Countries with the Worst Hunger and Food Insecurity (2026 Ranked)

The FAO's State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2025 report estimated that 673 million people experienced chronic undernourishment in 2024 — approximately 8.2% of the global population. That number is lower than the 733 million recorded in 2022–2023, reflecting genuine progress in Asia and Latin America. But in Africa and western Asia, hunger is rising. Sudan experienced a declared famine in 2024 — the first anywhere in the world since Ethiopia in 2011. The Democratic Republic of Congo has 25 million people in acute food insecurity. Afghanistan, Yemen, and Haiti remain in persistent crisis. This article examines which countries face the most severe food insecurity, what causes it, and why a world that produces more than enough food still fails to feed everyone.

How hunger is measured

Hunger reporting uses multiple overlapping metrics that measure different dimensions of food insecurity, and understanding them is necessary for reading the data correctly.

Undernourishment (FAO definition): Chronic insufficient caloric intake to maintain basic health over a year or more. The 673 million figure from the 2025 FAO report uses this definition. This is the broadest measure.

The Global Hunger Index (GHI): Published annually by Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide, the GHI combines four indicators — undernourishment, child wasting, child stunting, and child mortality — into a 0–100 score. This multidimensional measure captures nutritional quality alongside caloric sufficiency. GHI scores above 35 are classified as "Alarming"; above 50 as "Extremely Alarming."

IPC Phase Classification: The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) is the operational standard for humanitarian response. It classifies populations on a 1–5 scale: Phase 1 (Minimal), Phase 2 (Stressed), Phase 3 (Crisis), Phase 4 (Emergency), Phase 5 (Catastrophe/Famine). "Famine" has a strict technical definition: at least 20% of households facing extreme food gaps, acute malnutrition exceeding 30% in children, and two or more deaths per 10,000 people per day from starvation or disease. Reaching Phase 5 is the threshold for a formal famine declaration.

Source: FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2025. Rome: FAO, 2025. Available at fao.org/publications.

Countries with the most severe food insecurity

(Global Hunger Index 2024; IPC Phase 4/5 emergency/famine populations; WFP country reports)

Rank	Country	GHI Score	Severity	Pop. in IPC Phase 3+ (millions)
1	Somalia	49.7	Alarming	6.7
2	Central African Republic	48.9	Alarming	2.6
3	South Sudan	45.7	Alarming	5.5
4	Madagascar	44.3	Alarming	2.8
5	Haiti	40.8	Alarming	5.4
6	Niger	39.4	Alarming	4.5
7	Chad	38.9	Alarming	4.8
8	Lesotho	39.1	Alarming	—
9	Sierra Leone	39.7	Alarming	2.1
10	DRC	38.5	Serious	25.8
11	Mali	35.9	Serious	3.1
12	Afghanistan	35.1	Serious	14.8
13	Yemen	35.4	Serious	16.6
14	Sudan	33.8	Serious	25.0+
15	Mozambique	33.7	Serious	3.2

Note: Sudan's GHI score does not fully capture the acute crisis caused by the 2023–2024 civil war, which developed faster than annual surveys could capture. IPC figures are from mid-2024 assessments; WFP estimates for Sudan suggest the actual number in acute food insecurity may exceed 25 million.

Source: Global Hunger Index 2024 (Welthungerhilfe & Concern Worldwide), IPC Acute Food Insecurity Analysis mid-2024, WFP situation reports.

Where this data comes from

Food insecurity rankings combine three primary sources: the Global Hunger Index (GHI), which is published annually by Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide and combines undernourishment, child wasting/stunting, and child mortality into a standardised 0–100 score; the IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification), which classifies populations on a 1–5 scale from minimal to catastrophic famine; and WFP country situation reports tracking acute food insecurity numbers. The GHI covers all countries; IPC is applied only where active assessment occurs, typically in crisis zones. A key limitation: all hunger metrics lag behind real-time developments. Annual GHI scores release on a calendar cycle; crises like Sudan's 2023–2024 war develop faster than data can capture. IPC assessments, while more timely, require field access that conflict prevents. The figures presented are best read as recent snapshots, not real-time crisis tracking.

