Global Hunger Crisis Deepens As World Leaders Slash Aid Amid Record Malnutrition and Displacement

Acute global hunger surged for the sixth consecutive year in 2024, reaching the highest levels since international tracking began, according to the newly released 2025 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC). Published by the Food Security Information Network, the report found that 295 million people across 53 countries and territories experienced acute food insecurity last year—an increase of 13.7 million compared to 2023. For the fifth year in a row, more than 20 percent of the assessed population was classified as food insecure.

“This Global Report on Food Crises is another unflinching indictment of a world dangerously off course,” wrote United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres in the report’s foreword. “Long-standing crises are now being compounded by another, more recent one: the dramatic reduction in lifesaving humanitarian funding to respond to these needs. This is more than a failure of systems – it is a failure of humanity. Hunger in the 21st century is indefensible. We cannot respond to empty stomachs with empty hands and turned backs.”

The number of people experiencing catastrophic levels of hunger—designated as IPC/CH Phase 5—more than doubled to 1.9 million in 2024, the highest recorded since the GRFC began tracking global food crises in 2016. These conditions, which include famine and starvation, were concentrated in countries facing overlapping crises such as Sudan, the Gaza Strip, South Sudan, Haiti, and Mali.