Global levels of acute food insecurity have risen for the sixth consecutive year, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said on Friday.
More than 295 million people faced life threatening food deprivation in 2024, nearly 14 million more than the year before, according to the latest annual Global Report on Food Crises.
António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, called the report’s findings “another unflinching indictment of a world dangerously off course”.
“Hunger is not an emergency confined to certain pockets of the world or periods of time. It is fast becoming a scar etched into the lives of millions around the globe,” he said.
The report found that the number of people facing famine or “catastrophic” levels of hunger more than doubled between 2023 and 2024.
Almost two million people in five countries or territories faced famine conditions in 2024, over 95 per cent of them in the Gaza Strip and Sudan.
Conflict and insecurity remain the leading causes of acute food insecurity and were the primary driver of worsening hunger in Nigeria, Sudan and Myanmar.
Extreme weather – notably widespread flooding fuelled by the El Niño weather phenomenon across Africa – and economic upheaval, also wreaked havoc on global food security by decimating harvests and crippling supply chains.
Despite the overall deterioration, the report showed that the food security situation actually improved in 15 of the 63 surveyed countries.
In Afghanistan, for example, more than four million people no longer require urgent international food aid to survive. There were also marked improvements in Guatemala, Kenya and Ukraine.
1705 Number of analysed population in countries/territories facing high levels of acute food insecurity
However, the report projects a bleak picture for the year ahead.
Food prices will be driven up by Donald Trump’s tariff war and a weaker US dollar, with growing currency volatility harming access to food in import-dependent countries, it said.
The unprecedented aid cuts by major donors in early 2025 also spell disaster.
The report estimates that funding for food crises could fall by as much as 45 per cent, with severe consequences for vulnerable populations.
Jean-Michel Grand, Executive Director at Action Against Hunger UK, said: “The international response is failing starving communities.”
“Life-saving treatments are readily available and inexpensive. We have the knowledge and expertise, but it’s our willingness to respond that is lacking,” he told The Telegraph.
1705 Humanitarian allocations to food sectors in food crisis contexts
When President Trump began dismantling the US Agency for International Development (USAID) – long the world’s largest humanitarian funder in food crises – almost half of its nutrition programmes were drained overnight.
The report added that funding constraints will harm humanitarian efforts to monitor and gather data to curtail food crises, which “limits the capacity of organisations to anticipate, identify and respond to humanitarian needs”.
The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET), a UN-backed body activated to verify famine findings produced by technical analysts, is already defunct due to Trump’s order to freeze all foreign aid.
“Long-standing crises are now being compounded by another, more recent one: the dramatic reduction in lifesaving humanitarian funding to respond to these needs,” said Mr Guterres.
“This is more than a failure of systems – it is a failure of humanity. Hunger in the 21st century is indefensible. We cannot respond to empty stomachs with empty hands and turned backs.”
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