At home and abroad, U.S. policies that restrict access to food deepen hunger and place disproportionate burdens on women, particularly women of color.
This election, hunger weighs heavily on the ballot—particularly for voters who care about women. From Gaza to Cuba, from USAID to SNAP, current U.S. food policies reveal a troubling pattern of misogyny.
Food abounds in U.S. agricultural systems, yet our food, farming and food aid policies deliberately deprive people in need of nourishment—with women, particularly women of color, bearing much of the burden. The recent wave of U.S. policies cutting food assistance and intensifying existing sanctions forms a pattern that, if unchecked, threatens to spread.
Though they may seem unrelated, U.S. international food policy and domestic agricultural legislation share important similarities. In both cases, massive cuts to food assistance have been justified in the name of efficiency, austerity or national security—even as federal funding shifts away from social and humanitarian services and toward unprecedented military spending.
Four prominent examples—Gaza, Cuba, USAID and the grotesque “One Big Beautiful Bill”—illustrate how U.S. food and agricultural policies eliminate or obstruct urgently needed food assistance. These policies deepen food insecurity through deliberate government decisions.
In each case, research documents the compounding burdens these cuts place on women.
Across the country and around the world, women shoulder much of the responsibility for feeding families and communities. Cutting food assistance increases their unpaid care work, compounds existing hardships and undermines their autonomy.
Millions of people in the United States and around the world depend on supplemental food assistance for survival. Suddenly cutting that aid … can be deadly.
Gaza, Palestine
In 2024, amid mounting warnings about intentional starvation in Gaza, eight humanitarian organizations released a Gaza Scorecard assessing Israel’s compliance with humanitarian access demands issued by the Biden administration. The independent assessment found conclusive evidence that Israel had failed to meet those demands—instead, blocking lifesaving food and water from entry into Gaza Strip and lethally targeting food aid workers and seekers.
The Women’s Refugee Commission found that restrictions on food assistance in Gaza disproportionately harmed women and girls, who face heightened risks of hunger, starvation and exclusion from aid distribution.
Nevertheless, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken declined to suspend military assistance to Israel, despite concerns about compliance with Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act, which restricts certain U.S. assistance to countries that obstruct the delivery of American humanitarian aid.
These days, the Republican-led executive and legislative branches have continued further military and agribusiness integration with Israel, even as Israeli military operations and restrictions on access to agricultural land have worsened food insecurity in Palestinian communities and Lebanon. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli settler violence, restrictions on farmland access and theft of olive harvests have further undermined Palestinian livelihoods.
Facing what scholars have described as genocidal violence and systematic deprivation, Palestinian women confront impossible choices as they struggle to keep their children fed and alive.
In September 2026, as food insecurity worsened in the occupied West Bank, the World Food Programme announced that funding shortages had forced it to cut the number of people receiving food assistance in half—from 400,000 to 200,000. Once again, women are left bearing much of the burden of these catastrophic conditions.
Cuba
The United States has also maintained an economic embargo against Cuba for generations, seeking to pressure the country’s government into political change.
Under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Trump administration intensified economic pressure, expanding sanctions targeting the country’s energy sector and further restricting its ability to obtain fuel.
Food insecurity has worsened across the island. In August 2026, United Nations human rights experts condemned the expanded U.S. sanctions, warning that the resulting humanitarian crisis threatened access to food, healthcare and other essential services.
With access to fuel and imported goods severely constrained, Cubans are struggling to meet basic needs. Pregnant women face barriers to essential maternal healthcare, while children and young people struggle to obtain adequate nutrition.
In August, U.N. experts issued another dire warning, urging the international community to prevent a “silent Gaza” from unfolding in Cuba.
Cuban women have responded with extraordinary resourcefulness and cooperation, helping families and communities navigate worsening shortages. As farmers, food providers and caregivers, they shoulder a disproportionate share of the crisis, working to stave off the worst consequences of the country’s deepening food insecurity.
USAID
… The shutdown contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths by late 2025, with malnutrition and infectious diseases among the leading causes.
Upon taking office in January 2025, the Trump administration froze foreign assistance and began dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), one of the world’s largest providers of humanitarian and food assistance.
The consequences were immediate and devastating. Within weeks, 1,100 metric tons of food aid rations—pre-purchased from U.S. farmers—rotted in a Dubai warehouse, with no staff to move and make use of it. Then, nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food rations, valued at $793,000, expired and were slated for destruction after delays in securing approval for their distribution.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) canceled approximately $500 million in planned food deliveries through The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), along with more than $1 billion in planned funding for local food purchasing programs that supported schools, food banks and farmers, including producers who have historically faced racism and sexism.
Early analyses of the global consequences of USAID’s dismantling and mass layoffs document devastating impacts, particularly on women and children.
