One in 11 people worldwide — some 733 million overall — faces hunger, as global hunger rates have plateaued since the pandemic, said an annual report by five UN agencies on Wednesday. The lack of progress added urgency to warnings that the world would fail to meet the goal of zero hunger by 2030.
The annual State of Food Security (SOFI) report said levels of undernourishment were similar to those of 2008-09 — 15 years ago. “An alarming number of people continue to face food insecurity and malnutrition,” said the agencies.
Between 9 and 9.1 percent of the world’s population faced hunger in 2021, 2022, and 2023, equal to roughly 733 million people at current population levels, said the report. The hunger rate was 8.5 percent in 2020, when the coronavirus spread worldwide, and 7.9 percent in 2019, before the pandemic.
“Six years from 2030, hunger and food insecurity trends are not yet moving in the right direction to end hunger and food insecurity by 2030,” said the SOFI report. “The indicators of progress towards global nutrition targets similarly show that the world is not on track to eliminate all forms of malnutrition.”
At current rates, about 582 million people will be chronically undernourished in 2030, half of them in Africa, said the report.
“Conflict, climate variability and extremes, economic slowdowns and downturns, lack of access to and affordability of healthy diets, unhealthy food environments, and high and persistent inequality continue to drive food insecurity and malnutrition all over the world,” the leaders of the World Food Program, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development said in the report’s foreword.
“A central reason is finance. … Estimating the gap in financing for food security and nutrition, and mobilizing innovative ways of financing to bridge it, must be among our top priorities,” they said.
At present, one in five Africans faces hunger, and the proportion is rising, said the SOFI report. The percentage of the population facing hunger in Asia is stable at 8.1 percent; half of the hungry people in the world live there. With a 6.2 percent hunger rate, Latin America has made progress. From 2022 to 2023, hunger increased in western Asia, the Caribbean, and most African subregions, said the agencies in a release.
To read the State of Food Security report, click here.