A brief history of global hunger: from progress to reversal

The trajectory of global hunger since 1945 is not a story of steady decline. It is a story of genuine progress, interrupted by crises that set back decades of gains.

The Green Revolution (1960s–1980s). Norman Borlaug's development of high-yield wheat varieties, combined with fertiliser adoption and irrigation expansion, dramatically increased food production in Asia and Latin America. India went from famine-risk in the 1960s to food exporter status by the 1980s. Global caloric production per capita rose consistently, and the absolute number of hungry people fell despite rapid population growth.

The post-Cold War improvement (1990s–2010s). After the Cold War, reduced proxy conflicts in Africa and improved governance in many developing countries allowed agricultural investment and economic growth. The number of chronically undernourished people fell from approximately 1 billion in 1990 to around 650 million by 2015 — a reduction that the Millennium Development Goals credited as one of their headline successes.

The reversal (2020–present). COVID-19 disrupted global supply chains, caused income shocks that reduced purchasing power for the poorest populations, and temporarily halted humanitarian operations. Climate change began producing more frequent and severe harvest failures. The number of active conflicts globally increased. The FAO's 2025 report confirms that 2024 sees 673 million undernourished — still above the pre-COVID baseline of approximately 650 million, and far from the Sustainable Development Goal of zero hunger by 2030.

The 2030 SDG hunger target will not be met. The FAO projects that 512 million people will still be chronically undernourished in 2030, with nearly 60% in Africa.

Source: FAO State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2025; Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture for Green Revolution history.

Sudan: the 2024 famine declaration

Sudan's civil war — beginning in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — produced the world's worst single humanitarian crisis within months of its outbreak.

The scale. By mid-2024, an estimated 25 million Sudanese were in acute food insecurity — nearly half the country's population. In North Darfur's Zamzam displacement camp, which holds more than 400,000 internally displaced people, the IPC Famine Review Committee formally declared Phase 5 (Famine) conditions in June 2024. This was the first famine declaration anywhere in the world since Somalia in 2011.

How famine happens in practice. The Zamzam declaration reflects what famine looks like operationally: children arriving at medical facilities in states of severe acute malnutrition, treatment centres overwhelmed beyond capacity, mortality rates from malnutrition-related illness exceeding the Phase 5 threshold. In Zamzam, MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières) reported mortality rates in therapeutic feeding centres consistent with famine-level catastrophe.

Hunger as a weapon. Both parties in Sudan's civil war have deliberately obstructed humanitarian aid. Aid convoys were blocked, warehouses looted, and humanitarian workers killed. The weaponisation of food access — blocking aid, attacking agricultural areas, disrupting market supply chains — violates the Fourth Geneva Convention and constitutes a war crime. Enforcement mechanisms are essentially non-functional during active conflicts of this scale.

The international attention gap. Sudan's crisis received dramatically less international media coverage and donor response than the Ukraine crisis of similar displacement scale. By early 2024, Sudan had more internally displaced people than Ukraine but a fraction of the humanitarian funding. Researchers and NGOs have noted this disparity explicitly. It reflects the reality that humanitarian response is shaped by geopolitical proximity, media coverage cycles, and donor-country strategic interests — not purely by objective severity.

Source: IPC Famine Review Committee press statement, June 2024; MSF field reports from Zamzam camp; OCHA Sudan Humanitarian Response Plan 2024; FAO SOFI 2025.

The DRC: the forgotten crisis

The Democratic Republic of Congo hosts the world's largest absolute food insecurity crisis — 25.8 million people in IPC Phase 3 or above — yet receives less international attention per person affected than almost any other major crisis.

