The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2025

Publisher: Five UN agencies: FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO
Tracks: SDG 2 (Zero Hunger): targets 2.1 (hunger, food insecurity) and 2.2 (malnutrition)
This year’s theme: High food price inflation and what it did to diets
Related: Acute crises are tracked separately in the Global Report on Food Crises; see also the SDG Report 2026

SOFI is the official scorecard for SDG 2. The 2025 edition brings a rare piece of good news, world hunger ticked down, alongside a sobering one: a healthy diet is still beyond the reach of 2.6 billion people, and the world is a long way behind the 2030 goal of zero hunger.

The numbers

Hunger eased slightly. An estimated 8.2% of the world faced hunger in 2024 (about 673 million people), down from 8.5% in 2023.
But food insecurity is vast. Around 2.3 billion people were moderately or severely food insecure in 2024, 683 million more than in 2015, when the 2030 Agenda began.
Healthy diets are unaffordable for billions. The cost of a healthy diet rose to $4.46 (PPP) per person per day; 2.6 billion people could not afford one, more than a billion of them in Africa.
The 2030 outlook is bleak. On current trends, 512 million people would still be chronically undernourished in 2030, nearly 60% of them in Africa.
Nutrition is mixed. Child stunting fell from 26.4% (2012) to 23.2% (2024), but only 34% of young children and 65% of women meet minimum dietary diversity, and adult obesity and anaemia are rising.
The theme: prices. Median global food price inflation surged from 2.3% (late 2020) to 13.6% (early 2023), peaking near 30% in low-income countries. A 10% rise in food prices is associated with a 2.7 to 4.3% rise in child wasting.

SOFI 2025 (executive summary): “As 2030 nears, the world is significantly behind on achieving Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG 2) — end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture — with setbacks worsened by extreme weather events, the COVID-19 pandemic, food price surges, and geopolitical disruptions such as the war in Ukraine.”

The counting angle

This year’s numbers carry a measurement story SDGCounting watches closely: new survey data from India led the agencies to revise global hunger and unaffordability estimates downward. A large share of the apparent improvement is better data, not only a better world. It is a clean example of why the count itself matters: when one country’s statistics improve, the global picture moves, which is a reason to invest in measurement and a caution against reading small year-on-year shifts as trends.

Our read: Hunger is drifting down from its pandemic peak but sits well above 2015, and affordability is the real front line. The gap between “enough calories” and “a healthy diet” is where SDG 2 is being lost, and it is widening fastest in Africa.

Watch & read

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2025, the full report (FAO and partners).
The SDG Report 2026, which draws on these figures for SDG 2.

Figures are as reported by the five publishing agencies; 2024 is the latest reference year.