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World Health

Nutrition and Food Security

Global hunger, food systems, and the international effort to achieve Zero Hunger by 2030.

Food security is the condition in which all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. Nutrition is the related science and public-health discipline concerned with how the nutrients in food support human growth, development, and disease prevention. Together, these two fields describe one of the oldest and most persistent challenges of human civilization, and despite remarkable agricultural and medical progress across the twentieth century, they remain central concerns of governments, international agencies, and households around the world.

Overview

At the global scale, nutrition and food security are shaped by an intricate system of farms, fisheries, markets, trade routes, storage infrastructure, household budgets, cultural preferences, and public programs. A shortfall at any link in this chain can translate into hunger, malnutrition, and in extreme cases famine. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which became a specialized agency of the United Nations in 1945, provides the most widely used working definitions and statistical measures in the field, anchored by the Four Pillars framework of availability, access, utilization, and stability.

Recent decades have delivered both remarkable progress and sobering setbacks. Global child stunting, the classic indicator of chronic undernutrition, has fallen sharply since the 1990s. At the same time, conflict, climate shocks, rising food and fuel prices, and the economic aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic have pushed the number of undernourished people back upward. The 2023 edition of the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report from the Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that roughly 735 million people faced chronic hunger, a level still well above pre-pandemic figures and far from the trajectory needed to meet Sustainable Development Goal 2, Zero Hunger, by 2030.

Modern nutrition policy has also expanded well beyond preventing hunger. Public health authorities now speak of a double burden of malnutrition, in which undernutrition and micronutrient deficiencies coexist within the same countries, and sometimes the same households, as rising rates of overweight, obesity, and diet-related noncommunicable diseases such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Addressing this full spectrum requires attention not only to calories but to dietary quality, food safety, breastfeeding practices, food fortification, and the broader systems that shape what people eat.

The international response to hunger and malnutrition is coordinated principally by the Rome-based agencies of the United Nations — the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Programme, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development — supported by the nutrition divisions of the United Nations Children's Fund and the World Health Organization, the financing of the World Bank, and the bilateral aid programs of major donor governments. Together these institutions maintain an architecture of surveillance systems, emergency response mechanisms, and long-term development programs that has saved many millions of lives, even as the global challenge continues to evolve.

Key Facts

People facing hunger: Approximately 735 million undernourished worldwide (FAO SOFI 2023 estimate), roughly 9.2 percent of the global population
Moderate or severe food insecurity: Approximately 2.4 billion people lacked regular access to adequate food in 2022 (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, WHO joint report)
Child stunting (under age 5): Approximately 148 million children stunted (about 22 percent of under-fives), per UNICEF / WHO / World Bank Joint Child Malnutrition Estimates
Child wasting: Approximately 45 million children under five are wasted, with about 13.7 million suffering severe wasting and at greatly elevated risk of death
Childhood overweight: Approximately 37 million children under five are overweight; numbers are rising across all income groups
Adult obesity: More than 1 billion adults live with obesity (WHO estimate), roughly one in eight people worldwide
IPC Phase 3 or above: More than two dozen countries regularly carry populations in IPC Phase 3 (Crisis) or worse; the exact roster shifts with each reporting cycle
Sustainable Development Goal: SDG 2, Zero Hunger, with a target year of 2030; adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015
Lead United Nations agencies: FAO, WFP, and IFAD (all headquartered in Rome), with UNICEF and WHO leading on nutrition
WFP Nobel Peace Prize: Awarded to the World Food Programme in 2020 for its efforts to combat hunger and prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war

Defining Food Security

The most widely used definition of food security was agreed at the 1996 World Food Summit and remains the working standard of the Food and Agriculture Organization: food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. The definition is built on four interlocking pillars that, together, describe what a food-secure household or country looks like in practice.

The first pillar, availability, refers to the physical presence of food. A country or region may produce enough calories domestically, import them through trade, or receive them as aid, but the aggregate supply must exist. The second pillar, access, covers the economic and physical capacity of households to obtain food. A country can be awash in food at the national level while poor families cannot afford it, so measures of income, employment, market functioning, and transport infrastructure are central. The third pillar, utilization, describes the biological dimension: whether a diet provides the energy, protein, and micronutrients people need, and whether clean water, sanitation, and health services allow those nutrients to be properly absorbed. The fourth pillar, stability, recognizes that food security is dynamic. A household may be secure today and insecure tomorrow after a drought, a job loss, or a political crisis, so resilience over time is as important as conditions on any given day.

