Global hunger is declining for the third year running, but healthy diets remain out of reach for billions; ending all forms of malnutrition requires transforming unhealthy food environments, treating food security as a responsibility of the State rather than the government in office, and building anticipatory social protection that can withstand climate and economic shocks
July 26, 2026
The latest edition of “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report,” the United Nations’ leading assessment of global hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition co-produced annually by the FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, offers something increasingly rare in global affairs: evidence that progress is still possible.
According to SOFI 2026, global hunger declined for the third consecutive year. An estimated 645 million people faced hunger in 2025 — 14 million fewer than in 2024 and 43 million fewer than in 2022. Africa also recorded the first interruption of its upward hunger trend since 2017.
These results show that hunger is not inevitable and that public policies make a difference. But they should not encourage complacency. If current trends continue, approximately 520 million people could still suffer from hunger in 2030. The world remains far from achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, which calls for “ending hunger, achieving food security and improved nutrition, and promoting sustainable agriculture.”
South America provides both encouragement and a warning. The prevalence of undernourishment in the subregion fell from 5.5% in 2020 to 3.5% in 2025, while the number of people experiencing hunger declined by around eight million. If this trajectory continues, South America could become the only world region to achieve the SDG hunger target by 2030.
But progress remains uneven. Severe national and territorial big pockets of hunger persist in the North-East of Brazil and in the Amazon and the Andean regions. The report tells us that nearly 90 million South Americans still experience moderate or severe food insecurity, which means that about one in every six inhabitants continues to face hunger. The regional average can improve even as millions of people remain excluded, especially in South America where the inequalities are so high.
Moreover, leaving FAO’s Hunger Map does not mean overcoming malnutrition. Almost one-third of the global population remains unable to afford a healthy diet. This exposes an uncomfortable contradiction: the world produces more food than ever, but nutritious foods remain inaccessible to billions.
The problem is not only insufficient production of fruits and vegetables. Weak infrastructure, inadequate storage and cold chains, unreliable energy supplies, and inefficient transport and retail systems increase the cost of fruits, vegetables and other nutritious foods. The World Health Organization recommends that people over ten consume at least 400 grams of fruits and vegetables daily. For many families, however, this is economically or physically impossible.
Meanwhile, ultra-processed products rich in sugar, salt and unhealthy fats are often cheaper, more heavily promoted and more readily available. Hunger, micronutrient deficiencies, overweight and obesity therefore increasingly coexist, sometimes within the same household.
Access to a healthy diet cannot continue to be treated as a private matter or reduced to individual choice. Families do not choose in a vacuum. Their decisions are shaped by income, prices, working conditions, school environments, advertising and what food is available in their communities.
This is particularly important when addressing childhood obesity. It is both unfair and ineffective to blame parents — and especially mothers — for children’s diets while ignoring the commercial and social environment surrounding them. Governments must regulate food marketing aimed at children, strengthen school meals, improve access to fresh foods and use labelling, taxation and public procurement to make healthy choices genuinely accessible.
Here lies another major risk. A political shift to the right in several countries could weaken the recognition of adequate food as a human right and revive the idea that feeding a family is exclusively a private responsibility. When food security is treated merely as a consumer choice, social programmes are weakened and the State withdraws precisely from the communities where it is most needed.
Food and nutrition security must be a policy of the State, not only of the government in office. Hunger has no ideology. Effective institutions and programmes must receive adequate and predictable public financing independent of the political option of their governments.
Yet even the strongest policies will remain vulnerable if they are designed only to respond after a crisis. In a world of increasingly frequent and overlapping shocks, food-security policies must become anticipatory. Anticipatory social protection is the missing link between the programmes that reduce hunger in ordinary times and the early action needed to prevent a foreseeable shock from reversing years of progress.
Climate change is making food insecurity more unpredictable, but many shocks are not entirely unforeseeable. El Niño, for example, can often be anticipated months in advance. Strong El Niño conditions could intensify droughts and floods across Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean, threatening food security well into 2027.
This is why anticipatory social protection must become a central pillar of national food-security and climate-resilience strategies. It cannot remain a temporary humanitarian instrument activated only through exceptional projects. It must be incorporated into permanent social-protection systems, with predefined triggers, clear institutional responsibilities and financing agreed before disasters occur.
We already possess increasingly accurate climate forecasts, early-warning systems, social registries and digital payment mechanisms. The challenge is to connect them. Anticipatory social protection translates an early warning into early assistance.
When predefined climate thresholds are reached, governments should be able to expand cash transfers, protect school-meal provision, distribute seeds and agricultural inputs, support water harvesting and irrigation, and activate insurance and credit. Assistance must arrive before vulnerable families are forced to sell productive assets, take children out of school or reduce the quantity and quality of the food they consume.
Experience shows that this approach works. During the 2023–2024 El Niño event, anticipatory measures in nine Latin American and Caribbean countries reached more than 100,000 people in rural communities. In some Central American countries, early interventions contributed to increases of up to 40% in maize and bean production.
The lesson is clear: anticipatory social protection is not merely about responding earlier. It is about preventing a predictable climate shock from becoming a food, nutrition and humanitarian crisis. Governments must establish pre-arranged financing and automatic activation mechanisms, supported by coordination among climate agencies, civil-protection authorities and the institutions responsible for agriculture and social protection. Waiting to negotiate emergency budgets after the damage becomes visible defeats the purpose of anticipation.
SOFI 2026 reminds us that humanity knows how to reduce hunger and undernourishment. The question is whether we have the political will to protect these gains from climate shocks, economic crises and ideological reversals.
Ending hunger and all forms of malnutrition requires defending adequate food as a human right, transforming unhealthy food environments and protecting successful policies across political cycles. Above all, it requires making anticipatory social protection a permanent responsibility of the State — so that governments can act today against the shocks we already know are coming.
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This article was originally published on IMPAKTER. Read the original article.
