Overview

• FAO’s latest assessment estimates 673 million people were undernourished in 2024 (8.2%) and about 2.3 billion faced moderate or severe food insecurity, a slight improvement from 2023 with stark regional gaps.
• At FAO headquarters in Rome, Pope León XIV condemned the use of hunger as a weapon of war, while Queen Letizia argued that only multilateral cooperation can safeguard the right to food and cited 600 million people facing hunger and nearly 3 billion unable to afford healthy diets.
• Projections reported from the FAO analysis indicate roughly 512 million people could still face chronic undernourishment by 2030 if current trends continue, with Africa carrying nearly 60% of that burden.
• In Mexico, 55.7 million people live with food insecurity even as the country records very high adult obesity, leading the world in sugary drink consumption at 163 liters per person annually and wasting 20 million tons of food each year.
• In Peru, specialists report that 41% of the population—about 13.9 million people—experiences moderate or severe food insecurity and a third cannot afford a healthy diet costing $4.34 per day, underscoring implementation gaps in national policy as FAO’s 2025 theme emphasizes that water is life and food.