For every five plates of food served around the world, roughly one ends up in the bin. That adds up to more than a billion tonnes of food a year. Meanwhile, 645 million people, about one in 13 of the world’s population, went hungry in 2025, according to the UN.
That gap is the focus of World Food Day on October 16, the annual UN observance marking the founding of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 1945. This year’s theme, “Innovate today, nourish tomorrow”, calls for food systems that feed more people and waste less. In this visual explainer, Al Jazeera looks at global hunger, which countries waste the most food and simple ways to waste less at home.
Global hunger has fallen for a third year in a row, but it remains above levels seen before the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the UN’s annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, an estimated 645 million people, or 7.8 percent of the world’s population, faced hunger in 2025. That is down from 8.1 percent in 2024 and a peak of 8.6 percent in 2022, but still about 61 million more people than in 2019.
Africa has more hungry people than any other region. In 2025, an estimated 309 million people in Africa were undernourished. That is one in five people on the continent and almost half of the world’s hungry people.
By comparison, 292 million people in Asia (6 percent of the population) and 32 million in Latin America and the Caribbean (4.8 percent) were undernourished. The 2026 Global Hunger Index shows a similar pattern at the country level. The index scores countries out of 100, combining undernourishment with child stunting, child wasting and child mortality.
Scores of 35 or more are considered “alarming”. Hunger is classed as alarming in eight countries, seven of them in Africa. Somalia has the worst score of the 122 countries ranked, followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Chad and Madagascar.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
