Where Data Tells the Story
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According to "The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2025", the FAO's latest status report on world hunger, around 670 million people across the globe faced hunger in 2024. While that's a slight improvement compared to 2022 and 2023, it is currently estimated that more than 500 million people will still be chronically undernourished in 2030, meaning that the UN's Sustainable Development Goal 2: Zero Hunger by 2030 is already out of sight.
Moreover, actual hunger and undernourishment are only the tip of the iceberg in the world's quest to ensure safe access to nutritious and affordable food for everyone. According to the FAO's latest estimates, about 2.3 billion people, or 28 percent of the world's population, were moderately or severely food insecure in 2024. While that's down from 28.5 percent in 2022, it's a significant increase from 21.4 percent in 2015 and from 25 percent in 2019, the last year before the Covid-19 pandemic destroyed years of progress in the fight against hunger and food insecurity.
Nowhere does the problem have a larger scale than on the African continent. According to FAO, 58.9 percent of the African population was experiencing moderate (including not enough money for healthy food, self-sufficiency problems, having to skip meals) or severe (including no food stocks, entire days without food) food insecurity (FAO's definition). This represents an increase of 7.8 percentage points, or roughly 100 million people, since 2019. Africa is also the only world region that has yet to recover from the Covid-19 shock. While other regions have seen the prevalence of food insecurity decline gradually since the pandemic, the share of food insecure people continued to climb in Africa.
According to the FAO, food insecurity is more prevalent in rural areas (32 percent) than in peri-urban (28.6 percent) and urban areas (23.9 percent). There's also a persistent gender gap in food insecurity, with women more likely to be food insecure than men in every region of the world.