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Interactive map: tracking world hunger and food insecurity
Hunger is still one of the biggest and most soluble problems in the world.
Every day more than 700 million people (8.8% of the world’s population) go to bed hungry, according to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP).
WFP’s HungerMap LIVE displayed here tracks key indicators of acute hunger such as household food consumption, livelihoods, children’s nutritional status, mortality and access to clean water to rank countries.
After approaching 600 million from 2014 to 2019, the number of people worldwide affected by hunger increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2020, 155 million people (2% of the world’s population) suffered from acute hunger, requiring urgent assistance.
The fight to feed the world
The problem of world hunger is not new and attempts to solve it have been in the headlines for decades.
On July 13, 1985, at Wembley Stadium in London, Prince Charles and Princess Diana officially opened Live Aid, a global rock concert organized to raise funds to help famine-stricken Africans.
The event was followed by similar concerts in other arenas around the world, connected globally by satellite to more than a billion viewers in 110 countries, raising more than $ 125 million (today’s $ 309 million ‘hui) to fight famine in Africa.
But more than 35 years later, the continent is still struggling. According to the UN, out of 12 countries with the highest prevalence of insufficient food consumption in the world, nine are in Africa.
| Country | % of the population affected by hunger | Population (millions) | Region |
|---|---|---|---|
| Afghanistan | 93% | 40.4 | Asia |
| Somalia | 68% | 12.3 | Africa |
| Burkina Faso 🇧🇫 | 61% | 19.8 | Africa |
| South Sudan 🇸🇸 | 60% | 11.0 | Africa |
| Mali | 60% | 19.1 | Africa |
| Sierra Leone 🇸🇱 | 55% | 8.2 | Africa |
| Syria 🇸🇾 | 55% | 18.0 | Middle East |
| Niger | 55% | 22.4 | Africa |
| Lesotho | 50% | 2.1 | Africa |
| Guinea | 48% | 12.2 | Africa |
| Benin 🇧🇯 | 47% | 11.5 | Africa |
| Yemen 🇾🇪 | 44% | 30.0 | Middle East |
Approximately 30 million Africans face the effects of severe food insecurity, including malnutrition, famine and poverty.
Wasted leftovers
Although most of the reasons for the food crisis in the world involve conflict or environmental challenges, one of the main contributors is food waste.
According to the United Nations, a third of the food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted around the world. It comes down to about 1.3 billion tons of food wasted per year, worth around $ 1,000 billion.
All the food produced but never consumed would be enough to feed two billion people. This is more than double the number of undernourished people in the world. Consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food as all of sub-Saharan Africa’s net food production each year.
Solve world hunger
While many people may not be “hungry†in the sense of suffering from physical discomfort, they may still be food insecure, not having regular access to enough healthy and nutritious foods to keep them healthy. normal growth and development.
Estimates of the amount of money it would take to end world hunger range from $ 7 billion to $ 265 billion per year.
But to tackle the problem, investments must be used in the right places. Experts say governments and organizations need to deliver food and humanitarian assistance to regions most at risk, increase agricultural productivity and invest in more efficient supply chains.
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