The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health reported on estimates indicating that the shutdown had contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths by late 2025, with malnutrition and infectious diseases among the leading causes.
In a six-month assessment of the cuts, George Washington University’s Global Food Institute warned that the international food assistance system was deteriorating. U.N. agencies and journalists have documented similarly alarming impacts on children.
In January 2026, Oxfam warned that the cuts could result in the death of a child under age 5 every 40 seconds by 2030. Its analysis also cited projections that approximately 200,000 children under 5 could die as a result of the cuts in 2025 alone.
Behind these staggering estimates are grieving and malnourished mothers, along with women caregivers forced to shoulder the compounded burdens of lost assistance, illness and hunger.
The abrupt dismantling of USAID disrupted established systems for delivering food and other lifesaving assistance to children and families around the world, deepening food insecurity and leaving millions more vulnerable.
SNAP
Back home, in 2025, President Trump and the Republican-led Congress enacted H.R. 1, the sweeping budget reconciliation law known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” The legislation reduced projected federal spending on public assistance programs—including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid—while expanding funding for immigration enforcement and detention.
By shifting administrative costs to states, expanding work requirements, restricting future benefit updates and eliminating eligibility for many refugees and asylum seekers, H.R. 1 cut projected federal SNAP spending by nearly $200 billion over 10 years.
According to an October 2026 analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, SNAP participation declined by 5.5 million people between July 2025, when the law was enacted, and July 2026. Women, including many women of color, are among those most affected by the loss of assistance.
Feeding America estimates that the law could take nearly 6 billion meals off the table for SNAP participants each year.
Losing SNAP benefits can also create obstacles to accessing other nutrition assistance, including the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and free school meals. Declining SNAP participation can reduce the number of children automatically certified for free school meals, potentially threatening schools’ eligibility for programs that provide free meals to all students.
Meanwhile, the House has passed a 2026 farm bill, and the Senate Agriculture Committee has advanced its own version, even as the sweeping SNAP cuts enacted under H.R. 1 continue to take effect.
The consequences are already visible. According to a ProPublica investigation, at least 776,000 children in 12 states were no longer receiving SNAP benefits following the Trump administration’s changes to the program. The nationwide number is likely considerably higher.
Yet measuring the full scale of food insecurity has become more difficult. In September 2025, the Trump administration announced that the USDA would discontinue its annual household food-security reports, which had long served as a primary measure of hunger in the United States.
Adding bureaucratic hurdles that push people off SNAP blames and shames those already struggling to make ends meet, many of whom work one or multiple low-paying jobs. Decades of research have documented the long-term benefits of improved access to nutrition for people in need.
Women—as mothers, grandmothers, daughters caring for aging parents, teachers, community leaders and anti-hunger professionals—are left scrambling to fill the gaps. They shoulder the growing logistical, economic, social, health and emotional burdens of these disruptions.
Food Access and Misogyny
At the heart of all four cases lies the danger of dependence on food assistance when governments can abruptly withdraw it.
Ideally, people would be able to afford, access, grow, prepare and enjoy food without depending on government aid—from Palestine to the Caribbean and throughout the United States. Genuine, lasting food security requires food sovereignty: the ability of people and communities to shape their own food systems and determine how food is produced and distributed.
But vast inequalities persist. Millions of people in the United States and around the world depend on supplemental food assistance for survival. Suddenly cutting that aid, whether domestically or internationally, places an immediate burden on caregivers. The consequences can be deadly.
For many reasons, women continue to bear much of the responsibility for feeding children, older adults, people with disabilities, families and communities. Whether out of necessity, obligation or choice, women around the world are more often than not responsible for humanity’s dinner—and lunch and breakfast.
Extensive research documents the toll food insecurity takes on women responsible for providing food and care, as well as on the people who depend on them. From Gaza to Cuba, from USAID to SNAP, the evidence reveals how deliberate U.S. policy decisions to restrict access to food and cut assistance disproportionately harm women and girls, particularly working women of color.
Deeply rooted sexism runs through U.S. policies governing food, farming, agricultural labor, land, food aid and agricultural trade policies. Under Republican control, these inequalities have become especially pronounced.
Against a backdrop of widening inequality and rising hunger, the abundance of the U.S. agricultural system could instead be directed toward nourishing those in need—and supporting the people who feed them, most of whom are women.
Even this preliminary examination shows how women across the country and around the world suffer acutely—as intended—from recent U.S. agricultural policies, funding cuts and sanctions. These are not inevitable consequences. They reflect political choices.
It could—and must—be different.
Congressional actions, and inaction, have enabled these deliberate restrictions on food access. The midterm elections offer an opportunity to challenge this pattern of agrifood policies that disproportionately harm women and demand a different course.
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