Global hunger eased slightly in 2025, but Africa still carries the heaviest share of the world’s food insecurity and is on track to hold most of it by 2030, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, discussed again this month around World Food Day. An estimated 7.8 per cent of the world’s population, about 645 million people, faced hunger in 2025, down from 8.1 per cent in 2024 and 8.6 per cent in 2022. The figures mark improvement, not resolution.
Far larger numbers continue to struggle with less visible forms of deprivation. FAO estimates that 2.1 billion people were moderately or severely food insecure in 2025, meaning they could not consistently access enough safe, nutritious food, even if not all of them went hungry outright. The report highlights stark regional divergence: 56.6 per cent of people in Africa experienced moderate or severe food insecurity, compared with 20.3 per cent in Asia and 22.9 per cent in Latin America and the Caribbean.
FAO projects that between 510 million and 520 million people could still be facing hunger in 2030, with roughly 56 per cent of them in Africa. That is a statistical projection based on current trends and shocks continuing, not a prediction of inevitability, and FAO has repeatedly stressed that policy choices made in the next few years could shift the continent’s trajectory.
Climate, prices and conflict erode fragile gains
The aid and policy network CWS, reviewing the FAO findings this month, stresses that climate change, elevated food prices and conflict remain the principal threats to further progress. Those forces erode household incomes, reduce crop yields and disrupt markets in ways that hit the poorest households hardest and fastest, since they spend a larger share of their budgets on food and have the least capacity to absorb a shock.
A further layer to the problem is diet quality rather than calorie count alone. FAO’s materials note that healthy diets remain unaffordable for large numbers of people, which has consequences beyond immediate hunger. Households may secure enough calories to avoid acute hunger yet still lack the diverse nutrients, such as protein, fruit and vegetables, needed for long-term health and productivity. That affordability gap widens the true human and economic cost of food insecurity well beyond the headline hunger figures.
Regions diverge in exposure and response
The regional picture also reflects differing exposure to shocks and differing capacity to respond to them. In many African countries, food systems face climate volatility, weaker transport infrastructure and limited fiscal space for social protection programmes. In Asia and Latin America, more established safety nets and better-functioning domestic food markets have dampened some vulnerabilities, even as pockets of severe need persist in both regions.
Policymakers and donors therefore face choices about where to concentrate scarce resources: reducing the price of basic staples, expanding cash transfers, investing in climate-resilient crops, or supporting market access for smallholder farmers. The FAO numbers provide bearings for that debate, not a ready-made blueprint. Hunger has eased from its recent highs, yet the concentration of risk in Africa, and the persistence of unaffordable healthy diets everywhere, leave hundreds of millions of people vulnerable to reversal. Whether the 510-520 million figure projected for 2030 becomes an outcome or an avoidable projection remains an open question that depends on choices still to be made.
