New Data on Food Security and Nutrition Worldwide

(graphic: R Stephenson)

Every year the United Nations, led by the Food and Agriculture Organization, puts together a fact-packed report titled The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026 (SOFI). I am focused on all the things that the current U.S. administration is doing to make life harder for hungry people, so I came to this year’s U.N. report looking to see if the harm it is doing is showing up in the data yet.  

The latest numbers in the report are for 2025, and they still show a bit of progress against undernourishment. FAO has been tracking the prevalence of undernourishment for more than 50 years. An estimated 7.8 percent of the world’s people (645 million people) were undernourished in 2025, higher than the estimated 7.5 percent for 2019 before the pandemic, but slightly lower than 8.1 percent in 2024. 

We aren’t seeing the negative effects of Trump’s policies in this data, partly because some of the policies he announced in 2025 will go into effect over a period of years. Also, while the United States has global impact, changes in U.S. policy may have relatively little effect on the livelihoods of people in countries or regions with relatively weak connections to the United States. 

Undernourishment is probably increasing in 2026. The U.N. report stresses “enormous uncertainty” in the current year. It highlights three threats to global food security, all of them due in part to the current administration: conflict in the Middle East, increasing weather extremes, and reductions in international humanitarian and development assistance. 

This year’s SOFI calls particular attention to parts of the world where hunger is prevalent and severe: Africa and a cluster of countries suffering from widespread acute hunger.

• The percentage of Africa’s people who are undernourished is now much higher than in any other region. As of 2025, 20 percent of Africans are undernourished, compared to 6 percent in Asia and 4.8 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean. 

• The most distressing aspect of this report is what it says about the increasing prevalence of acute food insecurity in the world. The United Nations has developed a new methodology and a separate annual report on acute food insecurity titled The Global Report on Food Crises. The traditional indicator of hunger, undernourishment, measures chronic food insecurity—people who don’t get enough calories to be healthy and productive. The indicator of acute food insecurity measures severe hunger that threatens lives or livelihoods. It was designed to guide international humanitarian action, and it divides countries into five phases of increasing urgency. 

As of 2025, 266 million people are facing high levels of acute food insecurity, sharply up from a decade ago. Of these 266 million people, 39 million were in Phase 4 (Emergency) and 1.4 million in Phase 5 (Catastrophe). The five countries with the largest numbers of people facing high levels of acute food security were, in descending order, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Yemen, and Afghanistan. The countries and territories with the largest share of the population facing high levels of acute food insecurity were Gaza, South Sudan, Yemen, Sudan, and Haiti.

The United Nations has declared famine in parts of  Gaza and Sudan. Official declarations of famine are exceedingly rare, and the situation in Gaza is exceedingly grim. Israel’s attacks on Gaza and the famine that has followed have been way out of proportion to Hamas’ terrorist attack in 2023. A delegation from Trump’s Board of Peace has just returned from Israel. But a peace agreement seems unlikely until our government insists that Israel’s government show more compassion in their dealings with Gaza.