By Eshioromeh Sebastian
For the first time, Africa has surpassed Asia as the region with the highest number of undernourished people, cementing its position as the global epicenter of hunger, according to a new United Nations report released Tuesday.
The 2026 edition of “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI)”—a joint publication by five UN agencies including FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, and WHO—shows that approximately 309 million Africans went hungry in 2025, edging out Asia’s 292 million. This shift comes even as global hunger figures continued their downward trend for a third straight year, falling to 7.8 percent of the world’s population from 8.1 percent in 2024.
But the continent’s numbers tell a grimmer story. One in every five Africans experienced hunger last year, and more than half the population struggled with moderate or severe food insecurity. Across the globe, about 645 million people went hungry in 2025—a drop of nearly 14 million from the previous year and 43 million since 2022. Yet the UN cautioned that the pace of progress remains dangerously slow, putting the 2030 zero-hunger target increasingly out of reach.
Access to nutritious food presents an even wider chasm. Nearly 2.7 billion people—roughly one in three globally—could not afford a healthy diet in 2025. In Africa, that figure skyrockets to 66.6 percent of the population, underscoring a crisis not just of quantity but of quality.
The report also flagged alarming setbacks in maternal and child nutrition. Some 150 million children under five remain stunted, while only 30.8 percent of children aged 6 to 23 months receive a minimally diverse diet. Anaemia among women of reproductive age is worsening, even as adult obesity has climbed steadily from 12.1 percent in 2012 to 16.2 percent in 2024—a dual burden of malnutrition that increasingly strains health systems.
Looking ahead, the UN agencies warned that intensifying conflicts, extreme weather events, shrinking humanitarian budgets, and declining official development assistance could erase recent progress. Their projections suggest that between 510 million and 520 million people could still face hunger by 2030 if these headwinds persist.
FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu struck a cautious note of optimism, insisting that “progress is possible, but we must move faster. Ending hunger and making healthy diets affordable requires political commitment, sustained investment and enabling policies.”
WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus emphasized that the affordability gap is a policy failure, not an inevitability. “While we welcome the clear progress we have made in reducing hunger, a healthy diet still remains unaffordable for one in three people globally,” he said. “Obesity is rising and progress on maternal and child nutrition is stalling. But we know what works: policies that make healthy food the easy choice, promoting breastfeeding, front-of-pack labelling, taxing unhealthy products, and protecting children from harmful marketing. Healthy diets are not a luxury, they are the foundation of health and must be within everyone’s reach.”
UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell added that the findings serve as a stark reminder that food systems are failing the most vulnerable. She called for integrated approaches linking nutrition, healthcare, education, and social protection to shield children and women from cascading global shocks.
The report urges governments to ramp up investment in food system infrastructure—from irrigation and cold-chain storage to research and trade reforms—while adopting policies that lower the cost of nutritious foods and build resilience against climate volatility and economic disruptions.
Discussion about this post