The scale paradox. The DRC's food crisis is larger in absolute numbers than Sudan, Afghanistan, or Yemen. But its chronic, multi-decade nature makes it less visible in news cycles driven by sudden-onset events. The DRC has been in persistent conflict since 1996. Over 100 armed groups operate in the eastern provinces. Farming in conflict zones is dangerous, supply chains are chronically disrupted, and displacement is constant.

The mineral wealth trap. The DRC holds an estimated $24 trillion in mineral resources — coltan (essential for electronics capacitors), cobalt (essential for EV batteries), gold, and diamonds. The country's mineral wealth is not a solution to its food crisis; it is a cause of it. Competition over mineral revenues funds armed groups, drives conflict, and provides international actors with incentives to tolerate instability rather than resolve it. The cobalt that powers the electric vehicle transition flows through supply chains contaminated by conflict and child labour in the DRC's eastern mining regions.

Eastern DRC specifically. The provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri, and Kasai have experienced near-continuous armed conflict for 30 years. The M23 rebel group — whose advance and temporary capture of Goma in early 2024 was documented as a major escalation — is backed by Rwanda according to UN Group of Experts reports. This gives the DRC's food crisis an explicitly geopolitical dimension that makes resolution contingent on regional diplomacy.

What happens when a crisis becomes permanent. The DRC illustrates a dynamic in humanitarian system design: crises that persist beyond 3–5 years lose "emergency" status in donor budgets and shift to the chronic underfunded "complex emergency" category. Populations in permanent crisis receive less funding per person than those in newly declared emergencies. This is a structural failure of humanitarian finance.

Afghanistan: the cost of political decisions on food access

Afghanistan's hunger crisis escalated dramatically after the Taliban's takeover in August 2021 — not primarily because of drought or natural causes, but because of deliberate policy choices made by multiple actors.

The aid cut-off. Western governments and the World Bank cut development assistance to Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover — a decision with legitimate political rationale (the Taliban government violated the conditions of aid) but immediate humanitarian consequences. Afghanistan's government budget was approximately 75% foreign aid-funded. When that funding stopped, health facilities closed, social protection payments ceased, and civil servants went unpaid for months.

The women's work exclusion. The Taliban's progressive exclusion of women from economic life — banned from working for NGOs (March 2022), from secondary education, eventually from most public employment — removed roughly half the working-age population from the formal economy. Women-headed households (many of whom had male relatives who had fled or been killed) faced immediate destitution. The UN warned repeatedly that the gender exclusion policies were directly driving food insecurity.

The scale. By 2024, approximately 14.8 million Afghans were in acute food insecurity — down slightly from 2022 peak levels as some humanitarian adaptation occurred, but still representing catastrophic conditions for nearly 35% of the population.

The WFP response. The World Food Programme operates its largest single country programme in Afghanistan, reaching 15+ million people through food and cash transfers. This scale of operation — unprecedented in WFP's history for a single country — illustrates both the severity of the crisis and the institutional limits of humanitarian response as a substitute for functional governance.

Source: WFP Afghanistan Country Brief 2024; UN OCHA Afghanistan Humanitarian Response Plan; UN Special Rapporteur reports on Taliban gender restrictions.

Yemen: when a blockade starves a country

Yemen's war — initiated in 2015 with Saudi-led coalition military intervention against Houthi forces that had captured Sanaa — produced what the UN classified as the world's worst humanitarian crisis for much of 2017–2022.

The import dependency. Yemen imports approximately 90% of its food. A country that cannot feed itself depends entirely on port access for food security. The Saudi-led naval blockade of Yemeni ports — justified as a weapons interdiction measure — severely restricted food imports. UN investigators documented that the blockade's effect on food access was disproportionate to any weapons interdiction benefit, and constituted a collective punishment of the civilian population.

