Sudan is the worst starvation crisis in the world right now, with roughly 21.2 million people facing serious food insecurity as of 2025. Famine, the most extreme classification on the international hunger scale, has been officially confirmed there in multiple locations. Several other countries are close behind, including the Gaza Strip, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, and Haiti.
How Starvation Severity Is Measured
The international system used to rank hunger crises is the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC. It runs from Phase 1 (minimal food insecurity) to Phase 5 (catastrophe or famine). Phase 5 means people are starving to death: households have no food and no remaining ways to cope. For an entire area to be declared in famine, it must show extreme levels of acute malnutrition and rising death rates simultaneously. Very few places reach that threshold, and when they do, it signals a catastrophic failure of food access.
Sudan: The World’s Worst Crisis
Sudan’s civil war, which erupted in April 2023, has created the largest hunger emergency on the planet. As of September 2025, an estimated 21.2 million people, roughly 45 percent of the country’s population, were facing high levels of acute food insecurity. Of those, 6.3 million were in the emergency phase and 375,000 were in the most extreme category, where starvation and death are actively occurring.
Famine has been officially confirmed in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, and in the besieged town of Kadugli in South Kordofan. Earlier confirmations in 2024 identified famine conditions in several displacement camps in North Darfur, including Zamzam, Abu Shouk, and Al Salam, as well as the Western Nuba Mountains. The pattern has been one of steady expansion: areas that were in crisis six months ago tip into famine as fighting cuts off supply routes and displaces more people.
Twenty additional areas across North, South, and East Darfur, plus West and South Kordofan, are considered at high risk of famine because they continue to receive waves of displaced people with no reliable food supply.
Gaza Strip
The Gaza Strip has experienced a rapid collapse in food access since late 2023. Malnutrition-related deaths have accelerated sharply: of 74 such deaths recorded in 2025, 63 occurred in July alone, including 24 children under five and 38 adults. The World Health Organization noted that most of these people were declared dead on arrival at health facilities or died shortly after, their bodies showing clear signs of severe wasting. The combination of a small, densely populated territory with heavily restricted supply routes has made the speed of deterioration unusually fast compared to other crises.
Democratic Republic of the Congo
The eastern provinces of the DRC have been in a prolonged hunger crisis driven by armed conflict. Between January and June 2025, an estimated 27.7 million Congolese, about 24 percent of the analyzed population, were facing high levels of food insecurity. The worst-hit provinces are North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri, and Tanganyika, where more than 10.3 million people were in crisis or worse, including 2.3 million in the emergency phase.
The situation worsened after the forced closure of six camps for displaced people in and around Goma and surrounding territories in early 2025, triggered by intensified fighting. When camps close, families scatter into areas with even less infrastructure and food access, compounding the crisis.
Somalia
Somalia narrowly avoided a formal famine declaration in 2022 and remains deeply fragile. Between July and September 2025, around 3.4 million people were facing high levels of acute food insecurity. Of those, 624,000 were at emergency levels. Conditions are projected to worsen through the end of 2025 as seasonal rains fall below normal, pushing the number of people in crisis to 4.4 million, or 23 percent of the population. Conflict, high food prices, and localized flooding are all contributing factors.
Haiti
Haiti stands out as the only country in the Western Hemisphere with confirmed Phase 5 conditions. Nearly half the population, 48 percent, was facing high levels of acute food insecurity between August 2024 and February 2025. About 6,000 people were in the catastrophe phase, and another 2 million were at emergency levels. Gang violence in and around Port-au-Prince has disrupted supply chains so severely that basic food cannot reliably reach large parts of the country.
Other Countries With Alarming Hunger
The 2024 Global Hunger Index flagged six countries with alarming levels of hunger: Burundi, Madagascar, Somalia, South Sudan, Yemen, and Chad. Several of these, particularly Yemen and South Sudan, have been in protracted crises for years, with conflict and economic collapse keeping food insecurity locked at dangerous levels. Yemen’s hunger emergency is tied to a long-running war and import dependency, while South Sudan faces recurring flooding and intercommunal violence on top of its fragile post-conflict economy.
What Drives These Crises
Conflict is the dominant driver behind nearly every location on this list. Wars destroy farmland, block supply routes, displace millions of people from their livelihoods, and make humanitarian access dangerous or impossible. In Sudan, the DRC, Gaza, Somalia, and Haiti, armed violence is the primary reason food cannot reach the people who need it.
Extreme weather compounds the problem. Droughts in the Horn of Africa and flooding in parts of the DRC and South Sudan destroy harvests and kill livestock, eliminating the food sources that communities fall back on when markets fail. Economic shocks, particularly currency collapse and inflation, push food prices beyond what families can afford even when food is technically available. And critically, international humanitarian funding has fallen short of what these crises demand, forcing aid organizations to cut rations or narrow the populations they serve at precisely the moment need is greatest.
These drivers rarely appear in isolation. The worst starvation zones are places where two, three, or all four converge at once, creating conditions that overwhelm any single intervention.