In 2025, 266 million people across 47 countries faced high acute food insecurity, close to a quarter of the population analyzed. For the first time in the report’s ten-year history, two famines were confirmed in one year, in parts of the Gaza Strip and Sudan. The report’s framing is that this is no longer a run of separate emergencies but a structural condition.
The headline
Acute hunger has roughly doubled over the past decade. Beyond the two confirmed famines, 39 million people were at emergency level across 32 countries, and the number in catastrophic hunger ran about nine times higher than in 2016. On the human toll: 35.5 million children were acutely malnourished, nearly 10 million of them severely, and more than 85 million people were forcibly displaced within food-crisis contexts. Ten countries, among them Sudan, South Sudan, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and Yemen, accounted for about two-thirds of global acute hunger.
The counting story
The report’s authority rests on its method. It is built on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) and West Africa’s Cadre Harmonisé, a phased, consensus classification agreed across the network’s partners rather than a single agency’s estimate. That rigor comes with a stated limit that matters for how the number is read: 18 countries and territories lacked comparable 2025 data, including Burkina Faso and Ethiopia, so the 266 million figure is best understood as a floor. Where the data is thinnest, the need is often greatest, which is the measurement problem SDGCounting keeps returning to.
Why it matters
This is the sharpest data point behind SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), and food systems sit at the top of the priority areas named in the UN’s own SDG stocktake. The report attributes the crisis primarily to conflict, compounded by economic shocks and climate extremes, which is why its authors treat it as structural rather than cyclical. It is a companion read to the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, which tracks chronic hunger, where this report tracks the acute end.
Watch & read
- Global Report on Food Crises 2026, the full report (Global Network Against Food Crises).
- State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, the companion brief on chronic hunger (SDG 2).
Figures are drawn from the report as published. The 266 million figure excludes 18 countries and territories that lacked comparable 2025 data and is treated by the authors as a lower bound.