Food security

• 1. Introduction

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  Food security is the state of having reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, healthy food. In 2024, an estimated 2.28 billion people experienced food insecurity at moderate or severe levels. That is roughly 28 percent of everyone alive on Earth. Yet per capita world food supplies are, by most measures, more than adequate to feed every person on the planet. That gap between what exists and who receives it is the central paradox at the heart of this story. How did definitions of food security evolve from a narrow focus on supply to a six-pillar framework touching agency and sustainability? Why do wars, droughts, and financial crises continue to push hundreds of millions into hunger? And what are the tools, policies, and movements trying to close the gap? Those are the questions this documentary will examine.

• 2. Defining the Problem

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  At the 1974 World Food Conference, food security was defined almost entirely in terms of supply: the availability at all times of adequate world food supplies to sustain steady expansion of consumption and offset fluctuations in production and prices. That framing left out a crucial truth, which economists and policymakers gradually absorbed: having enough food in the world is not the same as everyone getting enough to eat.

  Later definitions added demand and access. The first World Food Summit, held in 1996, produced the most widely cited formulation: food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. That summit also declared that food should not be used as an instrument for political and economic pressure.

  By 2009, the World Summit on Food Security named four pillars: availability, access, utilization, and stability. A decade later, in 2020, the High-Level Panel of Experts for the Committee on World Food Security recommended two more: agency, meaning the capacity of individuals to make their own food choices, and sustainability, meaning the ability of food systems to provide security without compromising future generations.

  Food insecurity, meanwhile, extends beyond outright hunger. The United States Department of Agriculture defines it as limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, or a limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways. That formulation covers people who do not go to bed starving but who skip meals, reduce portions, or rely on emergency food supplies to get through the month.

• 3. The Scale of Hunger

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  Close to 12 percent of the global population was severely food insecure in 2020, representing 928 million people, which was 148 million more than in 2019. In 2023, the Global Report on Food Crises found that acute hunger affected approximately 282 million people across 59 countries, an increase of 24 million from the previous year. Conflicts, economic shocks, and extreme weather were the primary drivers.

  Regional patterns are uneven and shifting. In 2023, the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity in Africa stood at 58.0 percent, nearly double the global average. Food insecurity is falling in Latin America and the Caribbean and declining gradually in Asia. In Africa it continues to rise. The Gaza Strip and South Sudan were among the hardest-hit areas identified in the 2023 Global Report on Food Crises.

  Within countries, the burden falls unevenly. Globally and in almost every region, food insecurity is more prevalent in rural areas than in urban areas. In 2024, moderate or severe food insecurity affected 32.0 percent of adults living in rural areas, compared with 23.9 percent in urban areas. Women are consistently more affected than men in every region of the world. The gender gap widened considerably after 2019, reaching 4.3 percentage points in 2021, before narrowing slightly and then widening again between 2023 and 2024.

  The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted a decades-long decline in hunger. FAO estimated the hunger excess linked to the pandemic at 30 million people by the end of the decade. Even before the pandemic, FAO had warned that the world was off track to achieve Zero Hunger, the second of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, by 2030.

• 4. Causes and Compounding Crises

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  The most important drivers of food insecurity are high food prices and disruptions to global food supplies caused by war. The Russian invasion of Ukraine disrupted global supply chains with severe effects on production, sourcing, and logistics, with particular consequences for Asian and Pacific countries that depend on Ukrainian wheat and fertilizer. Nearly 1.1 billion people in those regions lack a healthy diet due to poverty and rising prices.

  Climate change is compounding the pressures. In 2023, extreme weather was a primary driver of acute food insecurity in 18 countries, affecting over 77 million people. A 2026 joint report by the FAO and the World Meteorological Organization identified a temperature threshold: once temperatures exceed 25 degrees Celsius, crop yields begin to decline significantly, with effects on harvests and food prices that can persist for up to a year. Recent climate modeling projects that global yields of calories from six major staple crops could be 24 percent lower by 2100 under a high-emissions scenario than they would be without climate change.

  Approximately 40 percent of the world's agricultural land is already seriously degraded. Between 1950 and 1984, the Green Revolution increased world grain production by 250 percent, but it also caused soil contamination and erosion through intensive farming, and a reduction in biodiversity through heavy pesticide use. Sub-Saharan Africa bears a disproportionate share of water stress; of an estimated 800 million people who live in Africa, 300 million live in a water-stressed environment. Projections suggest that by 2030, between 75 million and 250 million people in Africa will be living in areas of high water stress.

  Crises rarely arrive alone. In 2020, East Africa faced a triple threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, flooding, and desert locusts, creating a complex emergency that led to a 20 percent increase in acute food insecurity in the region. Cyclone Idai, which struck Southern Africa in 2019, destroyed 780,000 hectares of crops and triggered cholera outbreaks and pest infestations, affecting 3 million people across Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi. When hazards overlap, the damage exceeds what any single event would have produced.

