At least 735 million people were affected by hunger in 2022, according to the most recent report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
And as Statista’s Martin Armstrong reports, nowhere does the problem have a larger scale than on the African continent. According to FAO, about 61 percent of the population there was experiencing moderate (including not enough money for healthy food, self-sufficiency problems, having to skip meals) or severe (including no food stocks, entire days without food) food insecurity (FAO’s definition). This represents an increase of 9.4 percentage points from 2017, and 4.9 points higher than the first Covid pandemic year.
Other world regions have seen a dip or plateau in hunger levels since the start of the pandemic, which caused widespread increases due to “an unequal pattern of economic recovery among countries and unrecovered income losses among those most affected by the pandemic”. Africa though has experienced an unabated rise.
Looking ahead, the FAO expects “most progress to occur in Asia, whereas no progress is foreseen in Latin America and the Caribbean, and hunger is projected to increase significantly in Africa by 2030.”
