Inefficiency, insufficiency and paucity of useful data — these are the regular findings of studies into social endeavors, be it education, welfare, combating antisemitism or poverty. But a new report into Israel’s nonprofit food-aid network is far from yet another banal critique of the effort to address hunger and malnutrition; it is a blazing red flag, raising serious questions about waste, egregious redundancies and a pronounced absence of government oversight for a field with major repercussions on healthcare, education and the economy. 

Published in the journal Food Policy, the article “Philanthropic food assistance in high-income countries: Lessons from Israel’s food-aid network” offers what it describes as the first national mapping of the philanthropy-backed organizations that provide food assistance to the 2.8 million people, including more than 1 million children, whom Israel’s National Insurance Institute found were unable to afford sufficient or sufficiently nutritious food in 2024 — representing 27.1% of the population.

Reviewing the financial documents of all Israeli food security nonprofits, the authors — professor Aron Troen and Moran Accos of the Hebrew University, alongside Orly Tamir from Sheba Medical Center — find that there is enough funding in the field to have a significantly greater impact than there is and that there are significantly more food-aid organizations than can reasonably be justified.

“Are we being effective? And the answer is that… we are not doing this well,” Troen told eJewishPhilanthropy this week.

The current system, he warned, is wasteful and instead of solving an “acute need,” it is “designed now to create chronic dependency,” with recipients of food aid unable to improve their situation. Those recipients, the survey found, are disproportionately Arab and Haredi.

“And that is going to kill Israel,” he said. “We are on the wrong course.”

According to Troen, who also serves on a variety of national committees and councils related to nutrition and food security, in order to seriously address the issue of hunger and malnutrition, the government first has to start taking the matter seriously.

Though income inequality and poverty are serious issues in Israel, these are far from the top issues that are being raised directly in the current election campaigns, Troen noted. 

He also noted that philanthropic funding for food-aid programs far surpasses state support — with roughly 85% of total funding coming from charitable donations, while 13% comes from state budgets — but added that the answer is not necessarily just having the government take over the field entirely. 

“Governments aren’t always the most efficient means of solving a problem,” he said.

Instead, he said the only way to ensure that adequate resources are used effectively and equitably is to demand transparency from nonprofits and to fund independent research. While he singled out the larger Israeli food-aid nonprofits — chiefly Latet and Leket Israel — for releasing documentation and reports on their work, he noted that they are also constrained, through no fault of their own, by their need to raise money for their work. This, he said, inherently limits their ability to objectively assess the needs and their impact.

“They’d like to put themselves out of business, but they’re also in the business of staying in business,” he said.

As a result, the reports that they do release are “useful when you are raising money, but not effective when you are talking about research,” said Troen. 

Joseph Gittler, the founder of Leket Israel, told eJP that he did not agree with Troen’s assessment, believing that the issue with nonprofits’ assessments is not that they oversell their impact but that they overstate the problem, using overly dramatic poverty statistics.  

Tallying together financial reports, the survey found that there is more than NIS 6.2 billion ($2.1 billion) of “turnover” reported each year, and that hundreds of registered nonprofits do not file financial documents, indicating that the true number is likely higher. This amount of money should be enough to provide a healthy diet to more than half of the Israelis struggling with food insecurity, based on a 2021 World Bank estimate that the daily cost of maintaining a healthy diet in high-income countries is $3.43 per person. A higher daily estimate by Israeli researchers of $11.3 per person would still indicate that far more people could be helped than are. 

“It’s a huge amount of money, if you compare it to what the actual cost is of a healthy diet,” Troen said.

At least some of the inefficiency can be attributed to the other glaring statistic in the study: there are more than 2,000 registered nonprofits whose primary or secondary purposes is food assistance, as well as another 230 that could not be classified but have food-aid listed as one of their objectives. 

“There is an unbelievable ratio of NGOs to people,” Troen said, noting that this roughly works out to one nonprofit for every 1,000 people experiencing food insecurity. “The numbers don’t make sense.”

Gittler, who has been involved in food assistance since launching Leket in 2003, told eJP that he too was shocked by the figure. “I’ve been at this for 23 years, and I’m shocked by that number,” he said. 

According to the research, the number of nonprofits that include food assistance in their objectives has exploded in recent years.

“The curve begins to rise in 2008,” Troen said. “There were 300-400 in 2000, and now there are more than 2,000 nonprofits in 2026.”

The study found that these are mainly connected to the Haredi community, “while Arab communities, despite significantly higher rates of [food insecurity], remain underrepresented.” The researchers also noted that in addition to disparities between populations, there are also geographic gaps, “particularly among Bedouin populations in the Ssouth.”

“Efficiency may also be challenged by the uncoordinated entry of private organizations, which can result in overlapping services in some areas and unmet needs in others,” the study said.

Gittler agreed that the large number of nonprofits in the field likely contributes to waste, both in terms of money and volunteer efforts. 

“I have no doubt that there are large inefficiencies because there are so many small organizations,” he said. 

However, Gittler pushed back on the question of overall efficacy of the food-aid network in Israel. Though he said that he “enormously respects” Troen,” he does not “necessarily accept that they aren’t making a big dent.”

Both Gittler and Troen both agreed that a key focus going forward should be addressing what they see as a surplus of organizations, consolidating smaller organizations and giving more weight to the larger groups, such as Leket and Latet. 

Gittler said that he hopes that, as a result of this new mapping project, “we see more mergers or at least more cooperations” between organizations. 

Troen added that there should also be “better professional oversight” and that funders should also “put some money into research” to more effectively assess the issue. 

Troen stressed that the issue of hunger and malnutrition is both serious, with long-lasting effects, and also solvable. 

“We know that if you have a hungry kid, he’s not going to learn,” he said.

While there are cases in Israel of caloric deficits and starvation, malnutrition is also a serious problem, leading to higher rates of obesity, metabolic issues, diabetes and other diseases. And these illnesses, Troen said, are then “born by the people who are most socially and economically disadvantaged.,” he said.