Global Hunger Declines for Third Consecutive Year, Yet Progress Remains Fragile Amidst Geopolitical Conflicts and Soaring Costs, UN Report Warns
Global hunger witnessed a third consecutive year of decline in 2025, a testament to the possibility of progress in the fight against food insecurity. However, these improvements are delicate, unevenly distributed across regions, and ultimately insufficient to achieve the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by their 2030 deadline. This sobering assessment comes from The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026 (SOFI 2026) report, a comprehensive annual publication released on Tuesday by five specialized United Nations agencies.
The SOFI 2026 report estimates that 7.8 percent of the global population, or approximately 645 million people, faced hunger in 2025. This figure marks a sustained, albeit slow, improvement from 8.1 percent in 2024 and 8.6 percent in 2022. The reduction translates to nearly 14 million fewer people experiencing hunger compared to 2024, and a significant 43 million fewer than in 2022. While these numbers offer a glimmer of hope, the report’s authors — the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the UN World Food Programme (WFP), and the World Health Organization (WHO) — collectively warn that ongoing crises threaten to undermine this fragile progress.
Persistent Regional Disparities Highlight Uneven Recovery
Despite the global downtrend, the recovery from hunger remains profoundly uneven across different regions of the world. Asia, a continent that has historically grappled with massive food security challenges, along with Latin America and the Caribbean, has demonstrated steady improvements in recent years, reflecting targeted interventions and economic growth in many areas. In stark contrast, Africa now bears the heaviest burden in absolute terms, being home to approximately 309 million hungry people in 2025, a figure that has tragically surpassed Asia’s 292 million.
While Africa’s previously rising trend in the proportion of its population facing hunger is showing signs of stabilization, decreasing from 20.3 percent in 2024 to 20.0 percent in 2025, the continent’s rapidly growing population means that the absolute number of people affected continues to climb. This demographic dynamic presents a significant hurdle, demanding accelerated and more effective interventions to prevent further exacerbation of the hunger crisis. The report underscores that without fundamental shifts in policy and investment, Africa’s demographic trajectory will continue to outpace efforts to alleviate hunger.
Broader measures of food access paint an equally concerning picture of persistent disparities. In 2025, an estimated 25.8 percent of the global population, roughly 2.1 billion people, experienced moderate or severe food insecurity. This classification indicates that these individuals were, at times, forced to compromise on either the quality or quantity of the food they consumed due to financial or logistical constraints. While this figure represents a decrease from 27.1 percent in 2024 and 28.7 percent in 2020 — equivalent to nearly 86 million fewer people than in 2024 and 135 million fewer than in 2020 — it remains notably above pre-pandemic levels, suggesting a lingering impact of recent global disruptions.
The regional disparities in food insecurity are even more pronounced. Over half of Africa’s population (56.6 percent) grappled with moderate or severe food insecurity in 2025. This contrasts sharply with 20.3 percent in Asia, 22.9 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, and a significantly lower 8.7 percent in Northern America and Europe. The report also highlights that food insecurity continues to be more prevalent in rural areas compared to peri-urban and urban settings, often due to limited access to markets, infrastructure, and diverse livelihoods. Furthermore, women remain disproportionately affected by food insecurity, though the report notes a slight narrowing of the gender gap in 2025, an encouraging but insufficient step towards equity.
Geopolitical Conflicts and Climate Shocks Threaten Future Progress
The SOFI report is an annual barometer of global food security, providing crucial insights into the world’s progress (or lack thereof) towards achieving SDG 2: Zero Hunger. Beyond current statistics, this year’s report offers critical updated hunger projections for the next five years, taking into account the escalating conflict in the Middle East, particularly the 2026 Middle East conflict referenced. This conflict, alongside other global disruptions, is anticipated to significantly impact food inflation, primarily driven by higher energy and fertilizer prices.
Depending on the duration and intensity of the crisis’s impact, the report warns that approximately 510 to 520 million people may still be facing hunger in 2030. This projection represents a worrying increase compared to the lower estimate of 503 million people in a pre-conflict scenario. While the global number of undernourished people is still expected to decrease by 20 percent by 2030 from current levels, the added strain of geopolitical tensions casts a long shadow over these targets.
