State of Food Security & Nutrition in the World (SOFI) 2025 report -Press Conference |United Nations

“Africa has been deteriorating in terms of hunger, while Latin America, especially South America, has been improving, and Asia, especially South Asia driven by India, has been significantly improving,” said Maximo Torero, Chief Economist of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, commenting on the outcomes of the report.

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI 2025) report jointly published by five United Nations specialized agencies indicates that an estimated 8.2 percent of the global population, or about 673 million people, experienced hunger in 2024, down from 8.5 percent in 2023 and 8.7 percent in 2022.

SOFI 2025 indicates that between 638 and 720 million people faced hunger in 2024.

Based on the midpoint estimate of 673 million, this represents a decrease of 15 million people from 2023 and of 22 million from 2022.

Notable improvements are seen in southern Asia, mainly reflecting new data from India, and Latin America. Hunger in Asia fell from 7.9 percent in 2022 to 6.7 percent, or 323 million people, in 2024. Additionally, Latin America and the Caribbean saw undernourishment fall to 5.1 percent, or 34 million people, in 2024, down from a peak of 6.1 percent in 2020.

According to the current projection, 512 million people could be chronically undernourished by 2030, with nearly 60 percent of them in Africa.

SOFI 2025 also examines the causes and consequences of the 2021–2023 food price surge and its impact on food security and nutrition. The report highlights that the global policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic —characterized by extensive fiscal and monetary interventions — combined with the impacts of the war in Ukraine and multiple extreme weather events contributed to recent inflationary pressures.

“The SOFI also show us that the food prices have been increasing more and faster than the prices of other commodities.That means the food inflation has been faster and higher than the non-food inflation. And that, of course, affects the most vulnerable people, which their share of expenditures in food is higher than in other commodities.”

Food inflation has hindered the post-pandemic recovery in food security and nutrition. Since 2020, global food price inflation has consistently outpaced headline inflation. The gap peaked in January 2023, with food inflation reaching 13.6 percent, 5.1 percentage points above the headline rate of 8.5 percent.

Low-income countries have been particularly hit hard by rising food prices. While median global food price inflation increased from 2.3 percent in December 2020 to 13.6 percent in early 2023, it climbed even higher in low-income countries, peaking at 30 percent in May 2023.

The report recommends a combination of policy responses to food price inflation. They include targeted and time-bound fiscal measures, such as social protection programs, to safeguard vulnerable households; credible and transparent monetary policies to contain inflationary pressures; and strategic investments in agrifood R&D, transport and production infrastructure, and market information systems to improve productivity and resilience.

“Private financing will be essential. In everything we do, we cannot just use the governments and IFIs [International Financial Institutions] we also need to atract private financing. And climate financing needs to increase substentialy. In agrifood systems today they are at 4 percents, while the agrifood systems are the ones providing the right to food. So, we need to change that abruptly so that we can have financing that is needed to transform our agrifood systems so that we can assure that there is more availability of healthy diets in the world and the cost of the healthy diet is reduced in the world and that we can accelerate the transmition of decline of the prices of commodities into the final products that we eat.”