For emergency response, food security specialists also use the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, a common scale developed by a consortium of United Nations agencies, non-governmental organizations, and governments. In the Sahel, a parallel system known as the Cadre Harmonisé produces comparable results. Both systems sort populations into five phases: Phase 1, Minimal or None; Phase 2, Stressed; Phase 3, Crisis; Phase 4, Emergency; and Phase 5, Famine. A formal declaration of Phase 5 famine is rare and requires evidence that at least twenty percent of households face extreme food shortages, that global acute malnutrition exceeds thirty percent, and that two adults or four children per ten thousand are dying each day from hunger-related causes. The IPC framework gives donors and governments a shared language for triggering emergency response and is updated for affected countries on a regular cycle.

FSA clients preparing greens for canning at Southeast Missouri Farms, a Depression-era food preservation program — Farm Security Administration clients preparing greens for canning at the Southeast Missouri Farms project. Home-preservation programs of the 1930s were early examples of household-level efforts to improve both availability and stability of food supplies during economic crisis.

Hunger and Undernutrition

Hunger in the technical sense refers to an uncomfortable or painful sensation caused by insufficient food, while undernourishment describes a chronic state in which an individual habitually consumes fewer calories than their body requires. Undernutrition is the broader category that includes insufficient energy, insufficient protein, and insufficient intake of essential vitamins and minerals. Undernutrition is most damaging in the first one thousand days of life, from conception through a child's second birthday, a period in which deficits in growth and cognitive development can become permanent.

Child undernutrition is usually measured by three indicators. Stunting, or low height for age, reflects chronic undernutrition over months or years and is associated with reduced adult height, lower educational attainment, and weaker economic productivity. Wasting, or low weight for height, reflects acute recent food deprivation and carries a sharply elevated risk of death. Underweight, or low weight for age, captures a mix of the two. Severe wasting was historically described in the clinical literature through two dramatic forms, marasmus, characterized by extreme thinness, and kwashiorkor, characterized by edema and often linked to very low protein intake, but modern practice treats acute malnutrition as a continuum managed with ready-to-use therapeutic food and integrated health services.

Layered on top of energy and protein shortfalls is a second category known as hidden hunger, or micronutrient deficiency. Iron deficiency causes anemia, which reduces work capacity and increases maternal mortality. Iodine deficiency was historically a major cause of goiter and cognitive impairment before universal salt iodization. Vitamin A deficiency remains a leading cause of preventable childhood blindness and is linked to elevated infection risk. Zinc deficiency contributes to diarrhea and impaired immunity. Folate deficiency in early pregnancy increases the risk of neural tube defects. Global estimates suggest that several billion people consume diets that are deficient in one or more of these micronutrients, even when caloric intake appears adequate, which is why dietary quality and food fortification sit at the center of modern nutrition policy.

The Double Burden of Malnutrition

A generation ago, nutrition policy in low- and middle-income countries was dominated by the fight against hunger and undernutrition, while overweight and obesity were considered problems of wealthy societies. That clean division no longer holds. Today many countries contend with a double burden of malnutrition, in which large numbers of children remain stunted or wasted even as rates of overweight, obesity, and diet-related chronic disease rise among adults and, increasingly, among children as well. This shift reflects rapid urbanization, rising incomes, the spread of processed and ultra-processed foods, cheaper vegetable oils and sugars, and the displacement of traditional diets based on whole grains, legumes, vegetables, and fresh produce.

The consequences show up in public-health statistics for noncommunicable diseases, or NCDs. Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, several forms of cancer, and fatty liver disease are all strongly linked to poor dietary patterns, and the World Health Organization has identified unhealthy diets as one of the leading modifiable risk factors for premature death worldwide. Childhood overweight, once rare outside wealthy countries, has risen steadily in most regions, setting children on an earlier path toward adult disease. The global increase in obesity has not spared low-income countries, where the same households can contain a stunted child, an overweight mother, and grandparents with diet-related chronic illness.

