Drive to eliminate global hunger by 2030 has stalled, UN warns

About 733 million people faced hunger in 2023 due to conflicts, climate change and economic crises, a UN report says.

A goal to eliminate global hunger by 2030 looks increasingly impossible to achieve as the number of people suffering chronic hunger has barely changed over the past year, a UN report says.

The annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, published on Wednesday, said about 733 million people faced hunger in 2023 – one in 11 people globally and one in five in Africa – as conflict, climate change and economic crises take their toll.

David Laborde, director of the division within the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) that helps prepare the survey, said that although progress had been made in some regions, the situation had deteriorated on a global level.

“We are in a worse situation today than nine years ago when we launched this goal to eradicate hunger by 2030,” he told the news agency Reuters, saying challenges such as climate change and regional wars had grown more severe than envisaged a decade ago.

If current trends continue, about 582 million people will be chronically undernourished by the end of the decade, the report said.

Regional trends varied significantly with hunger continuing to rise in Africa, where growing populations, wars and climate upheaval weighed heavily. By contrast, Asia has seen little change, and Latin America has improved.

The report also noted that 71.5 percent of people in low-income countries were not able to afford a healthy diet last year, compared with 6.3 percent in high-income countries.

While famines are easy to spot, poor nutrition is more insidious but can nonetheless scar people for life, stunting both the physical and mental development of babies and children and leaving adults more vulnerable to infections and illnesses.

“Malnutrition affects a child’s survival, physical growth, and brain development,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said in a statement.

But she noted how global child stunting rates have dropped by one-third, or 55 million, in the past two decades and said this showed investments in child nutrition can tackle the current challenges.

“We must urgently step up financing to end child malnutrition. The world can and must do it. It is not only a moral imperative but also a sound investment in the future,” Russell said.

The UN also said the way the antihunger drive was financed had to change because greater flexibility is needed to ensure the countries most in need get help.

“We need to change how we do things to be better coordinated, to accept that not everyone should try to do everything but really be much more focused on what we are doing and where,” Laborde said.

Laborde noted that international aid linked to food security and nutrition amounted to $76bn a year, or 0.07 percent of the world’s total annual economic output.

“I think we can do better to deliver this promise about living on a planet where no one is hungry,” he said.