The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World

About the report

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World is an annual flagship report jointly prepared by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to inform on progress towards ending hunger, achieving food security and improving nutrition and to provide in-depth analysis on key challenges for achieving this goal in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The report targets a wide audience, including policy-makers, international organizations, academic institutions and the general public.

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023

This year, the update to the global assessment of food security and nutrition reflects a particular moment in history. While the pandemic, the ensuing economic rebound, the war in Ukraine, and soaring prices of food, agricultural inputs and energy have all played out differently across regions with differing impacts, new estimates indicate hunger is no longer on the rise at the global level but is still far above pre-COVID-19-pandemic levels and far off track to achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2.

As past editions of this report have highlighted, the intensification of the major drivers of food insecurity and malnutrition – conflict, climate extremes, economic slowdowns and downturns, and growing inequality – often occurring in combination, is challenging our efforts to achieve the SDGs. There is no question these threats will continue, requiring that we remain steadfast to build resilience against them. However, there are still important megatrends that must be fully understood when devising policies to meet the SDG 2 targets.

One such megatrend, and the focus of this year’s report, is urbanization. As urbanization increases, rural and urban areas are becoming more intertwined, and the spatial distinction between them is becoming more fluid. The changing pattern of population agglomerations across this rural–urban continuum is driving changes throughout agrifood systems, creating both challenges and opportunities to ensure everyone has access to affordable healthy diets.

After presenting the latest updates of the food security and nutrition situation around the world, the report then examines the drivers, patterns and dynamics of urbanization through a rural–urban continuum lens and presents new analysis on how urbanization is changing food supply and demand across the rural–urban continuum. Complementing this, further analyses for selected countries explore differences in the cost and affordability of a healthy diet, and in food insecurity and different forms of malnutrition across the rural–urban continuum.

Building on these insights, the report identifies policies, investments and new technologies to address the challenges, and capitalize on the opportunities, that urbanization brings for ensuring access to affordable healthy diets for everyone, across the rural–urban continuum.

Key messages

1. Global hunger, measured by the prevalence of undernourishment (Sustainable Development Goal [SDG] Indicator 2.1.1), remained relatively unchanged from 2021 to 2022 but is still far above pre-COVID-19-pandemic levels, affecting around 9.2 percent of the world population in 2022 compared with 7.9 percent in 2019.
2. It is estimated that between 691 and 783 million people in the world faced hunger in 2022. Considering the midrange (about 735 million), 122 million more people faced hunger in 2022 than in 2019, before the global pandemic.
3. From 2021 to 2022, progress was made towards reducing hunger in Asia and in Latin America, but hunger is still on the rise in Western Asia, the Caribbean and all subregions of Africa.
4. It is projected that almost 600 million people will be chronically undernourished in 2030. This is about 119 million more than in a scenario in which neither the pandemic nor the war in Ukraine had occurred, and around 23 million more than if the war in Ukraine had not happened. This points to the immense challenge of achieving the SDG target to eradicate hunger, particularly in Africa.
5. The prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity at the global level (SDG Indicator 2.1.2) remained unchanged for the second year in a row after increasing sharply from 2019 to 2020. About 29.6 percent of the global population – 2.4 billion people – were moderately or severely food insecure in 2022, of which about 900 million (11.3 percent of people in the world) were severely food insecure.
6. Worldwide, food insecurity disproportionately affects women and people living in rural areas. Moderate or severe food insecurity affected 33.3 percent of adults living in rural areas in 2022 compared with 28.8 percent in peri-urban areas and 26.0 percent in urban areas. The gender gap in food insecurity at the global level, which had widened in the wake of the pandemic, narrowed from 3.8 percentage points in 2021 to 2.4 percentage points in 2022.
7. More than 3.1 billion people in the world – or 42 percent – were unable to afford a healthy diet in 2021. While this represents an overall increase of 134 million people compared to 2019, before the pandemic, the number of people unable to afford a healthy diet actually fell by 52 million people from 2020 to 2021.
8. Worldwide in 2022, an estimated 148.1 million children under five years of age (22.3 percent) were stunted, 45 million (6.8 percent) were wasted, and 37 million (5.6 percent) were overweight. The prevalence of stunting and wasting was higher in rural areas, while overweight was slightly more prevalent in urban areas.
9. Steady progress has been made on increasing exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of life and reducing stunting among children under five years of age, but the world is still not on track to achieve the 2030 targets. Child overweight and low birthweight have changed little, and the prevalence of wasting is more than double the 2030 target.
10.  Increasing urbanization, with almost seven in ten people projected to live in cities by 2050, is driving changes in agrifood systems across the rural–urban continuum. These changes represent both challenges and opportunities to ensure everyone has access to affordable healthy diets.
11. Challenges include a greater availability of cheaper, convenience, pre-prepared and fast foods, often energy dense and high in fats, sugars and/or salt that can contribute to malnutrition; insufficient availability of vegetables and fruits to meet the daily requirements of healthy diets for everyone; exclusion of small farmers from formal value chains; and loss of lands and natural capital due to urban expansion.
12. But urbanization also presents opportunities, as it results in longer, more formal and complex food value chains that expand income-generating activities in off-farm employment, especially for women and youth, and increase the variety of nutritious foods. Farmers often gain better access to agricultural inputs and services as urban areas grow closer to rural areas.
13. Understanding the changes occurring throughout agrifood systems (i.e. from food production, food processing, and food distribution and procurement, to consumer behaviour) requires a rural–urban continuum lens, reflecting the growing connectivity and interlinkages across urban, peri-urban and rural areas.
14. While already quite advanced in Asia and Latin America, changes in food demand and supply across the rural–urban continuum are accelerating in Africa, where the shares of the population that are food insecure and unable to afford a healthy diet are among the highest in the world. Here the expansive growth in off-farm employment and interconnected food markets and food supply chains is driving a diet transition across the rural–urban continuum.
15. The affordability of a healthy diet is becoming more critical to households living in peri-urban and rural areas because they rely more on food purchases. In the 11 African countries studied, despite the lower cost of a healthy diet in these areas, affordability is still lower than in urban centres. Low-income households living in peri-urban and rural areas are especially disadvantaged, as they would need to more than double their food expenditure to secure a healthy diet.

Source : FAO

Related resources

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