Policy responses to the double burden focus on making healthy diets more affordable, protecting breastfeeding, regulating the marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages to children, taxing sugar-sweetened beverages in some jurisdictions, and building nutrition standards into school meals and public procurement. The Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization jointly declared the 2016 to 2025 period the Decade of Action on Nutrition, which was followed by subsequent national commitments under the Nutrition for Growth process. The underlying argument is that good nutrition is not a matter of eating more or eating less but of eating better across the life course.

Staple Foods Globally

Most of the world's caloric intake comes from a surprisingly small number of staple crops. Each has its own geography of cultivation, its own culinary traditions, and its own vulnerabilities. The following staples anchor the diets of different regions of the world.

Rice

Rice is the primary staple across most of East, Southeast, and South Asia, and is a major staple in parts of West Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. It feeds more people than any other single crop and is produced overwhelmingly by smallholder farmers on flooded paddy systems.

• Dominant across Asia (China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam)
• Sensitive to water availability and temperature
• Highly vulnerable to flooding, drought, and salinity

Wheat

Wheat is a staple in temperate climates across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Central and South Asia, the Americas, and parts of China. It is heavily traded internationally, and disruptions in major exporters such as Russia, Ukraine, Canada, and the United States can ripple through import-dependent countries.

• Staple for bread, pasta, noodles, flatbreads, couscous
• Major export commodity on global markets
• Vulnerable to heat stress at flowering

Maize

Maize, or corn, is native to the Americas and is the dominant staple across much of Eastern and Southern Africa and Central America. Globally, a large share of maize production goes to animal feed and industrial uses, but as a direct food crop it supports tens of millions of smallholder households.

• Nshima, ugali, sadza, tortillas, polenta
• Major feed crop for poultry, pork, dairy
• Susceptible to drought and fall armyworm

Cassava

Cassava, also called manioc or yuca, is a drought-tolerant root crop introduced to Africa from South America during the Columbian Exchange. It is now a critical staple across much of Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America, valued because it grows on marginal soils and can be left in the ground as a living store.

• Fufu, gari, tapioca, farinha
• Low in protein and micronutrients
• Requires processing to remove cyanogenic compounds

Potato

The potato was domesticated in the Andes and became a staple across Europe after the sixteenth century. It remains central to the diets of the Andean highlands and is a major crop in temperate regions of Europe, North America, and East Asia. The potato's collapse as a monoculture crop was the immediate trigger of the Irish Famine of 1845 to 1849.

• Efficient producer of calories per hectare
• Vulnerable to late blight (Phytophthora infestans)
• Andean region cultivates thousands of varieties

Sorghum and Millet

Sorghum and the various millets, including pearl millet and finger millet, are drought-tolerant grains that have been staples of the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and dryland zones of South Asia for thousands of years. They tolerate heat and poor soils better than maize or wheat and are receiving renewed attention as climate-resilient crops.

• Staples in Sahelian West and East Africa
• 2023 was the International Year of Millets (FAO)
• Important in rainfed agro-ecologies

Plantain and Banana

Cooking bananas and plantains are a primary staple in humid tropical regions of Central and East Africa, the Caribbean, and parts of Latin America and Southeast Asia. Some national diets, notably that of Uganda with matooke, are built around them. They are vulnerable to fungal diseases such as Panama disease and banana bunchy top virus.

• Matooke, fufu, mofongo, patacones
• Perennial crop, harvested year-round
• Highly dependent on a few commercial cultivars

Teff and Other Regional Grains

Teff, a tiny ancient grain, is central to the cuisine of Ethiopia and Eritrea, where it is used to make the spongy flatbread injera. Other regionally important grains include fonio in West Africa, quinoa and amaranth in the Andes, and buckwheat in parts of Asia. These crops carry significant cultural weight and often provide valuable nutritional profiles.