The bifurcated economy. Yemen's economy has fragmented into two parallel systems: the internationally recognised government (based in Aden, Saudi-backed) and the Houthi-controlled territory (centred on Sanaa). Each side controls its own currency printing, creating hyperinflation on both sides. Civil servants in Houthi territories went unpaid for years. The economic dysfunction is as responsible for food insecurity as direct conflict.

Where Yemen stands in 2026. Active fighting has reduced significantly following a UN-brokered truce, though no permanent settlement has been reached. Humanitarian access has improved modestly. The 16.6 million people in IPC Phase 3+ as of 2024 represents an improvement from the 21 million peak of 2018–2019, but Yemen remains one of the world's most severe food insecurity environments — a chronic crisis rather than an acute emergency, which means it competes with newer crises for donor attention.

Somalia: 30 years of state collapse and climate shock

Somalia's hunger crisis is the product of a 30-year state collapse combined with extreme climate vulnerability — a combination that makes it structurally different from conflict-driven crises like Sudan or Yemen.

Somalia has had no functioning central government since 1991. In the absence of state institutions, food security depends on clan structures, NGO networks, and the informal economy — all of which are disrupted by periodic armed conflict (between government forces, al-Shabaab, and clan militias), recurrent drought, and flooding.

The drought-flood cycle. The Horn of Africa experienced one of its worst droughts on record in 2020–2022, pushing Somalia to the brink of famine. Ironically, the drought was followed by catastrophic flooding in 2023 (linked to the La Niña cycle and Indian Ocean warming patterns attributed to climate change). The flooding destroyed crops that had just been planted in drought recovery, disrupting a food security improvement that was beginning to materialise.

Al-Shabaab's food policy. The militant group al-Shabaab controls significant territory in southern Somalia and has a documented policy of blocking humanitarian aid in areas it controls — taxing aid operations, expelling NGOs, and weaponising food access to consolidate population control.

6.7 million in acute food insecurity. Despite these structural challenges, Somalia's food insecurity numbers have modestly improved from the 2022 famine-risk peak, largely because of successful scaled humanitarian response by WFP, UNICEF, and a network of local NGOs. This represents genuine progress in operational humanitarian delivery — though not in addressing the underlying structural causes.

Haiti: food insecurity in the western hemisphere

Haiti's food insecurity is unusual among countries on this list because it occurs in the Americas — a region with aggregate food surplus — and results primarily from political collapse rather than conflict in the traditional sense.

The gang governance vacuum. Following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021 and the subsequent political vacuum, armed gangs progressively took control of Port-au-Prince and key supply routes. By 2024, gangs controlled an estimated 80% of Port-au-Prince, blocking food distribution, humanitarian access, and normal economic activity. Haiti's food insecurity is fundamentally a security problem — food exists, but cannot safely move to where people are.

5.4 million food insecure. With a population of approximately 11 million, roughly half of Haiti faces acute food insecurity. This is the worst food security situation in the western hemisphere by prevalence rate.

The 2024 intervention. A Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission authorised by the UN Security Council began deploying in 2024 to address gang violence. Whether this intervention meaningfully improves food security depends on whether it can restore supply chain security — a challenging mission in a dense urban environment with well-armed criminal organisations.

Source: WFP Haiti situation reports 2024; IPC Haiti assessment mid-2024; UN Security Council Resolution 2699 on Kenya-led mission.

Why hunger persists in a world with food surplus

The world produces approximately 1.5 times the calories needed to adequately feed every person. This fact requires direct engagement, because it means global hunger is not a supply problem.

The distribution failure. Food does not flow to where people need it — it flows to where purchasing power exists. The global food system is a market, not a distribution network. A Somali pastoralist with no cash cannot buy grain that exists in a Ukrainian warehouse. The economic mechanism that in high-income countries links hunger to overweight populations (cheap calorie-dense processed food is affordable; fresh nutritious food is expensive) operates globally to concentrate food in wealthy populations.

