War, economic chaos defied drive to end hunger in 2023: UN

Conflict, economic turbulence and extreme weather scuppered efforts to curb hunger last year, with around nine percent of the world's population affected, U.N. agencies said on Wednesday.

About 733 million people may have faced hunger in 2023, a level that has held steady for three years after a steep rise following the Covid-19 pandemic, they said in a report.

But the picture is uneven. While hunger affected one in every five people in Africa, compared with a global average of one in 11, Latin America and the Caribbean progressed and Asia stalled in the goal of eliminating undernourishment.

The broader goal of securing regular access to adequate food for everyone also stalled in that period.

Moderate or severe food insecurity, which forces people to occasionally skip meals, hit 2.33 billion people last year — almost 29 percent of the global population.

The report by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, UNICEF, the World Food Programme and the World Health Organization suggests the U.N. goal of a world without hunger by 2030 is fading further.

Conflicts, climate chaos and economic downturns are already known as major drivers of food insecurity and malnutrition that combine with underlying factors including persistent inequality, the unaffordability of healthy diets and unhealthy food environments.

But these major drivers are becoming more frequent and intense — and occurring concurrently more often — meaning more people are exposed to hunger and food insecurity, the report said.

A healthy diet was unaffordable for more than one third of the world's population in 2022, the report added, citing updated estimates.

Here too regional inequalities were...