• Teff is high in iron and calcium
• Quinoa provides complete protein
• Many are climate-resilient heritage crops

Food Systems and Supply Chains

A food system is the full chain of activities that connects land, water, and labor to the food on household plates. It includes the farms and fisheries that produce food, the companies and cooperatives that process and package it, the merchants and traders who move it across borders, the retailers who sell it, and the households that prepare and consume it. Modern food systems span every scale from a family garden to globally integrated agribusiness and must deliver on overlapping goals of nutrition, livelihoods, environmental sustainability, and resilience.

A striking share of the world's food still comes from smallholder farms. The International Fund for Agricultural Development estimates that small farms, typically under two hectares, produce a substantial portion of food consumed in low- and middle-income countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Smallholder agriculture is labor-intensive, sensitive to weather, and often dependent on rainfed cultivation, which is why climate shocks translate quickly into rural food insecurity. Commercial and large-scale agriculture, by contrast, dominates production in the Americas, Europe, and Oceania and supplies much of the international grain trade. These trade flows are linked through the forests, rivers, and ports described in our global pages on forests and rainforests and world rivers and lakes, which in turn connect to the global shipping lanes of the world's oceans and seas.

Fisheries and aquaculture provide a major share of animal protein worldwide and are particularly important in coastal and island countries. Capture fisheries depend on the health of marine and freshwater ecosystems, while aquaculture, now the faster-growing source of fish, depends on feed, water, and responsible management. Pastoralism, in which communities derive livelihoods from herds of cattle, sheep, goats, camels, and yaks, is central to arid regions across the Sahel, East Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Andes. Each of these systems has its own vulnerabilities and its own strengths.

Smallholder Agriculture

Family farms of a few hectares or less remain the backbone of food production in much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, producing a large share of the food consumed in low- and middle-income countries.

Commercial Farming

Large mechanized operations in the Americas, Europe, and Oceania dominate global exports of wheat, maize, soybeans, and meat, linking distant producers to consumers through international markets.

Fisheries and Aquaculture

Wild-capture fisheries and farmed fish together supply a major share of the world's animal protein, with especially high dietary importance in small island states and coastal communities.

Pastoralism

Nomadic and transhumant herding turns grasslands, steppes, and dryland rangelands into milk, meat, and livelihoods across the Sahel, East Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, Mongolia, and the Andes.

Post-Harvest Losses

In many low-income settings, a substantial fraction of food produced is lost between the farm gate and the consumer because of poor storage, transport, and cold-chain infrastructure, representing a major target for nutrition gains.

Global Trade

A relatively small number of countries supply the bulk of internationally traded grains, oilseeds, and fertilizers, which makes import-dependent countries vulnerable to export restrictions and shipping disruptions.

Food distribution in Chicago, Illinois, June to July 1941 — Depression-era nutrition assistance — Food distribution in Chicago, Illinois, 1941. Public food-aid programs have a long history in high-income countries and provide an important template for the emergency and safety-net programs still operated by national governments and multilateral agencies around the world.

Drivers of Food Insecurity

The annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report identifies a recurring set of drivers that push people into hunger. Conflict has overtaken other factors as the single largest driver of acute food insecurity in recent years. Armed conflict disrupts farming, damages infrastructure, forces displacement, destroys markets, and often deliberately restricts the movement of food. The World Food Programme estimates that a majority of people in IPC Phase 3 or worse live in countries affected by conflict or fragile governance, a pattern visible in recent crises in Sudan, Yemen, the Sahel, and Ukraine.

Weather and climate shocks are the second major driver. Droughts, floods, tropical cyclones, heat waves, and the reach of diseases and pests such as desert locusts or fall armyworm can erase harvests across entire regions. Climate change, treated at length in our page on natural disasters, increases the frequency and severity of these events and threatens the long-term viability of some traditional farming systems. Small island states, low-lying delta regions, and semi-arid zones are among the most exposed.

Economic shocks are the third major driver. A spike in the price of imported grains or fertilizers, a currency devaluation, a sudden loss of employment, or a recession can rapidly push poor households from adequate food access into crisis, particularly in countries that rely heavily on food imports or remittances. The COVID-19 pandemic, the spike in energy and food prices that followed it, and the debt pressures on many low-income economies combined in the early 2020s to push global hunger sharply upward, reversing years of gains. Displacement is both a consequence and an amplifier of these drivers: refugees and internally displaced people have lost access to their farms, livestock, and jobs, and typically depend on emergency food assistance for extended periods.

