The World Is Starving for Action—Not Just Data

A world of abundance is still cracking under the weight of food injustice.

This week, the United Nations released its annual global hunger report. The data is sobering, but even more disturbing is the inaction. Below is my personal reflection on the 2025 SOFI report, what it says, what it doesn’t, and what it demands of us.

On July 28, five major UN agencies released the 2025 edition of the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report. The findings are grim, though sadly unsurprising: 673 million people are going to bed hungry; that’s one in 12 people on Earth, or 8.2% of the global population. Another 2.3 billion are facing moderate to severe food insecurity.

Despite the world’s collective pledge to end hunger by 2030 under SDG 2, the hard truth is that global progress has stalled. In some places, it’s reversing.

The report confirms what many of us working in food systems have long feared: the pandemic-era surge in hunger was not an anomaly, but a preview of a new normal shaped by conflict, climate shocks, economic instability, and chronic underinvestment in resilience.

But the real question isn’t what the SOFI report says. It’s what the world will do with it.

A Dangerous Plateau in the Fight Against Hunger

For a brief moment after the pandemic’s peak, the numbers offered a glimmer of hope. From a record 738 million hungry people in 2021, the world saw a small decline in 2022 and 2023. But that trend flatlined in 2024. Now, in 2025, we’re backsliding: 45 million more people are hungry today than in 2019, before COVID-19 struck.

Africa remains the epicenter of global hunger. More than 20% of the continent's population is undernourished; that’s more than one in five, double the global average. Western Asia and parts of Latin America are also flashing red. Even in middle-income countries, healthy diets are slipping further out of reach. Over 3.1 billion people cannot afford one.

Meanwhile, severe food insecurity, the sharpest edge of the crisis, is affecting 867 million people, many of whom are living in fragile and conflict-affected states.

The Drivers Are Known. So Why the Delay in Response?

The SOFI 2025 report clearly lays out the four major culprits:

• persistent food price inflation

• armed conflict

• climate disasters

• economic instability

None of these are new. Yet what’s deeply worrying is how little we’ve evolved in our ability to respond.

Food prices remain stubbornly high. Conflict in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, etc continues to obliterate food systems; devastating supply chains, and pushing entire communities to the brink.

Climate change, once viewed as a long-term threat, is now a frequent and deadly disruptor. From crop-killing droughts in the Horn of Africa to floods in South Asia, farmers are being battered by forces beyond their control.

And across the Global South, a tightening noose of sovereign debt and currency devaluation is squeezing national governments, limiting their ability to shield their people from hunger’s advance.

What the Report Gets Right and Where It Falls Short

SOFI 2025 gets many things right. It elevates policies and programs that have helped cushion vulnerable populations from the worst shocks. Brazil’s expansive social protection initiatives continue to support millions. In Rwanda and Ethiopia, targeted nutrition programs have contributed to measurable reductions in childhood malnutrition. India’s release of 10 million tons of wheat from public reserves in July 2023 helped curb domestic price spikes, while the Black Sea Grain Initiative provided temporary relief to global cereal markets. Investments in school feeding, early warning systems, and efforts like Mali’s GIZ-backed sustainable agriculture push demonstrate the power of coordinated action, especially in countries with proactive emergency frameworks.

However, the report also falls short of where it matters most. It largely avoids confronting the deeper, structural forces that make food insecurity so persistent. For instance, it makes no mention of the growing financialization of food systems, where hedge funds and institutional investors engage in speculative trading of grain futures, fueling price volatility in wheat, maize, and soy. These dynamics disproportionately hurt low-income countries and make food less accessible to those already on the margins.

Equally absent is a serious reckoning with the consolidation of power across the agrifood value chain. A handful of corporations dominate everything from seeds and inputs to processing and distribution, distorting markets and limiting the agency of smallholder farmers and national governments alike. This concentration of control, and its consequences for equity and food sovereignty, receive little attention.

Most crucially, the report continues to frame hunger predominantly as a humanitarian or development issue, rather than the political and systemic crisis it truly is. While it rightly identifies conflict as one of the major drivers of food insecurity, it gives less attention to the reverse dynamic: how hunger itself can fuel unrest, deepen instability, and contribute to cycles of displacement and violence. In fragile contexts, this feedback loop can be devastating, and overlooking it limits our understanding of hunger’s full geopolitical weight and undermines the scale of response it demands.

These omissions highlight the need for a shift not just in how we respond, but in how we define and measure progress.

From Monitoring to Mandate: What Needs to Change

If we are to course-correct by 2030, three things must happen:

1. Track Financial and Structural Risk

Hunger is no longer just about weather or war. It’s about debt, speculation, trade power asymmetries, and the concentration of corporate control in agrifood systems. Future reports must track these forces, not just yields and calories.

2. Invest in Resilience, Not Just Relief

While emergency food aid is vital, the future depends on building resilience: local procurement systems, nutrition-sensitive agriculture, equitable land access, and farmer-led innovation. These should become new indicators of progress.

3. Respond in Real Time

We need a more dynamic, rolling global food security dashboard. The world shouldn’t have to wait 12 months to acknowledge famine. The tools exist. Now it’s a matter of political will.

The Bottom Line

I’ve read the SOFI report every year for a decade. It’s a powerful document. The data is essential, and the world is not short on it. We have tracked hunger’s trends for decades. What we lack is the courage to confront the systems that perpetuate scarcity amid abundance.

SOFI 2025 is a wake-up call, not because of its numbers, but for what it demands: an end to incrementalism.

To feed the future, we must dismantle the political and financial structures that normalize hunger and build resilient, equitable food systems.

The time for bold systems transformation is now.

If we want to feed the future, we must stop managing hunger and start ending it by confronting the systems that produce it in the first place.