmers and carbon underscores the same logic: local productive capacity exists, but the mechanisms that would allow redistribution of its benefits are lacking.
Feeding 100 Million Sahelians in 2030 if Roads Don’t Follow
The question facing 2028-2030 exceeds the annual humanitarian cycle. It touches the very architecture of the Sahelian food system.
The Sahel’s population is growing at a sustained pace. Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso and Chad are among the countries with the highest fertility rates in the world. By 2030, the region should have several tens of millions of additional inhabitants. Agricultural production growth could help meet increased demand, provided distribution improves. But this assumption supposes that distribution does improve.
Yet nothing indicates that this is the current trajectory.
One scenario is that of fragmented stagnation. Production continues to grow in stable areas, while insecurity and transport costs disrupt certain markets and corridors; conflict zones deepen and swell the number of people beyond market reach. Phase 4 could concern more people. Humanitarian funding covers a declining fraction of needs. Demographics increase potential needs, but evolution depends heavily also on conflict, displacement, climate variability, prices and humanitarian financing.
The second conditional scenario is that of progressive connection. Targeted investments in rural infrastructure—access roads, collection markets, decentralized storage systems—begin to reduce transaction costs between surplus producers and deficit areas. Price information systems enable traders to make better-informed decisions. Market guarantee mechanisms secure transactions in moderate-risk areas. This scenario depends on additional public investments.
Improved security is essential to extend and sustain structural investments, but certain investments can be realized in fragile contexts. This is the scenario of conditional progress: it is achievable, but it requires choices.
A third, more speculative scenario, would see market technologies—digital platforms connecting producers and buyers, mobile payments, digital credit systems—partially compensate for the absence of physical infrastructure. Experiments exist in Kenya, Tanzania and Ghana, where agricultural platforms have reduced post-harvest losses and improved producer prices. Their transposition to central Sahel, marked by weak connectivity and persistent insecurity, remains uncertain. This model is relevant for stable areas; for conflict zones, it remains insufficient without physical presence and minimum security.
The signals to monitor in distinguishing these trajectories in coming years are relatively readable. The first is the evolution of humanitarian response plan funding: sustained funding increases would signal a political reorientation by donors. The second is investment in rural infrastructure in the Sahelian countries themselves, data regularly published by the African Development Bank and FAO. The third is the evolution of the perimeter of conflict zones: even partial stabilization in Mali or Burkina Faso would reopen hundreds of kilometers of commercial circuits currently closed.
The link between distribution and production is also a link between economic policy and food security. As shown in the analysis published here on regenerative agriculture and small farmer access, agricultural technique is insufficient: without market access, productivity remains without effect on incomes and food security.
Financing as Leverage, Not Charity
The response to the problem of insufficient financing deserves a more nuanced reading than simple appeal to donors. Humanitarian financing is a dependent variable of a series of political and institutional choices that are themselves modifiable.
The first lever is reform of predictable financing instruments. Humanitarian contributions arriving after the crisis peak cost more and save fewer lives than preventive contributions. Anticipatory financing mechanisms, such as those developed by the UN’s CERF (Central Emergency Response Fund), enable automatic triggering of financing when CILSS early warnings exceed certain thresholds. These mechanisms exist; they are under-capitalized.
The second lever is systematic integration of local purchases into humanitarian programs. When WFP buys cereals from surplus Sahelian producers for redistribution to deficit populations in the same region, it solves two problems at once: it supports agricultural incomes and reduces the logistical cost of aid. This model, called “purchase for progress,” is being deployed in several Sahelian countries, but at a scale still insufficient relative to the volumes at stake.
The third lever is reconstruction of rural roads in stable areas. Investments in passable tracks can reduce transport costs between a surplus zone and a deficit zone. These infrastructures fall within national budgets and African investment funds, not humanitarian budgets. The fact that they are considered separately is itself an institutional problem to resolve.
Regional production is rising, while distribution and markets are severely disrupted in certain areas affected by insecurity, prices and logistical constraints. Responding to this requires less good will than visible investment choices, predictable financing mechanisms, and a strategy that connects production to markets rather than treating the two as separate problems. These conditions are achievable. They are not yet in place.
Sources
- Regional AGRHYMET Centre – CILSS, Harmonized Framework Regional Communication Sheet, projected situation June-August 2026: https://agrhymet.cilss.int/2026/07/09/fiche-de-communication-regionale-ch-de-la-situation-projetee-juin-aout-2026/
- Food Crisis Prevention Network (FCRPN), Harmonized Framework, April 2026 meeting
- World Food Programme – Purchase for Progress (P4P), Sahel activity reports
- FAO – The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026
- African Development Bank – Rural Infrastructure and Food Security in West Africa