Underlying all of these drivers is structural poverty. Even in calm years, hundreds of millions of people live close to a subsistence line where a single adverse event — a lost harvest, an illness, a funeral, a school fee, a child born — forces a choice between food quantity and food quality. Many of these structural pressures are inherited from a long history of unequal economic development and colonial-era land tenure, a story sketched in our page on decolonization. Long-term improvements in food security are therefore inseparable from broader progress on income, education, health, and governance.

Historical Famines

Famine, the most extreme form of food insecurity, has accompanied human societies throughout recorded history. The modern era brought both the logistical capacity to feed billions and the political capacity to cause catastrophic starvation. A selective list of twentieth- and twenty-first-century famines illustrates how different the causes can be.

1845–1849
Great Irish Famine

Potato late blight destroyed successive harvests in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom. Roughly one million people died and another million emigrated, reshaping Ireland's demography for generations.
1921–1922
Soviet Famine of 1921–1922

Following the Russian Civil War, a severe drought along the Volga combined with collapsed markets killed an estimated five million people. The American Relief Administration led one of the first large-scale international food relief operations.
1932–1933
Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine

A man-made famine during forced agricultural collectivization in the Soviet Union killed several million people, heavily concentrated in Soviet Ukraine. Ukraine and many other states recognize the Holodomor as a genocide of the Ukrainian people.
1943–1944
Bengal Famine

Wartime rice shortages, cyclone damage, inflation, and British colonial policy converged in Bengal during World War II. An estimated two to three million people died, and the economist Amartya Sen later drew on the episode to reshape modern famine theory.
1959–1961
Great Chinese Famine

The Great Leap Forward's radical agricultural collectivization, combined with inflated local reports and poor weather, produced what is widely regarded as the deadliest famine of the twentieth century. Credible scholarly estimates range from roughly fifteen to forty-five million excess deaths.
1983–1985
Ethiopian Famine

Drought, civil war, and a government response that restricted aid produced a humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia that killed hundreds of thousands of people and triggered one of the largest global charity mobilizations of the twentieth century, including the Live Aid concerts in 1985.
2011
Somalia Famine

A severe Horn of Africa drought combined with armed conflict to produce a formal IPC Phase 5 famine declaration in parts of southern Somalia. A quarter of a million people are estimated to have died, the majority of them children, before humanitarian access expanded in 2012.
2017–present
Recent Emergencies

Localized famine or famine-like conditions have been reported in recent years in parts of South Sudan, Yemen, northeast Nigeria, Tigray in northern Ethiopia, and Sudan, driven primarily by conflict and constraints on humanitarian access. The Gaza Strip has also seen formal IPC warnings of catastrophic food insecurity.

UNRRA refugee camp at El Shatt for displaced Yugoslavs during World War II — food and supply distribution — The El Shatt refugee camp in Egypt operated by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration during World War II. UNRRA, founded in 1943, was a direct institutional predecessor of today's multilateral food-assistance architecture, including the World Food Programme.

Global Response Architecture

The international response to hunger and malnutrition rests on a network of United Nations agencies, international financial institutions, and bilateral donor programs, complemented by civil-society organizations and national governments. The three agencies headquartered in Rome are sometimes called the Rome-based triumvirate and coordinate much of the food-related work of the United Nations system. The Food and Agriculture Organization, founded in 1945, focuses on agricultural development, fisheries, forestry, global food data, and normative standards such as the Codex Alimentarius food-safety framework. The World Food Programme, established in 1961 and recipient of the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize, is the world's largest humanitarian organization specializing in emergency food assistance, school meals, and logistics in crisis settings. The International Fund for Agricultural Development, a specialized financial institution also founded in the 1970s, channels long-term finance into smallholder agriculture and rural livelihoods.