Crucially, these projections do not fully account for other potential disruptors, such as the effects of extreme weather events. The report specifically mentions the anticipated El Niño phenomena in 2026 and 2027, which could bring widespread droughts, floods, and other agricultural disturbances, further compounding the challenges. The combined effect of armed conflicts, climate change-induced disasters, and the reduction in official development assistance (ODA) and humanitarian funding creates a perfect storm that threatens to derail the hard-won gains in the fight against global hunger. The interconnectedness of these global challenges means that progress in one area can easily be undermined by setbacks in another, necessitating a more integrated and resilient global response.
Slow Progress on Global Nutrition Targets
Beyond the immediate measure of hunger, the SOFI 2026 report also critically assesses global progress on maternal and child nutrition, revealing that efforts remain woefully insufficient to meet international commitments, including the 2030 nutrition targets. Indicators vital for assessing early childhood development and overall public health, such as child stunting, wasting, overweight, low birthweight, and exclusive breastfeeding rates, show only marginal improvements. The pace of progress is simply too slow to meet the ambitious targets set for the end of the decade.
Compounding these challenges, some critical nutrition indicators are actually worsening. Anaemia among women aged 15 to 49 years continues to be a persistent and growing problem, reflecting inadequate diets and healthcare access. Furthermore, the prevalence of adult obesity shows a steady and alarming increase, rising from 12.1 percent in 2012 to 16.2 percent in 2024. This trend runs directly counter to the target of halting its rise by 2025, indicating a severe public health crisis in many parts of the world driven by dietary shifts and sedentary lifestyles.
The report also highlights the poor quality of diets for many young children: only 30.8 percent of children aged 6 to 23 months worldwide consume a minimally diverse diet, underscoring critical nutrient deficiencies in early life. This lack of dietary diversity contributes significantly to the fact that 150 million children under five years of age are still stunted, a condition associated with irreversible physical and cognitive damage.
Regional variations again tell a nuanced story. While the prevalence of child stunting is declining in Africa and is on track to meet the 2030 target in Asia, and exclusive breastfeeding rates are improving across all regions where data is available, significant challenges persist. Nearly all regions are experiencing widening gaps in addressing anaemia among women, indicating a systemic failure to support women’s health. Moreover, child overweight is increasing rapidly in Oceania, signaling the growing double burden of malnutrition where undernutrition coexists with overweight and obesity.
The Unaffordable Healthy Diet: A Root Cause
A significant focus of this year’s SOFI report is a deeper examination of "the cost of a healthy diet" – defined as the average minimum expenditure required to obtain locally available foods that meet energy and most nutrient requirements, as per FAO and WHO guidelines (adequate, balanced, diverse, and moderate). The report starkly underscores that the escalating cost of nutritious food remains a major constraint to achieving SDG 2 (Zero Hunger). While lowering these costs is crucial, the report cautions that it alone will not be sufficient to improve dietary quality and nutrition outcomes, necessitating a broader approach that addresses income, education, and food environments.
In 2025, the average global cost of a healthy diet rose to 4.28 purchasing power parity (PPP) dollars per person per day. This marks a substantial increase from 3.44 PPP dollars in 2021 and 2.94 PPP dollars in 2017, reflecting global inflationary pressures, supply chain disruptions, and increased demand. Latin America and the Caribbean recorded the highest regional costs, at 4.91 PPP dollars per person per day, highlighting specific regional challenges in food systems.
Despite this rising cost, the number of people unable to afford a healthy diet has paradoxically declined globally, from 2.97 billion (37.4 percent of the global population) in 2021 to 2.69 billion (32.7 percent) in 2025. This global trend, however, masks profound and concerning regional disparities. In Africa, affordability worsened markedly, with a staggering 66.6 percent of the population unable to afford a healthy diet in 2025 – more than double the levels observed in Asia and in Latin America and the Caribbean. This indicates that while some regions are seeing improvements in purchasing power or food access, Africa is falling further behind.
The report delves into the structural reasons for these varying costs, noting that they differ widely across regions due to inherent differences in agrifood systems. Animal source foods, fruits, and vegetables consistently account for the largest share of these costs, reflecting their higher production and preservation expenses. In contrast, starchy staples contribute relatively little to the overall cost of a healthy diet. Specifically, animal source foods are the largest contributor to the cost of a healthy diet in Africa, while vegetables represent the largest share in Latin America and the Caribbean, pointing to distinct regional dietary patterns and agricultural priorities.
