The Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service in June released its annual International Food Security Assessment (IFSA), an outlook for global food security for the coming decade. The report estimated that global food security would improve over the coming 10 years, with a decline in the number of food-insecure people from 782 million in 2018 to 446 million in 2028.
The report analyzes 76 low- and middle-income countries, which have historically received food aid. It notes that improvements in food security vary greatly by country, with more improvement expected in Asia and Latin America than in Sub-Saharan Africa. Food security is assessed based on a 2,100-calorie-per-day diet.
The report calculates the percentage of the country’s population that is food insecure, the number of food-insecure people, and the “food gap,” which “measures the amount of food needed to raise consumption of food insecure people at every income level to the caloric target.” The report found that in addition to the expected decline of food-insecure people from 782 million to 446 million, the share of food-insecure people is projected to fall from 21.1 percent to 10.4 percent, and the food gap is projected to decline from 36 million tons to 24 million tons.
Last year’s IFSA had slightly different findings, estimating that in 2017, 646 million people were food-insecure in the reviewed countries, and that the number would decline to 372 million by 2027.