Pope Leo XIV says bureaucratisation slows humanitarian aid while weapons flow freely in conflicts.
ROME: Pope Leo XIV slammed Monday the “progressive bureaucratisation of solidarity” which hampers the delivery of aid to the world’s hungry, while weapons move freely, fuelling conflicts.
On a visit to the headquarters of the World Food Programme (WFP) in Rome, the pope appealed for the international community “to increase the resources dedicated to combating hunger and its root causes, and to remove the obstacles that prevent aid from reaching those in need”.
He said humanitarian concerns were often not a priority despite global rhetoric on the need to alleviate human suffering.
“It is precisely within the gap between acknowledgement in principle and prioritisation in practice that we witness the progressive bureaucratisation of solidarity alongside the quiet commodification of human life,” Leo said.
“On one hand, humanitarian action is increasingly burdened by bureaucratic procedures that can delay assistance.
“On the other hand, access to essential goods, including food, is too often influenced by economic or strategic considerations,” he said.
“As a result, those who do not generate quantifiable value risk becoming invisible,” he added.
The 70-year-old pontiff said that while aid and development projects are obstructed, weaponry is not.
“In effect, conflicts are ‘fed’ more readily than people are nourished,” revealing “a fundamental imbalance in political and moral priorities,” Leo said.
The US-born leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics urged governments and people to increase resources for those combating hunger, like the UN’s WFP, which provided assistance to 121 million people in 2025.
“The world today could live without hunger,” Leo said in an informal video call with WFP workers in South Sudan, Venezuela and Lebanon.
“The resources should be available. The capacity of food production exists, and yet oftentimes the resources are spent on… promoting war and conflict and other kinds of, if you will, less important end results.
“And so that the hunger continues even to increase in some parts of the world,” he said.
WFP says it has been hit hard by steep European and US funding cuts in recent years.
The deep cuts have come while the challenges have been multiplying, including from the war in the Middle East, which has piled on logistical difficulties and hiked prices for aid deliveries in a range of countries.
