For the third year running, the number of people going hungry in the world got smaller [1]. The UN's flagship food-security report, released July 21, put global hunger at about 645 million people in 2025 - 7.8 percent of everyone alive, down from 8.1 percent the year before [1].
The year-on-year change is roughly 14 million fewer people hungry, and the distance from the 2022 peak is larger still: 43 million [1]. Behind the percentages are harvests that came in, prices that eased, and safety nets that held in the places that count them.
The gains were not evenly spread - the biggest improvements were in South America and Southern Asia - but the most telling line is about Africa, which recorded its first reversal of a rising-hunger trend since 2017 [1]. A curve that had been bending the wrong way for years finally bent back.
The report, produced by the FAO with IFAD, WHO and the World Food Programme, carries the usual honest caveat that progress is uneven and can stall [1]. Three consecutive years of it, though, is the shape of something real: not a world that has solved hunger, but one that, for now, is walking it back.
