In response to the worsening food crisis affecting the Sahel and Sudan, Commissioner for International Cooperation, Kristalina Georgieva announced that the European Commission has proposed an additional 40 million Euro package in humanitarian funding to be drawn from the EU budget's Emergency Aid Reserve.

30 million Euro of the total package would be additional funding for the Sahel and 10 million Euro for Sudan. The additional funds will be used to boost the humanitarian aid operations carried out by European Commission humanitarian aid partners and will help to provide food assistance to over 500,000 extra beneficiaries.

Currently, over 10 million people in the Sahel region are at risk of food insecurity. Of these over 7 million are in Niger and 3 million of these are considered to be severely food insecure and in need of urgent food assistance.

The risk of a looming food crisis in the Sahel was identified by humanitarian aid experts from the European Commission as early as September 2009, and even before in 2008 EU granted aid to fight malnutrition in the Sahel. Since then, the European Commission has been working closely with its non-governmental, Red Cross and United Nations partners to raise awareness of the scale of the crisis and of the need to work pro-actively to ensure that funds and food were available in time to help.

Subsequent allocations of humanitarian aid in response to the growing food crisis included 20 million Euro in January 2010 to fund the 2010 Sahel Global Plan to fight malnutrition of children in the Sahel and a 24 million Euro food crisis response decision in June 2010.

The countries most affected by the food crisis in the Sahel region are Niger and Chad with many pockets of severe malnutrition also identified in northern Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Mali and northern Cameroon. Although less severe than in Sahel, the impact of the drought in Sudan has further compounded the situation of thousands of people exposed to violence and displacement in the Darfur and in the southern part of the country.

Beyond the humanitarian response, the EU established the Food Facility, funded with 1 billion Euro in 2008, as a reaction to the food price crisis. Projects have been initiated in Burkina Faso and Niger to encourage increased agricultural production. In Mali, the Food Facility supports a project that aims, among other things, at improving the nutrition status of mothers and infants by distributing essential vitamins, minerals and medicines.