Hunger worsens in Africa and West Asia

The world remains far from achieving the goal of eradicating hunger and malnutrition by 2030. Between 638 and 720 million people, or 7.8 to 8.8 percent of the global population, did not have enough food in 2024. While this figure has decreased slightly compared to 2023 , it still leaves the world with 22 million more people going hungry than in 2015, the year the 2030 Agenda was launched. These are the main conclusions of the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2025 (SOFI) report, published Monday and prepared by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Food Programme (WFP), UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO).

“There is an improvement in numerical terms because the average is 673 million people living in hunger, which means we have gone from a hunger prevalence of 8.5% to 8.2%, but that number is heterogeneous,” warns Máximo Torero, FAO's chief economist, in a video interview with EL PAÍS. A detailed analysis of the figures reveals that the overall improvement has been due to “notable progress” in South and Southeast Asia and Latin America, but, in contrast, “hunger continues to increase in almost all regions of Africa and Western Asia,” the report emphasizes.

Sixty percent of the world's hungry population will be in Africa in 2023 if the trend does not change.

Specifically, hunger affected 307 million people in Africa, 323 million in Asia, and 34 million in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2024. This means that approximately 20% of the African population suffered from hunger last year, compared to 6.6% in Asia and 5.1% in Latin America. And the forecasts for the African continent are not encouraging: the global number of undernourished people will fall to around 512 million in 2023, but 60% of them will be on this continent if the trend does not reverse.

In addition to the number of hungry people, another key indicator shows the persistence of a deeply unequal food system. According to the report, around 2.3 billion people (28% of the global population) experienced moderate or severe food insecurity in 2024. Although this figure has decreased slightly compared to 2023, it is still 335 million above the level that existed before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Food inflation

“Despite sufficient global food production, millions of people are hungry or malnourished because they lack, cannot access, or, more often, cannot afford safe and nutritious food,” the top leaders of the five organizations responsible for the report stated in a joint letter. They emphasized that “food insecurity and malnutrition are disproportionately affected by food price inflation.”

According to Torero, rising food costs are precisely one of the main drivers of this food insecurity, which particularly affects women, rural households, and communities with less access to social protection. “Food price inflation has risen even more than global inflation,” he says. Although international prices for agricultural commodities have begun to stabilize after the increase they experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the prices actually paid by consumers have not followed the same trend. “The bread you buy at the store depends not only on the price of wheat, which represents only 3% or 4%, but also on the cost of energy, logistics, and transportation…” explains the FAO chief economist.

In addition to this situation, Torero alludes to a larger macroeconomic problem: many food-importing countries, especially in Africa, "face high levels of debt and currency devaluations" that make imports even more expensive.

Despite global food production being sufficient, millions of people are starving.

Letter from the top leaders of the UN agencies that prepared the report

The result, he explains, is devastating for the poorest households, whose basic food basket consists mostly of food: "A 10% increase in food prices can lead to a 3.5% increase in moderate or severe food insecurity, and a 1.8% increase in severe food insecurity." It also translates into a significant increase in child malnutrition: a 10% increase in prices can lead to a 4.3% increase in cases of severe acute malnutrition in children under five, according to SOFI.

This rise in prices also directly affects the quality of the food we eat. According to the report, in 2024 the global average price of a nutritious diet reached $4.46 per day (€3.80), compared to $4.01 (€3.42) in 2022. And the most nutritious foods (fruits, vegetables, and animal products) remain the most expensive, while ultra-processed foods, rich in sugars, salt, and saturated fats, are the cheapest, contributing to the rise in malnutrition and the emergence of non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. According to the latest available data, adult obesity has also increased, rising from 12.1% in 2012 to 15.8% in 2022.

For this reason, Torero insists on the need to implement coordinated fiscal and agricultural policies, strengthen social protection, and foster agri-food systems to make them more resilient and effective, as Latin American and Asian countries have done. “You have the case of Brazil, Peru, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, and India, which have promoted two types of policies: social protection policies, which have had very positive impacts, but also very serious policies regarding agricultural development and improving productivity and efficiency,” explains the economist. “I think the combination of both factors is what makes the difference,” explains Torero.

Torero cites the sustained agricultural policies of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, "major grain exporters," as success stories and advocates for "more resilient" productivity. To achieve this, he believes it is necessary to "use science and innovation to create, for example, seeds that are more resistant to climate change or to water shortages or excesses."

All of these policies, along with attracting private investment, are, according to Torero, crucial, especially in a context where cuts in official development aid from major donors will have a negative impact on the fight against hunger. "This reduction affects two major areas: the response to food emergencies and the structural development of agri-food systems," with particularly serious consequences for the most vulnerable countries, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa, the economist explains.

Hunger in Gaza

Regarding Palestine and the extreme hunger situation in Gaza , the SOFI 2025 report recalls that, while its analysis focuses on the structural evolution of hunger and malnutrition in the medium and long term, there are other essential complementary assessments to understand the urgency of certain crises. One of these is the Global Report on Food Crises , published in May by the Global Network against Food Crises (led by, among others, the FAO), which analyzes situations of acute food insecurity, i.e. those that require immediate humanitarian responses. According to its 2025 edition, more than 295 million people in 59 countries and territories faced critical levels of acute hunger in 2024, phase 3 of the Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) , a set of internationally approved tools and procedures that establishes five phases: minimal, acute, crisis, emergency and famine.

That report identified the five countries with the highest number of people facing high levels of acute food insecurity, which were, in descending order, Nigeria, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia. In contrast, the countries with the highest percentage of their population experiencing high levels of food insecurity were Palestine (Gaza Strip), South Sudan, Sudan, Yemen, and Haiti. Furthermore, the analysis revealed that nearly two million people faced catastrophic acute food insecurity (Stage 5) in 2024, more than half of them (1,106,900) in the Gaza Strip. This figure was almost double the 576,000 people estimated to be in this phase at the end of 2023—already the highest number ever recorded for any country or territory in the history of the CPI.