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More than 266 million people in 47 countries faced high levels of acute food insecurity in 2025.
Hunger has nearly doubled in a decade, with famines declared in Gaza and parts of Sudan.
Conflict has overtaken extreme weather as the main driver.
Funding cuts and shrinking data coverage threaten effective humanitarian response and obscure true scale of crises.
More than 266 million people — roughly the population of a large country — are facing high levels of acute food insecurity across 47 countries, according to a major new report Global Report on Food Crises 2026 (GRFC 2026) released by an international alliance.
Global acute hunger has nearly doubled over the past decade and shows no sign of retreating. In fact, two famines were declared last year — in Gaza and parts of Sudan — marking the first time in the report’s history that famine was declared in more than one country in the same year.
The scale underscores how deeply entrenched acute food insecurity and malnutrition is, but the crises has increasingly been concentrated in a core group of countries.
The report was released on April 24, 2026 by the United Nations (UN), the European Union, Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, Germany, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, the Government of Ireland, the Group of Seven Plus and governmental and non-governmental agencies working together to address food crises.
In its 10th edition, the report found that 22.9 per cent of the analysed population across 47 countries (about 266 million people) experienced high levels of acute food insecurity in 2025, a marginal increase from 2024.
While the headline figure appears broadly stable, the report cautions that this is largely due to a reduced number of countries assessed this year rather than any meaningful improvement in conditions. The share of people facing acute hunger has remained above 20 per cent since 2020 and is nearly double what it was in 2016.
The crisis was found to be concentrated in certain regions: Just 10 countries — Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Sudan, Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic and Yemen — accounted for two-thirds of all people facing high levels of acute hunger. Afghanistan, South Sudan, Sudan, and Yemen experienced the largest food crisis both in terms of the share and absolute number of people affected.
At the extreme end, 1.4 million people across six countries were classified under 'Catastrophe' category — the most severe form of acute food insecurity phase — representing an increase of more than nine times since 2016. As per the definition by Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN, under this phase, households have an extreme lack of food and/or cannot meet other basic needs even after full employment of coping strategies and starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels are evident.
A further 39 million people in 32 countries were classified as being in ‘Emergency’, the second-most severe category.
Catastrophic food insecurity since 2016
The report showed that nearly half of food-crisis contexts also faced nutrition crisis, reflecting the combined effects of inadequate diets, disease burden and breakdowns in essential services.
In 2025 alone, 35.5 million children were acutely malnourished, including nearly 10 million suffering from severe acute malnutrition. In addition, forced displacement continued to exacerbate food insecurity.
Conflict and insecurity were the primary drivers of acute food insecurity, overtaking extreme weather events, which had long been a leading cause. In 2025, 19 countries where conflict was the primary driver accounted for 56 per cent of the population facing high levels of acute food insecurity, with 147.4 million people affected. This is an increase from 139.8 million in 2024 and more than double the 73.9 million recorded in 2018.
“Conflict remains the primary driver of acute food insecurity and malnutrition for millions around the world, with outright famine emerging in two conflict-affected areas in the same year — an unprecedented development,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres in the foreword to the report.
Meanwhile, the role of weather extremes, while still significant, has relatively diminished. In 2025, 16 countries where extreme weather was the primary driver accounted for 33 per cent of the affected population -- 87.5 million people — down from a peak of 96.6 million in 2024.
The shift is significant. For years, climate shocks such as droughts, floods, and erratic seasons had been the dominant force pushing populations into hunger. That conflict has now surpassed extreme weather as the leading driver reflects the toll of prolonged wars and instability, particularly across parts of Africa and the Middle East, where fighting has simultaneously destroyed livelihoods, disrupted food systems and cut off humanitarian aid access.
Compounding the crises is a sharp decline in the money available to address it. Humanitarian and development financing for food sectors in food crisis contexts has fallen back to levels last seen in 2016-2017, nearly a decade ago, even as acute food insecurity has remained stubbornly high. The funding retreat is already limiting the ability of governments and humanitarian agencies to respond effectively, the report warns.
The 2026 edition of the report features the lowest country coverage in its ten-year history, with 18 countries and territories unable to produce food insecurity data meeting the report’s technical requirements. Five of those countries — Burkina Faso, the Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, and displaced populations in Algeria and Ecuador — had data available last year, representing more than 27 million people facing high levels of acute food insecurity in 2024, but no updated estimates could be produced for 2025.
The consequences are visible in the volume of data collected. The World Food Programme (WFP), one of the principal data providers, conducted 800,000 survey interviews in 2025 — a 30 per cent drop from 1.1 million the previous year — and a further reduction is expected in 2026.
Similarly, the FAO reduced its household survey interviews by around 31 per cent, from roughly 170,000 in 2024 to 118,000 in 2025. Population coverage of food security analyses declined by about 40 per cent in Zambia, 17 per cent in Malawi, and 14 per cent in Guinea.
As a result, the integrity of data systems underpinning the global hunger assessment is increasingly at risk, the report warned, making it harder to see the full scale of a crisis that is already only partially visible.