Outside the Rome-based agencies, the United Nations Children's Fund leads much of the world's work on child nutrition, including treatment of severe acute malnutrition, breastfeeding promotion, and the joint reporting of child growth data with the World Health Organization and the World Bank. The World Health Organization leads on nutrition from a public-health perspective, issuing global guidelines on infant and young child feeding, obesity prevention, and dietary guidelines for populations. The World Bank and regional development banks finance large agriculture, rural development, and social-protection programs, and bilateral donors such as the United States Agency for International Development, the United Kingdom's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the European Commission, and many others fund complementary country-level work.

Global targets give this architecture a shared reference point. Sustainable Development Goal 2, agreed by United Nations Member States in 2015, commits the world to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture by 2030. Specific child-nutrition targets, agreed by the World Health Assembly in 2012 and extended to 2030, commit governments to reduce stunting, wasting, anemia in women of reproductive age, and low birthweight, and to halt the rise in childhood overweight and exclusive-breastfeeding declines. Progress has been uneven, and in recent reporting cycles many indicators have slipped off-track, but the targets continue to anchor policy and accountability around the world.

Nutrition Interventions That Work

Decades of research, compiled most prominently in the Lancet series on maternal and child nutrition, have identified a relatively short list of high-impact interventions. When implemented at scale, they reliably reduce mortality, stunting, and micronutrient deficiencies. The following are among the most established.

Exclusive Breastfeeding (0–6 Months)

The World Health Organization recommends exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of life, with continued breastfeeding alongside appropriate complementary foods up to age two and beyond. It provides complete nutrition, immune protection, and reductions in infant mortality at very low cost.

Complementary Feeding

From six months onward, infants need nutrient-dense complementary foods alongside breastmilk. Programs focus on dietary diversity, responsive feeding, and age-appropriate textures to support growth through the critical first one thousand days.

Community Management of Acute Malnutrition

The CMAM approach treats severe acute malnutrition at the community level using ready-to-use therapeutic foods, which allow children to recover at home rather than in hospital. It has transformed survival rates in emergencies since its widespread adoption in the 2000s.

School Feeding Programs

School meals improve child nutrition, raise attendance, and transfer income to poor families. The World Food Programme and national governments operate school-feeding programs in more than one hundred countries, making them one of the largest social-protection interventions in the world.

Salt Iodization

Universal salt iodization, promoted globally since the early 1990s, has dramatically reduced iodine deficiency and associated goiter and cognitive impairment. It is one of the most cost-effective public-health interventions ever deployed.

Flour and Staple Fortification

Wheat and maize flour fortified with iron, folic acid, zinc, and B vitamins, along with rice fortification in South and Southeast Asia, delivers micronutrients without requiring behavior change. Folic acid fortification has reduced neural tube defects in many countries.

Vitamin A Supplementation

Twice-yearly high-dose vitamin A supplementation for children in high-risk countries reduces child mortality and prevents vitamin A deficiency blindness. Integrating it with child-health days and vaccination campaigns has been a cornerstone of UNICEF nutrition strategy for decades.

Iron and Folic Acid for Women

Supplementation of iron and folic acid for pregnant women and adolescent girls reduces anemia, supports healthy pregnancies, and prevents some birth defects. It is included in the World Health Organization's recommended package of antenatal care.

Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene

Diarrheal disease and environmental enteropathy severely impair the absorption of nutrients. Clean water, safe sanitation, and handwashing are nutrition interventions in their own right and are particularly critical during emergencies to prevent conditions similar to those seen during historical pandemics.

Cash and Voucher Assistance

Where markets are functioning, cash transfers and food vouchers allow households to choose what to eat, support local traders, and deliver aid efficiently. Cash and voucher modalities now represent a large share of World Food Programme assistance globally.

Current Food Insecurity Hotspots

The World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization publish periodic Hunger Hotspots bulletins listing countries of highest concern. The composition shifts from cycle to cycle, but in recent reporting the following have repeatedly appeared as the most severe crises. Country profiles are linked where available.

Cambodian farmer carrying rice harvest through a paddy field — A farmer carries the rice harvest through a paddy field in Cambodia. Rice, grown largely by smallholder farmers, is the single most important staple for food security across Asia and is deeply tied to the region's monsoon climate and river systems.

Sudan

Large-scale displacement and collapsed markets from civil conflict have driven one of the world's most severe current food crises.

