Fewer people went hungry in 2025 than in 2024, according to the latest United Nations assessment, but the gains are fragile and uneven. This article explains what the 2026 edition of the annual food security report found, why a healthy diet is getting more expensive, and where the pressure points are.
What did the 2026 report find?
The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026, released on July 21, 2026, is produced jointly by five UN agencies: the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), UNICEF, the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Its theme this year is the high cost of a healthy diet.
The headline number is that hunger affected 7.8% of the world’s population in 2025, down from 8.1% in 2024 and 8.6% in 2022. That equals about 645 million people, nearly 14 million fewer than a year earlier and 43 million fewer than in 2022. It is the third consecutive year of easing.
A broader measure tells a similar story. About 2.1 billion people, or 25.8% of the world, experienced moderate or severe food insecurity in 2025. That is down from 27.1% in 2024 and 28.7% in 2020, but still above pre-pandemic levels, according to the agencies.
Hunger and food insecurity: two different measures
The report uses several yardsticks, and they are easy to confuse.
- Hunger (undernourishment) means a person’s habitual food intake is not enough to supply the energy needed for a normal, active life.
- Moderate or severe food insecurity captures people who lack regular access to enough nutritious, safe food, even if they are not always going without calories. People in this group may skip meals, cut portions or fall back on cheaper, less nutritious options.
This is why the second number is more than three times the first. Someone can be food insecure without meeting the strict definition of hunger, and the larger figure often reflects budgets stretched thin rather than empty plates.
Where is the problem concentrated?
Progress is far from even. Africa has about 309 million hungry people, the largest absolute number of any region, compared with about 292 million in Asia. Africa’s hunger rate edged down from 20.3% in 2024 to 20.0% in 2025, which means roughly one in five people on the continent is affected.
Moderate or severe food insecurity in 2025 showed a similarly wide spread across regions, according to the report:
| Region | Moderate or severe food insecurity, 2025 |
|---|---|
| Africa | 56.6% |
| Latin America and the Caribbean | 22.9% |
| Asia | 20.3% |
| Northern America and Europe | 8.7% |
The report also notes that food insecurity is more common in rural areas than in peri-urban or urban ones, and that women are disproportionately affected, although the gender gap narrowed slightly in 2025.
Why does a healthy diet cost so much?
The report’s central finding is about price. The global average cost of a healthy diet reached 4.28 purchasing-power-parity (PPP) dollars per person per day in 2025, up from 3.44 in 2021 and 2.94 in 2017. PPP dollars adjust for differences in price levels between countries, so the figure compares what a basket of food would buy across borders rather than at market exchange rates.
Worked example, using the report’s figures:
- From 2021 to 2025, the daily cost rose from 3.44 to 4.28, an increase of 0.84 dollars, or about 24%.
- From 2017 to 2025, it rose from 2.94 to 4.28, an increase of 1.34 dollars, or about 46%.
- At 4.28 dollars a day, a healthy diet for one person comes to roughly 1,562 PPP dollars over a 365-day year.
Regional costs differ. Latin America and the Caribbean had the highest average, at 4.91 PPP dollars per person per day. The biggest contributors to cost also vary: animal-source foods in Africa, and vegetables in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The report also points to the structure of food supply chains. Activities after food leaves the farm account for 70% to 75% of what consumers pay, and up to 40% of total costs come from processing, logistics and wholesale. Inefficiency at those stages, the agencies say, is part of why nutritious food is expensive.
Who can’t afford a healthy diet?
Affordability compares the cost of a healthy diet with what people have to spend. By that test, 2.97 billion people, or 37.4% of the world, could not afford a healthy diet in 2021. By 2025 the figure had fallen to 2.69 billion, or 32.7%. That is a drop of about 280 million people over four years (2.97 billion minus 2.69 billion), a real improvement but one that still leaves roughly one in three people priced out.
The gap is widest in Africa, where 66.6% of the population could not afford a healthy diet in 2025, more than double the levels in Asia and in Latin America and the Caribbean. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that “a healthy diet still remains unaffordable for one in three people globally.”
What is pushing progress off course?
The agencies name several forces. Conflict and climate shocks push households beyond what they can afford. The conflict in the Middle East has raised energy and fertilizer prices and fed into food inflation. Weather extremes continue to disrupt harvests. And cuts to official development assistance and humanitarian funding have reduced the support available to the most vulnerable countries.
These pressures echo broader themes in global economic coverage. Policymakers weighing how to shield households from rising prices face trade-offs similar to those discussed in targeted support versus price controls during cost-of-living crises. Conflict also drives hunger indirectly by displacing families from farms and markets; the pattern is explored in the first decline in global forced displacement in a decade.
What about child nutrition and obesity?
Hunger is only part of the nutrition picture. The report finds only marginal improvement in stunting, wasting, overweight, low birthweight and exclusive breastfeeding. About 150 million children under five are stunted. Just 30.8% of children aged 6 to 23 months eat a minimally diverse diet. Anemia among women aged 15 to 49 is worsening, and the gap is widening in nearly all regions.
At the other end of the spectrum, adult obesity rose from 12.1% in 2012 to 16.2% in 2024, missing the global target to halt its rise by 2025. Undernutrition and obesity can coexist in the same country, and even the same household, because the cheapest calories are often not the most nutritious. That is the core of the affordability problem: a diet can be cheap and still fall short of what the body needs.
Some regional bright spots exist. Stunting is declining in Africa, Asia is on track to meet the 2030 stunting target, and exclusive breastfeeding is improving in all regions with data.
What do the projections say for 2030?
The 2030 target of ending hunger is slipping further away. The pre-conflict projection was that about 503 million people would face hunger in 2030. Taking account of the Middle East conflict’s effect on food inflation, the agencies now estimate roughly 510 million to 520 million. Even on the earlier projection, the number of undernourished people would fall by only about 20%. The projections do not include the effects of the El Niño expected in 2026–2027.
Water stress is a related risk, since agriculture depends on it; the background is covered in why water scarcity is becoming a bigger global issue.
What the 2026 numbers add up to
The direction of travel is encouraging: three years of falling hunger, and fewer people unable to afford a healthy diet than in 2021. But the cost of eating well has climbed by almost a quarter in four years, a third of humanity still cannot afford it, and new shocks from energy prices, weather and aid cuts threaten to stall the recovery. FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu summed up the message: “progress is possible, but we must move faster.”
This article is general information about world affairs and public health and is not medical or nutritional advice.
Sources: World Health Organization
