Despite rising food production, global hunger continues to worsen, with 152 million more people facing hunger in 2023 compared to pre-pandemic levels in 2019, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)’s statistical yearbook released on November 18, 2024.
The alarming trend underscores the mounting challenge of achieving UN-mandated Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 of Zero Hunger by 2030 — a deadline just six years away. FAO’s State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report released in July 2024 had underscored the same challenge, finding that between 713 and 757 million people may have faced hunger in 2023.
Hunger affected 9.1 per cent of the world population in 2023, which is far above the 7.5 per cent estimated for 2019, the report said.
The global level of the prevalence of undernourishment (PoU), which had increased sharply in 2020 and more slowly in 2021, persisted at nearly the same level from 2021 to 2023. The PoU was the highest in Africa, followed by Asia.
Even though the number of people facing hunger in Asia declined by two million between 2022 and 2023, it still went up 79 million between 2019 and 2023 to 385 million.
Asia was home to 52 per cent of the world’s undernourished people, one of the reasons being its large population base.
This increase in food insecurity was reported at a time when global food production has been on the rise. The global production of primary crops reached 9.6 billion tonnes in 2022, an increase of 56 per cent compared to 2000. Staple crops such as sugar cane, maize, wheat and rice together account for nearly half of this production.
Similarly, meat production increased by 55 per cent from 2000 to 2022, with chicken accounting for the largest share of this rise. In 2022, 361 million tonnes of meat were produced globally, with chicken surpassing pork as the most produced meat.
These trends indicated that hunger or persistent food insecurity was not a problem of production but a problem of access, affordability and prevailing inequality.
At the same time, obesity rates were also rising, particularly in high-income regions. Over 25 per cent of adults in the Americas, Europe and Oceania were obese, reflecting the global challenge of ensuring access to healthy, nutritious food.