A critical finding is the role of food value chains in determining consumer prices. Post-farmgate activities, encompassing processing, logistics, and wholesale, account for a substantial 70 to 75 percent of what consumers ultimately pay for food. Within this, up to 40 percent of total costs arise specifically in processing, logistics, and wholesale segments. Therefore, improving efficiency in these segments is paramount, particularly for lowering the cost of perishable, nutrient-rich foods that are often more expensive to transport and store.
To truly reduce the cost of a healthy diet, the report advocates for context-specific policy responses. These must aim to expand the supply of nutritious foods while simultaneously lowering structural costs across entire agrifood value chains. Recommended interventions include strategic investments in critical infrastructure, such as roads and storage facilities, robust research and development in sustainable agriculture, improved irrigation systems, and enhanced cold chains to minimize spoilage. Alongside these investments, reforms in subsidies, trade facilitation measures, and regulatory frameworks are essential to create a more equitable and efficient food system. Targeted interventions that boost agricultural productivity, reduce food losses along the supply chain, and promote sustainable practices can simultaneously improve nutrition outcomes, strengthen resilience to shocks, and support broader climate goals. The report’s powerful conclusion resonates: "The work that lies ahead over the years to 2030 is immense. However, a world in which a healthy diet is no longer out of reach for nearly one in three people is a world worth building."
Urgent Calls to Action from UN Leadership
The release of the SOFI 2026 report was accompanied by urgent calls to action from the heads of the five collaborating UN agencies, each emphasizing the multifaceted challenges and the collaborative effort required to address them.
QU Dongyu, Director-General of the FAO, acknowledged the report’s confirmation that "progress is possible, but we must move faster." He stressed that ending hunger and making healthy diets affordable demands unwavering political commitment, sustained investment, and enabling policies. Dongyu highlighted how recent crises — ranging from natural disasters like the COVID-19 pandemic to man-made conflicts such as the war in Ukraine, the Gaza crisis, and the recent Strait of Hormuz disruption — have simultaneously demonstrated the resilience of agrifood systems and the urgent need to strengthen them further to better serve the world’s most vulnerable people, farmers, and consumers.
Alvaro Lario, President of IFAD, focused on the escalating cost of a healthy diet, noting that "nearly 2.7 billion people may still be unable to afford a healthy diet." He asserted that resilient value chains must be a central part of the solution. Lario emphasized IFAD’s role in translating the evidence provided by SOFI into tangible investment, advocating for strong partnerships to "build the value chains, market systems and rural economies that make healthy food affordable for all."
Catherine Russell, UNICEF Executive Director, underscored the fundamental right of every child: "Every child deserves the chance to grow and develop to their full potential, and this starts with access to nutritious, affordable food." She described the report as "a stark reminder that food systems fail millions of children and families." Russell called for an integrated approach, insisting that "Food, health, education and social protection must go hand in hand to protect the most vulnerable children and women from global shocks."
Carl Skau, Acting Executive Director of WFP, brought a powerful human perspective to the statistics: "Behind every number in this report is a family counting the cost of food." He linked conflict and climate shocks directly to families being pushed beyond their means. Skau reiterated WFP’s commitment to "continue working with partner agencies, governments and communities to build food systems that hold up under shock, so families can afford nutritious diets, even in times of crisis," concluding with a plea for "sustained investment to match the scale of the challenge."
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO, welcomed the progress in reducing hunger but highlighted the persistent problem of affordability: "a healthy diet still remains unaffordable for one in three people globally." He also pointed to the worrying trends of rising obesity and stalling maternal and child nutrition. Dr. Tedros emphasized that "we know what works," advocating for evidence-based policies such as making healthy food the easy choice, promoting breastfeeding, front-of-pack labelling, taxing unhealthy products, and protecting children from harmful marketing. He concluded with a resounding declaration: "Healthy diets are not a luxury – they are the foundation of health and must be within everyone’s reach."
The SOFI 2026 report serves as a critical annual health check on the world’s progress towards a fundamental human right: food security. While the decline in global hunger is a positive indicator of what concerted efforts can achieve, the persistent regional disparities, the shadow of geopolitical conflicts, the devastating impacts of climate change, and the rising cost of a healthy diet underscore the immense and complex challenges that remain. Achieving Zero Hunger by 2030 will require not just continued commitment, but a dramatic acceleration of efforts, innovative policy solutions, and unprecedented global cooperation to build truly resilient, equitable, and sustainable agrifood systems for all.