Yemen

Years of armed conflict, economic collapse, and port restrictions have left millions in IPC Phase 3 or worse.

Haiti

Gang violence, political paralysis, and repeated disasters have pushed a substantial share of the population into acute food insecurity.

Afghanistan

Drought, economic collapse after 2021, and restrictions on women's work have combined to produce persistent widespread hunger.

DR Congo

Armed conflict in the east, displacement, and chronic poverty have produced one of the largest food-insecure populations in Africa.

Ethiopia

Recovery from the Tigray conflict, recurring droughts in the south and east, and regional instability keep Ethiopia on hotspot lists.

South Sudan

Flooding, local conflict, economic pressure, and returnees from Sudan have kept a high share of the population in acute food insecurity.

Syria

More than a decade of conflict, economic collapse, and displacement have left a majority of Syrians food-insecure.

Somalia

Recurrent drought in the Horn of Africa, conflict, and weak rural markets continue to produce acute needs even after the 2022–2023 drought.

Myanmar

Civil conflict since 2021 and economic contraction have pushed food insecurity to levels unseen in Myanmar in decades.

Burkina Faso

Armed-group activity across the central Sahel has displaced populations and disrupted farming and markets in Burkina Faso.

Mali

Mali faces the same conflict-plus-climate pressures as its Sahel neighbors, with Cadre Harmonisé cycles reporting widespread acute needs.

Niger

Rapid population growth, limited arable land, and cross-border insecurity keep Niger consistently among the countries with severe acute needs.

Nigeria

Northeastern Nigeria has seen acute food insecurity linked to the ongoing insurgency in the Lake Chad basin; food prices and inflation amplify national needs.

Madagascar

The semi-arid south of Madagascar has experienced repeated droughts, which the World Food Programme has linked publicly to broader climate pressures.

Lebanon

A deep economic crisis since 2019 combined with regional instability has sharply raised food insecurity among Lebanese citizens and Syrian refugees alike.

The WFP HungerMap LIVE platform visualizes these and other hotspots in near real time using household surveys, food-price data, and remote-sensing inputs. Country-specific IPC and Cadre Harmonisé reports are the authoritative source for acute food-security classification at the subnational level.

Sources

Detailed citations, data references, and institutional sources for all CountryReports content are listed on the Sources page. The following United Nations agencies, international financial institutions, government statistical bodies, and peer-reviewed outlets are the primary authorities we rely on for nutrition and food-security content.

United Nations Agencies and Multilateral Bodies

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) — The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report, FAOSTAT database, Codex Alimentarius, and the Four Pillars framework.
World Food Programme (WFP) — Operational food assistance, HungerMap LIVE, Hunger Hotspots bulletins, and the WFP annual report. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020.
International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) — Rural Development Report, smallholder investment, and the Rome-based agencies' coordinated work on food systems.
United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) — Nutrition — Child nutrition data, State of the World's Children reports, and joint child malnutrition estimates with WHO and the World Bank.
World Health Organization (WHO) — Nutrition — Global nutrition targets, guidelines on infant and young child feeding, dietary recommendations, and the Global Database on Body Mass Index.
Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) — Standardized classification system for acute and chronic food insecurity and acute malnutrition. The Cadre Harmonisé produces comparable analyses for West Africa and the Sahel.
United Nations — Sustainable Development Goal 2 (Zero Hunger) — Official SDG 2 targets, indicators, and annual progress reporting.

International Financial Institutions and Government Data

World Bank — Food Security — Food Security Update bulletins, agricultural financing, and the World Bank's role in joint child-malnutrition estimates.
USDA Economic Research Service — Food Security in the U.S. — United States Department of Agriculture data on domestic household food security and international food-security assessments.
Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) — A United States Agency for International Development-funded network producing food-security analyses and early warning for more than thirty countries.

Research Institutions and Peer-Reviewed Outlets

Global Hunger Index — Annual peer-reviewed composite index produced by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Concern Worldwide, and Welthungerhilfe.
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) — CGIAR research center focused on agriculture, nutrition, and food-policy research.
Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) — Non-profit partner organization focused on large-scale food fortification and nutrition programming.

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