Key Messages:

• Global hunger, measured by the prevalence of undernourishment (SDG Indicator 2.1.1), affected between 691 and 783 million people in the world in 2022, 122 million more people than in 2019, before the global pandemic.

• Hunger is still on the rise in Western Asia, the Caribbean and all subregions of Africa.

• About 29.6 percent of the global population – 2.4 billion people – were moderately or severely food insecure in 2022 (SDG Indicator 2.1.2), of which about 900 million (11.3 percent of people in the world) were severely food insecure.

• Worldwide, food insecurity disproportionately affects women and people living in rural areas.

• More than 3.1 billion people in the world – or 42 percent – were unable to afford a healthy diet in 2021.

• 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.

• 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.

• New evidence for 11 Western, Eastern and Southern African countries challenges the traditional thinking that food purchases make up a small share of rural households’ food consumption in Africa. New evidence also challenges the conventional thinking that purchase patterns between urban and rural areas differ markedly. Food purchases are surprisingly high across the rural–urban continuum in the 11 African countries studied, and consumption of processed foods, higher in urban areas, only declines gradually moving to peri-urban and rural areas. In the 11 African countries studied, despite the lower cost of a healthy diet in peri-urban and rural areas, affordability is still lower than in urban centres.

• In many of these African countries studied, moderate or severe food insecurity across urban areas and peri-urban areas is similar to and sometimes even slightly higher than in rural areas.

• Investments in infrastructure, public goods and enhanced capacities that improve rural–urban connectivity are needed. Such investments should support the essential role of small and medium enterprises in agrifood systems, particularly in small and intermediate cities and towns.

• Public investment in research and development needs to be increased to develop technologies and innovations for healthier food environments and for increasing the availability and affordability of nutritious foods. Technology can be particularly important to boost the capacity of urban and peri-urban agriculture to supply nutritious foods in cities and towns.

• Subnational governments can play a key role in designing and implementing policies beyond the traditional top-down approach. Approaches to agrifood systems governance should ensure policy coherence among local, regional and national settings through the engagement of relevant agrifood systems stakeholders at all levels.