Short answers, pulled from the story.
Food security, as defined by the 1996 World Food Summit, exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. The concept has six recognized dimensions: availability, access, utilization, stability, agency, and sustainability.
In 2024, an estimated 2.28 billion people, or approximately 28.0 percent of the world population, experienced food insecurity at moderate or severe levels. The global prevalence has declined gradually since 2021, though food insecurity continues to rise in Africa while falling in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The most important causes are high food prices and disruptions to global food supplies from war. Climate change, water scarcity, land degradation, agricultural diseases, and pandemics such as COVID-19 also contribute. Structural factors including poverty, income inequality, and debt levels in low-income economies compound these pressures.
Food insecurity can cause stunting, a form of slowed physical growth that begins in utero and continues through approximately the third year of life. In 2020-22.0 percent of children under five years of age, or 149.2 million children, were affected by stunting. Once stunting occurs, improved nutritional intake after about age two cannot reverse the damage; severe malnutrition in early childhood often leads to lasting defects in cognitive development.
Girls and women make up an estimated 60 percent of the world's chronically hungry. At the global level, food insecurity is more prevalent among adult women than men in every region. The gender gap widened from 1.7 percentage points in 2019 to 4.3 percentage points in 2021 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, though it narrowed somewhat before widening again between 2023 and 2024.
The Food Insecurity Experience Scale is a measurement tool developed by FAO as a universally applicable experience-based scale derived from one used in the United States. It produces cross-country comparable estimates of food insecurity prevalence. Since 2015, the FIES has been adopted as one of the indicators in the Sustainable Development Goals monitoring framework.