The Countries Facing the Most Hunger Crisis

If you’ve ever thought about which country faces the harshest hunger crisis, the Global Hunger Index offers insight.

The index measures four components: undernourishment, child wasting, child stunting, and child mortality.

Countries are scored from 0 to 100, with four severity bands.

The map above visualizes the top 26 countries in the “serious” or “alarming” territory.

It comes at a moment when the UK government has warned that the world is sleepwalking into a global food crisis, with 45 million people facing acute hunger.

Somalia leads the Global Hunger Index 2025 with a score of 42.6, the closest any country has ever come to the “extremely alarming” threshold of 50, which has never been reached in the index’s history.
India scores 25.8, ranked fifth in the chart, but with 1.43 billion people, it represents the largest absolute hunger burden of any country in the dataset by an enormous margin

Five nations have crossed from “serious” into “alarming” territory, defined as a score of 35 or above.

Haiti sits at 35.7, the sole Western Hemisphere country in the dataset’s worst tier, where gang control of food distribution systems has replaced any functional state food management.

Madagascar follows at 35.8, an island nation 400 kilometers off Africa’s eastern coast, entirely dependent on maritime supply chains with no overland alternative when global shipping is disrupted.

The Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan are tied at 37.5.

DRC has approximately 100 million people (a population nearly 10 times larger than South Sudan’s 11 million), making the same score represent dramatically different absolute scales of suffering.