What's New

For the fourth consecutive year, global acute food insecurity rose in 2022. As many as 205.1 million people across 45 countries and territories are in IPC Phase 3 (Crisis) or higher food insecurity as of September 2022, according to the Global Report on Food Crisis Mid-Year Update. That represents an increase of 29.5 million people from 2021.

In many places around the world, hunger is worse than ever before.

That’s the message of the 2022 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC), released this week. The report paints a grim picture of global food security. Almost 193 million people across 53 countries/territories were acutely food insecure in 2021, up nearly 40 million people from 2020. This number represents a new record and is only expected to worsen throughout 2022.

Prevalence of hunger and food insecurity have been on the rise in Africa south of the Sahara (SSA) in recent years after a long period of decline. In 2020, an estimated one in five people in the region faced hunger, more than double the proportion of any other region worldwide. The period 2019-2020 in SSA saw the strongest increase in annual undernourishment ever recorded. In 2020, estimated prevalence of undernourishment ranged from 10.1 percent in southern Africa to 31.8 percent in Central Africa.

Our window of opportunity for achieving SDG 2 — eradicating hunger and malnutrition and ensuring access to safe, nutritious, and sufficient food for all by 2030 — is closing rapidly. However, far from moving closer to that goal, the world has seen a resurgence of hunger and food insecurity.

Several African countries are currently experiencing acute or worsening food insecurity, according to FEWS Net.