The global hunger decline recorded over the past two years continued into 2025, with improvements registered across every continent, according to a new United Nations report. Even so, the report warns that mounting climate and trade risks could undermine the progress achieved so far and slow momentum toward eliminating hunger by the end of the decade.
Around 645 million people, representing 7.8 percent of the world’s population, experienced hunger last year. That figure is down from 8.1 percent in 2024 and 8.6 percent in 2022, marking three consecutive years of improvement. The findings come from the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, commonly referred to by its acronym SOFI, which is jointly prepared each year by five United Nations agencies, including the Food and Agriculture Organization.
What Is Driving the Global Hunger Decline
The global hunger decline documented in this year’s report was driven largely by gains in Asia, particularly India, along with steady improvements across Latin America and the Caribbean. These regions have benefited from stronger agricultural output, improved social protection programmes, and more resilient food distribution systems, all of which have helped reduce the share of people going without adequate nutrition.
Máximo Torero, chief economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization, said the defining feature of this year’s findings was that hunger fell in every continent, including Africa, for the first time in recent years. He described the improvement in Africa as very slight, but noted that it nonetheless represented a meaningful shift after a prolonged period in which the continent’s hunger figures continued to climb even as the rest of the world improved.
Despite this modest turnaround, Africa remains the region facing the greatest challenges. The continent recorded the world’s largest undernourished population in 2025, with 309 million people affected, equivalent to roughly one in every five Africans. Torero attributed much of this persistent burden to weak infrastructure, limited cold-storage capacity, and poor transport networks, all of which raise the cost of highly perishable foods such as fruit, vegetables, milk, and meat. He added that fragmented regulations and non-tariff barriers between neighbouring African countries continue to restrict the flow of food across the continent, further complicating efforts to close the gap with other regions.
Food Insecurity in Africa Remains the Report’s Central Concern
While the broader trend points toward a global hunger decline, food insecurity in Africa continues to stand out as the report’s most pressing concern. The affordability of nutritious food is a particular sticking point. According to the report, 2.69 billion people worldwide cannot afford a healthy diet, a figure calculated using an average cost of 4.28 dollars per day in purchasing-power-parity terms. In Africa, that affordability gap is especially stark, with 66.1 percent of the population unable to afford a healthy diet, more than double the rates recorded in Asia and Latin America.
This disparity illustrates a broader theme running through the report: progress against hunger does not automatically translate into progress against malnutrition or poor dietary quality. Even as fewer people go without sufficient calories, many still lack access to the diverse, nutrient-rich foods needed for long-term health. Food insecurity in Africa, in particular, reflects structural weaknesses in agricultural supply chains rather than a simple shortage of food production.
Climate and Trade Risks Threaten Future Progress
Although the report frames 2025 as a year of encouraging, if uneven, progress, it devotes considerable attention to the climate and trade risks that could reverse recent gains. Climate shocks, including droughts, floods, and increasingly unpredictable growing seasons, continue to threaten agricultural output in vulnerable regions, particularly those already struggling with food insecurity. At the same time, disruptions to global trade routes and supply chains pose a separate but related threat, since many countries rely heavily on food imports to meet domestic demand.
The report’s authors caution that these climate and trade risks are not distant hypotheticals but active pressures already shaping food markets. Fragmented trade regulations, rising tariffs in some regions, and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events could all combine to slow or even reverse the global hunger decline observed over the past three years if left unaddressed. Governments and international bodies, the report suggests, will need to invest in more resilient agricultural infrastructure and more predictable trade frameworks to protect the gains made so far.
Chronic Hunger Versus Acute Crises
Torero also addressed a point of frequent public confusion, namely the relationship between chronic hunger figures and acute food crises caused by conflict or disaster. He explained that the war in Gaza had not materially altered the global hunger figures captured in this year’s report, because the methodology tracks long-term, chronic undernourishment rather than short-term, acute food insecurity linked to specific conflicts or emergencies.
According to Torero, food deliveries into Gaza have increased in recent months, helping to stabilise conditions on the ground, although rebuilding the territory’s agricultural sector will take considerably longer. He said the priority going forward is to help re-establish agricultural production in the territory, much of which was destroyed during the conflict, describing the effort as central to restoring long-term food security in the region.
Child Malnutrition and Diet Quality Remain Persistent Challenges
Even with an overall global hunger decline, the report makes clear that hunger is only one part of a much larger nutritional picture. Child malnutrition remains stubbornly high across multiple regions, and anaemia among women has actually worsened in recent years despite broader improvements in food access. At the same time, adult obesity has risen steadily, underscoring a growing double burden in which undernutrition and overnutrition coexist within the same populations, and often within the same countries.
This pattern reinforces a central argument of the UN food security report, which stresses that ending hunger cannot be achieved through calorie availability alone. Diet quality, dietary diversity, and consistent access to nutritious food are equally important, particularly for children and women, who remain disproportionately affected by malnutrition even in regions where headline hunger figures are improving.
Outlook Toward 2030
Looking ahead, the report projects that global hunger will continue to decline through 2030, provided that current trends hold. However, the authors are careful to frame this projection as conditional rather than guaranteed, given the climate and trade risks outlined elsewhere in the report. Sustaining a global hunger decline of this scale will require continued investment in agricultural resilience, stronger regional trade cooperation, and targeted support for the regions, particularly parts of Africa and Western Asia, that continue to lag behind global averages.
The report’s broader message is one of cautious optimism. Three consecutive years of improvement represent genuine progress, and the fact that every continent recorded gains in 2025 is presented as a notable milestone. At the same time, the persistence of food insecurity in Africa, the affordability crisis affecting billions worldwide, and the looming climate and trade risks identified throughout the report all point to a recovery that remains fragile. Whether the global hunger decline can be sustained into the next decade will depend heavily on how governments and international institutions respond to these compounding pressures in the years immediately ahead.
Published in SouthAsianDesk, July 22, 2026
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