More than 700 million people went hungry last year, says UN report

The number of hungry people in the world rose sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic and has remained at nearly the same level ever since, according to the flagship U.N. global food security report. This means the United Nations’ goal of eliminating hunger by 2030 is becoming further and further out of reach. Between 713 million and 757 million people may have faced hunger in 2023, the report said. When considering the middle of that range, or 733 million, the figures amount to about 152 million more people than in 2019, the year before the pandemic. An estimated 2.33 billion people were moderately or severely food insecure last year — or almost 29% of the global population. And more than one-third of people, or 2.8 billion, were unable to afford a healthy diet. The 2024 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, released Wednesday, is produced annually by five organizations: the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, UNICEF, the World Food Programme, and the World Health Organization. “733 million is a very high level, and it basically means that we are at the levels of 15 years ago,” FAO Chief Economist Máximo Torero told Devex. “And so we have lost 15 years in terms of the reduction of hunger, and it’s about 9.1% of the global population.” Had the COVID-19 pandemic never taken place, he added, the world would be much closer to achieving U.N. Sustainable Development Goal 2 of eliminating hunger by 2030, which was set in 2015. The major drivers of hunger — conflict, climate change, and economic shocks — are occurring more often and at higher intensity, the report said, while climate change was the most prevalent reason for food insecurity and malnutrition last year. This year’s findings are even more stark when broken down by region: 1 out of 11 people on the planet faced hunger in 2023, but that figure is 1 out of every 5 in Africa, where hunger levels are still on the rise. Hunger has stayed relatively unchanged in Asia, but although Africa is home to the largest proportion of undernourished people, Asia is home to the highest number — 384.5 million, compared to 298.4 million in Africa. Hunger and nutrition targets now appear impossible to hit; the report projects that 582 million people will be chronically undernourished at the end of the decade — and more than half of them will be in Africa. The 282-page report was timed with this week’s Group of 20 ministerial meetings in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where Brazilian President President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has made reducing poverty at home and abroad a major focus of his leadership as well as Brazil’s G20 presidency this year. At least 100 countries are expected to join a Brazil-led alliance to fight hunger and poverty. It will officially launch at the G20 summit in November. Brazil is one of the countries worth examining as a model. Latin America — and particularly South America — is a bright spot in the report, Torero said, as the region has reduced hunger to pre-COVID levels. Part of the reason for this is the region’s social safety nets, which enabled it to make progress despite price inflation pressures and the impacts of the pandemic, he said. “South America has one of the highest levels in terms of social expenditures compared to all the other subregions in Latin America and to Africa,” he said. “Also, it has a well-developed institutionalized social protection system, which helps them to respond quicker and to target better.” As examples, he pointed to conditional cash transfer programs used in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Peru, which target the most vulnerable people and keep them from going hungry. That should provide encouragement for the rest of the world, he added. “The progres that we see in South America and some subregions of Asia tell us that we have that capacity” to make progress, he said. “If we keep this rate of 5 million less people [experiencing] hunger in two years, it’s possible that South America will achieve SDG2.” On the African continent, one of the biggest barriers to progress is access to both public and private finance for food security and nutrition — and fixing that problem across the world’s lowest-income countries was a major theme of this year’s report. “We observed that the countries with the highest level of food insecurity are often the ones with the least access to financing,” Torero said. “Of the 119 lower middle income countries that we analyzed, around 60% have limited or moderate ability to access finance.” “If we want to change what is happening in Africa, and they don't have access to financing, then it's impossible,” he continued. “It will never happen, we will never achieve that.” Moving forward, the public and private sector alike will need to step up their finance for the food and nutrition space and especially for smallholder farmers, said Asma Lateef, policy and advocacy lead at the SDG2 Advocacy Hub. “One of the big recommendations of the report is the need to increase the risk appetite and use ODA and concessional finance to really de-risk some of the investments in agriculture, agri-food systems in low-income country contexts,” said Lateef, who worked on one of the report’s chapters. “And this becomes more important or more urgent as we see the impacts of climate change and the variability in weather extremes.” Another major issue is that there’s no universal definition for what counts as financing for food security and nutrition — meaning that it’s impossible to accurately measure what’s being spent and where. That in turn makes it difficult to map a pathway to achieving SDG targets. For example, depending on which definition is applied, the total amount of ODA grants for food security and nutrition in 2021 cover a wide range — from $6.9 billion per year to $62.6 billion, according to the report. The lack of a definition also poses challenges for identifying under-resourced areas within the food security and nutrition space, as well as holding institutions accountable for the impact they pledge to make with the funds. The report attempts to define financing for food security and nutrition as “the public and private financial resources, both domestic and foreign, that are directed towards eradicating hunger, food insecurity and all forms of malnutrition.” This includes a wide range of things, including grants and repayable finance, from ODA and private sources, which supports nutritious and safe food, and a health diet. “They are targeted to ensure the availability, access, utilization and stability of nutritious and safe foods, and practices that favour healthy diets, as well as health, education, and social protection services that enable these, and include the financial resources that are directed towards strengthening the resilience of agrifood systems to the major drivers and underlying structural factors of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition,” according to the report. It also calls for a standardized approach to mapping financial flows oriented to meeting SDG2. But regardless of how much funding is needed to achieve the SDG targets of ending hunger, food insecurity, and all forms of malnutrition, the report said, the cost of not mobilizing it is even more significant.