Conflict as the primary driver. The WFP estimates that conflict drives approximately 60% of acute food insecurity globally. Every country in this ranking's top tier — Somalia, CAR, South Sudan, DRC, Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan, Haiti — has active armed conflict as a central feature of its food crisis. Peace is not just a humanitarian good. It is a prerequisite for food security.

Climate change as a structural amplifier. Climate change is not creating new food crises from nothing — it is intensifying existing vulnerabilities. Drought frequency in the Sahel has increased. Flood severity in Bangladesh and the Mekong Delta has increased. The harvests most likely to fail are those in the countries least able to import substitutes. Climate-driven harvest failures interact with conflict and poverty to create compounding crises.

The aid adequacy gap. Humanitarian food aid reaches hundreds of millions of people but is structurally insufficient to address the scale of need. The WFP's annual budget (approximately $14 billion as of 2024) serves over 150 million people in some capacity. This is extraordinary operational reach — but it represents emergency caloric support, not the structural investment in local agriculture, markets, and governance that would reduce the need for aid. Humanitarian funding for food crises has been consistently underfunded relative to appeals in recent years.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Does the world produce enough food to end hunger?
A: Yes. Global caloric production has consistently exceeded need since the 1960s — producing 1.5 times the calories needed per person. Hunger persists because of inequality (purchasing power gaps), conflict (destroying production and supply chains), climate shocks, and political failures including export restrictions and aid corruption. Hunger is a distribution and governance failure, not production failure.

Q: What is the difference between famine and food insecurity?
A: The IPC scale has five phases. Phases 1–3 cover stressed to crisis conditions. Phase 4 (Emergency) means extreme food gaps with high acute malnutrition. Phase 5 (Famine) requires: 20%+ households with extreme gaps, 30%+ acute malnutrition in children, and 2+ deaths per 10,000 daily from starvation. Famine is technical declaration. Sudan's Zamzam camp met Phase 5 in 2024 — the first famine declaration since Somalia in 2011.

Q: Is global hunger getting better or worse?
A: Mixed trajectory. The FAO's 2025 report shows 673 million undernourished in 2024, down from 733 million peak (2022–23), due to Asia and Latin America improvement. But hunger is rising in Africa and western Asia. The world will not meet SDG zero-hunger goal by 2030. FAO projects 512 million still undernourished in 2030, with 60% in Africa.

Q: Which countries have the lowest hunger rates?
A: Countries with developed agriculture, strong social safety nets, and political stability have near-zero chronic undernourishment: EU nations, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea. Lowest rates globally include Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Finland, France, and Germany, where undernourishment is below 2.5%.

Q: What role does climate change play in hunger?
A: Climate change amplifies existing vulnerabilities rather than creating hunger independently. It increases Sahel drought frequency, intensifies South/Southeast Asian flooding, and makes harvests less predictable. Countries most exposed to climate-driven failure have least import capacity. The IPCC projects 80–135 million additional people pushed into hunger by 2050 under high-emissions scenarios.

Q: How much would it cost to end hunger?
A: The FAO estimates eliminating hunger by 2030 requires approximately $40 billion annually in food systems, social protection, and rural development investment. Global military expenditure in 2023 exceeded $2.2 trillion. The barrier is political priority, not financial capacity.

The takeaway

673 million people in a world with food surplus is not a natural tragedy — it is the compounded result of conflict, inequality, political failure, and climate vulnerability operating simultaneously in the countries least equipped to manage them. Sudan's famine declaration in 2024 was preventable: it required a civil war, deliberate obstruction of humanitarian aid, and an international community too politically divided to intervene effectively. The DRC's 25 million food insecure people reflect a three-decade failure to establish peace in a country whose mineral resources fund the conflict that drives the crisis. Yemen's hunger reflects what happens when a naval blockade cuts off food imports to a country that produces almost none of its own food. The solutions are not mysterious — they require peace, functional governance, agricultural investment, and social protection systems. What they lack is not knowledge but political will at both national and international levels.

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