Published annually by five United Nations agencies, the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) is the reference report for monitoring progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 2, tracking chronic food insecurity and malnutrition in all countries on a globally comparable basis. 

The 2026 edition reports a third consecutive year of gradual improvement in global hunger measured by the prevalence of undernourishment (PoU, SDG indicator 2.1.1). The PoU fell to 7.8% in 2025, corresponding to an estimated 645 million people (range: 608–696 million), from 8.1% in 2024 and 8.6% in 2022. The prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity, measured with the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES, SDG indicator 2.1.2), shows a continuous five-year downward trend following the sharp increase during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, progress remains insufficient and uneven: it was estimated that 20% of the population in Africa faced hunger in 2025, compared to 6% in Asia, 4.8% in Latin America and the Caribbean, 8% in Oceania, and less than 2.5% in Northern America and Europe. Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean have been showing steady recovery over several consecutive years, while the PoU in Africa had been on the rise since 2017 and stopped increasing only in 2025 (see Figure below).  

Furthermore, between 2010 and 2025 the number of people facing hunger in Africa rose from 171 to 309 million, while in Asia it fell from 396 to 292 million — so that in 2025, for the first time, more people faced hunger in Africa than in Asia. Africa's share of the global total climbed from 28 to 48% over the period, Asia's fell from 65 to 45%, and Latin America and the Caribbean remained broadly constant at around 5%. 

Achieving SDG 2 — ending hunger (SDG 2.1) and all forms of malnutrition (SDG 2.2) — requires not only sufficient food but nutritious food, which is why the 2026 report examines the systemic barriers to accessing it through the cost of a healthy diet (CoHD). The global mean CoHD rose to 4.28 purchasing power parity (PPP) dollars per person per day in 2025, from 2.94 in 2017. An estimated 2.69 billion people (32.7%) could not afford a healthy diet; unaffordability is falling globally but rising in Africa, where it reaches 66.6%.  

Minimum dietary diversity — for children (MDD-C) and for women (MDD-W) — was adopted as SDG indicator 2.2.4 in March 2025; only 30.8% of children aged 6 to 23 months and 62.7% of women aged 15-49 years attain it, falling to 20.5% and 43.0% respectively in Africa. 

The report recommends investment in both expanding the supply of nutritious foods through domestic production and trade and lowering structural per unit costs across the agrifood value chain. This includes investing in research and development, irrigation, infrastructure, cold chains and food loss reduction, alongside structural and policy reforms in subsidy design, trade facilitation and regulatory frameworks. Integrated interventions across the value chain yield substantially larger cost reductions than do isolated measures. For example, targeted technological and structural upgrades in perishable foods, especially fruits and vegetables, emerge as key levers for narrowing the affordability gap. 

Comparison between the SOFI 2026 and the Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC) 2026 main outcomes  

While chronic hunger is globally decreasing, acute food insecurity concentrated in deepening humanitarian crises increases and threatens the right to adequate food, as reported in the Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC), a multi-partner initiative that provides analyses of acute food insecurity focusing only on countries with food crises. These opposing trends are not contradictory. The two reports differ in concept, scope, method and purpose. SOFI measures chronic food insecurity in all countries, using nationally representative surveys designed for comparability across countries and over time, to inform long-term development policy. The GRFC measures acute food insecurity only in countries in food crisis, drawing on the most recent available evidence, which sometimes covers shock-affected areas alone, to trigger humanitarian response. 

Notwithstanding these differences, SOFI's data for the largest food-crisis countries confirm a deterioration in these settings, against the global trend: between 2014-2016 and 2023-2025, moderate or severe food insecurity rose in Nigeria (from 34.7% to 76.5%), Afghanistan (45.1% to 77.8%) and Yemen (45.7% to 74.4%), and undernourishment rose in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (27.3% to 39.5%) and Haiti (47.7% to 51.4%). In addition, SOFI’s food insecurity estimates are not updated for Sudan after 2018 or for Palestine after 2022 and are not reported for Somalia or Syria — precisely the contexts the GRFC covers.