For three years running, the number of people going hungry around the world has gone down. That is the headline finding of the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report, released July 21. An estimated 645 million people faced hunger in 2025, 14 million fewer than the year before and nearly 43 million fewer than at the 2022 peak.

"These numbers are important because they show that hunger is not inevitable," said FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu.

But the same report shows that progress is at risk, and the next decision that could sustain it lands in Rome in December.

Even with hunger falling, 2.69 billion people, roughly one in three, still could not afford a healthy diet last year. The cost of that diet keeps climbing, reaching $4.28 a day per person in 2025, up from $3.44 in 2021.

The picture is sharpest in Africa, where 309 million people are undernourished and 20% of the population faces hunger — the highest rate of any region in the world. More than half the continent experienced moderate or severe food insecurity last year.

The report’s own projection for the end of the decade is sobering. Given current trends, around 512 million people could still be undernourished by 2030, the year the world promised to end hunger altogether.

Three pressures are converging on these fears.

The first is conflict. Ongoing conflict in the Middle East is pushing up fuel, fertilizer, and transport costs, and those costs ripple through global food systems. SOFI’s forecasting accounts for this shock, estimating that millions more people could be facing hunger by the end of the decade than earlier projections suggested.

The second is the consequences of climate change. One example is the emergence of stronger El Niños, with a historically torrential one already forming this year. This climate pattern warms surface waters in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, weakens trade winds, and disrupts weather around the world, often bringing heavier rainfall to some regions, drought to others, and reducing agricultural yields.

Read the full article about global hunger decreasing by Jana Curanovic at Global Citizen.