Global Hunger Fell Below 8 Percent for the First Time Since the Pandemic

For the third year in a row, fewer people on Earth are living with hunger. Nearly 14 million fewer faced it in 2025 than in 2024, and 43 million fewer than at the peak in 2022.

That is the headline from the FAO’s new State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, released July 21 in Rome. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization compiles it each year with four partner agencies: IFAD, UNICEF, WHO, and the World Food Programme.

An estimated 645 million people faced hunger in 2025, which is 7.8 percent of the world’s population. That share was 8.1 percent in 2024 and about 8.6 percent at the 2022 peak, so 2025 is the first time it has dropped back below 8 percent since the pandemic years pushed it up.

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

Where the gains came from

A broader measure moved the same way. About 2.1 billion people lived with moderate or severe food insecurity in 2025, meaning they lacked steady access to enough safe, nutritious food. That is nearly 86 million fewer than a year earlier.

Most of that improvement was concentrated in two places: South America and Asia. Within Asia, Southern Asia drove the change, and because its countries are among the most populous on Earth, even a fractional drop in the hunger rate frees millions of people.

A pause in Africa’s climb

In Africa, hunger’s share of the population slipped from 20.3 percent in 2024 to 20.0 percent in 2025. The drop is slight, and it breaks a rise that had continued every year since 2017.

Even so, roughly 309 million people in Africa remain undernourished, and with the population growing fast, the total number of hungry people there could still climb even as the share falls.

The distance left to go

None of this puts the world on course to end hunger. The FAO projects that about 520 million people could still face it in 2030, far short of the UN’s second Sustainable Development Goal, Zero Hunger.

Cost is a large part of why. A healthy diet is still beyond the budget of nearly a third of the world’s people. Fresh, nutritious food picks up cost at every stop between the farm and the plate: storage, processing, the trip to market, and the price on the shelf.

Qu pointed to what could keep the numbers moving. “With strong economic policies, social protection and sustained investments in more efficient, more inclusive, more resilient and more sustainable agrifood systems, we can bend the hunger curve,” he said.

For 2025, the trend points down. Holding that direction long enough to reach the 2030 goal is the harder task.