For the sixth year in a row, the number of people facing high levels of acute food insecurity continued to rise in 2024. According to the 2025 Global Report on Food Crises, an estimated 295.3 million people – 22.6 per cent of the analysed population – faced high levels of acute food insecurity in 53 of the analysed countries/territories in 2024. This is an increase of 13.7 million people compared to the 2023 figures.
Published by the Global Network Against Food Crises, the report warns that acute food insecurity worsened in 2024. The number of people facing IPC5 or catastrophic levels of hunger more than doubled – the majority of whom were in Palestine, Sudan, South Sudan, Haiti and Mali. In IPC5, populations face an extreme lack of food and coping capacities, leading to starvation, acute malnutrition and death. This was the lived reality for an estimated 1.9 million people in 2024.
The 2025 report includes a greater focus on malnutrition, with new data estimating that 26 of the 53 analysed countries faced nutrition crises. 37.7 million children between 6 and 59 months were acutely malnourished in 2024, and more than 10 million suffered from severe acute malnutrition or wasting.
Additionally, the report presents a bleak outlook for 2025 due to worsening conflict/insecurity, geopolitical tensions, identifying weather extremes, economic uncertainty and funding cuts to foreign assistance – all of which are predicted to worsen food and nutrition insecurity this year.
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