• 5. Who Bears the Weight

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  Girls and women make up an estimated 60 percent of the world's chronically hungry. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women enshrines the equal right to food, yet little progress has been made toward that standard. Women play key roles in maintaining food security as food producers, agricultural entrepreneurs, household decision-makers, and managers of food stability during economic hardship, yet they remain disproportionately affected by the very insecurity they help to mitigate.

  Children face distinct and irreversible consequences. Worldwide, the prevalence of child stunting stood at 21.3 percent in 2019, or 144 million children. In 2020-22.0 percent of children under five years of age, or 149.2 million, were affected by stunting. Once stunting has occurred, improved nutritional intake after the age of about two years is unable to reverse the damage. Severe malnutrition in early childhood often leads to defects in cognitive development, creating a lasting disparity between children who experienced it and those who did not. Africa and Asia account for more than nine out of ten of all children with stunting worldwide.

  Racial and ethnic disparities are documented in high-income countries as well as low-income ones. A 2024 USDA study covering 2016 to 2021 found that in the United States, households led by individuals identifying as American Indian and Alaska Native experienced a food insecurity rate of 23.3 percent, while households headed by Asian individuals reported 5.4 percent. The national average for all households was 11.1 percent. The pattern held at the more severe end: multiracial American Indian-White households experienced very low food security at 11.3 percent, while Asian households reported 1.6 percent.

  Food insecurity also carries a mental health toll. Over 50 studies have found strong associations between food insecurity and higher risks of depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. Food-insecure individuals face almost a threefold risk increase for depression and anxiety compared to food-secure individuals. Adolescents experiencing food insecurity are more likely to report suicidal ideation and suicide attempts than those who are food-secure.

• 6. Measuring What Is Hard to See

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  FAO developed the Food Insecurity Experience Scale, known as the FIES, as a universally applicable measurement tool derived from a scale used in the United States. By establishing a global reference scale and a calibration procedure, the FIES makes it possible to produce cross-country comparable estimates of food insecurity. Since 2015, the FIES has been adopted as one of the indicators in the Sustainable Development Goals monitoring framework.

  Every year, five international bodies collaborate to produce The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, known as the SOFI report. FAO, the World Food Programme, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the World Health Organization, and UNICEF each contribute to this annual analysis. The report tracks chronic hunger using two main indicators: the Number of Undernourished and the Prevalence of Undernourishment. Since 2014, it has also reported the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity based on the FIES. Beginning in the early 2010s, FAO incorporated more complex metrics including estimates of food losses in retail distribution and the volatility of agri-food systems.

  Other instruments capture specific dimensions. The Household Food Insecurity Access Scale measures the degree of food inaccessibility in the previous month. The Household Dietary Diversity Scale counts how many different food groups a household consumed over a specific period. The Coping Strategies Index begins from a single question: what do you do when you do not have enough food and do not have enough money to buy food? These tools were developed in part by the USAID-funded Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance project and reflect the understanding that access remains the hardest pillar to measure reliably.

• 7. Responses and Pathways Forward

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  FAO has proposed a twin-track approach that combines sustainable development with short-term hunger relief. Short-term measures include vouchers for seeds and fertilizer, school feeding programs, emergency food aid, and unconditional cash transfers. Longer-term strategies involve investing in rural markets and infrastructure, promoting gender equality, and building policy environments that support small-scale food producers.

  Bangladesh is cited as a country that met the Millennium Development Goal hunger target. FAO credited growth in agricultural productivity, macroeconomic stability in the 1990s, and investment in irrigation infrastructure for that outcome. At the other end of the scale, FAO estimated that if healthy diets became the norm globally, almost all health costs attributable to unhealthy diets, projected to reach US$1.3 trillion a year in 2030, could be offset; savings on the social costs of greenhouse gas emissions linked to unhealthy diets would be even greater at US$1.7 trillion.

  In September 2022, the United States announced a contribution of $2.9 billion at the UN General Assembly to aid global food security efforts. Of that sum, $2 billion was directed to USAID for humanitarian assistance, with additional funds going to the Feed the Future Initiative and to the USDA for projects expected to benefit nearly a million children in food-insecure countries in Africa and East Asia.

  Alternative protein sources are drawing attention as a complement to conventional agriculture. With over 2,000 identified edible insects, researchers note that insects can contain between 13 and 77 percent protein by dry weight and require significantly less land to cultivate than conventional protein sources such as beef and chicken. Controlled Environmental Agriculture, which uses hydroponics and vertical farming, is already being implemented in water-scarce regions. Singapore, which imports about 90 percent of its food and was rated top in affordability, availability, quality, and safety, launched a program in 2019 aiming to produce 30 percent of its nutritional needs domestically by 2030 through aquaculture and hydroponics.