Progress made on eliminating global hunger
LANGHAM, Sask. — Global hunger levels have eased for the third consecutive year, according to a new report.
An estimated 645 million people experienced chronic hunger in 2025, according to The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026 report released by five United Nations agencies.
That means 7.8 per cent of the global population faced hunger last year, down from 8.1 per cent the year before.
That is still way too many people experiencing chronic hunger, Rick Block, Saskatchewan regional representative for the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, said during an interview at the 2026 Ag in Motion show in Langham, Sask.
“That doesn’t mean that you’re intermittently hungry or didn’t quite have enough to eat on a particular day,” he said.
“That means on a daily basis, or definitely through certain seasons of the year, that there is prevalent hunger at the household level.”
COVID disrupted what had been a long downward trajectory in curbing global hunger, but the world appears to be back on track following the global pandemic with a reduction of 14 million hungry people in 2025.
Why it Matters: Food aid groups are worried about what the future holds due to global cuts to international aid.
Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean have recorded steady improvements in recent years.
Africa now has the dubious distinction of being the world leader with 309 million hungry people compared to Asia’s 292 million.
Prolonged drought in the Horn of Africa, combined with conflict in places like Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has created difficult conditions for subsistence farmers, many of whom have been displaced from their land.
“It’s really sad to think of all this highly productive land in various regions no longer producing any food,” said Block.
Julia Saez, senior policy advisor with the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, said the 2025 reduction should be celebrated but added that the numbers are still above pre-COVID levels.
“It was going down and then it went back up, and so to see it going down again is really positive and it is really encouraging,” she said.
But she worries about what is to come because we have yet to see the impact of recent global cuts to development assistance programs.
Many traditional donor countries are drastically reducing food aid funding.
That includes Canada, which is slashing its foreign aid budget by $2.7 billion over the next four years.
Block said donations to the Canadian Foodgrains Bank soared during COVID because people had more disposable income and got firsthand experience of how serious supply chain shortages can be.
“We saw Canadians, in some ways, double down,” he said.
Donations have since returned to more normal levels.
The organization received $20.8 million in private donations in 2025-26, while Global Affairs Canada chipped in another $38 million. Adding in contributions from other organizations, the total raised was $72.8 million.
The bulk of that money was spent on 120 projects in 34 countries that helped 1.16 million people.
Block noted that the cost of a healthy diet has increased by 24 per cent over the last five years.
“We’re not the only ones with more costly groceries,” he said.
But while costs went up, incomes available to purchase food increased by more, so the number of people unable to afford a healthy diet dropped to 2.69 billion in 2025, down from 2.97 billion in 2021.
The cost of a healthy diet is most out of reach in Africa where two-thirds of the population cannot afford it.
The UN hopes to continue making progress on eliminating global hunger, targeting a sizeable drop to 503 million people by 2030.
However, if the conflict in the Middle East drags out that number could rise to 510 to 520 million due to high energy and fertilizer prices driving up the cost of food.
