World hunger affects roughly 733 million people, or about one in eleven people on the planet. That number has barely budged for three consecutive years, stuck at elevated levels since a sharp increase during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. But hunger doesn’t fall evenly across the globe. Certain regions, age groups, and communities bear a vastly disproportionate share.
Where Hunger Hits Hardest
Africa is the most severely affected continent. More than 20 percent of Africa’s population faced hunger in 2024, totaling 307 million people. That’s roughly one in five people across the continent, and the situation is getting worse rather than better.
Asia has the largest absolute number of hungry people: 323 million in 2024. However, the trend there is moving in the right direction. The share of Asia’s population going hungry dropped from 7.9 percent in 2022 to 6.7 percent in 2024, with southern Asia seeing particularly notable improvement.
Western Asia stands out as a second area of growing concern, where an estimated 12.7 percent of the population (more than 39 million people) faced hunger in 2024. Latin America and the Caribbean, by contrast, have made real progress, bringing hunger rates down to 5.1 percent (34 million people) after peaking at 6.1 percent in 2020.
Children Under Five
Young children are among the most vulnerable to hunger’s effects, and the consequences for them are physical and often permanent. In 2024, 150.2 million children under five were stunted, meaning their bodies had not grown to the height expected for their age. That represents 23.2 percent of all children in that age group worldwide. Stunting reflects chronic undernutrition and can impair brain development, limit learning ability, and reduce earning potential for a lifetime.
Another 42.8 million children under five were wasted, meaning they were dangerously thin for their height. Wasting signals acute malnutrition and carries an immediate risk of death, especially when combined with infectious diseases like diarrhea or pneumonia that a well-nourished child might survive.
Women Face Higher Rates Than Men
Hunger does not affect men and women equally. Globally, women are 2 percent more likely than men to experience severe food insecurity and between 1.7 and 4.2 percent more likely to experience milder forms. Those gaps may sound small in percentage terms, but applied across billions of people, they translate to tens of millions more women going without adequate food. The disparity stems from overlapping factors: women in many countries have less access to land, credit, and paid work, and they are often the last to eat within their own households.
Rural Communities Bear the Greatest Burden
People living in the countryside are consistently hungrier than people living in cities. Globally, 31.9 percent of rural populations face moderate or severe food insecurity, compared to 25.5 percent in urban areas. Peri-urban areas (the outskirts of cities) fall in between at 29.9 percent. This pattern holds across every world region except North America and Europe. It may seem counterintuitive that people who live closest to farmland go hungry more often, but rural communities typically have less access to markets, infrastructure, healthcare, and economic opportunity.
People Living in Conflict Zones
Armed conflict is the single biggest driver of the most extreme forms of hunger. In 2023, conflict pushed 135 million people across 20 countries into acute food insecurity. Overall, nearly 282 million people in 59 countries experienced high levels of acute hunger that year, up 24 million from the year before. War destroys farmland, disrupts supply chains, displaces families, and makes humanitarian aid delivery dangerous or impossible.
The most extreme example in recent data is the Gaza Strip, where over 495,000 people (22 percent of the population) reached catastrophic levels of food insecurity in mid-2024. At that level, households face outright starvation, with no remaining ways to cope. Famine conditions like these are rare globally but devastating when they occur, and they are almost always linked to conflict.
The Broader Picture: 2.33 Billion People
The 733 million figure captures people who are undernourished, meaning they consistently lack enough calories. But hunger exists on a spectrum. When you include people facing moderate food insecurity, those who skip meals, eat less nutritious food, or go entire days without eating on a regular basis, the number jumps to 2.33 billion. That’s nearly one in three people on Earth, and the figure has remained stubbornly high since the pandemic-era surge.
Moderate food insecurity doesn’t always look like what people picture when they think of hunger. It includes families who can afford rice but not vegetables, parents who feed their children but skip their own meals, and workers whose calorie intake drops during lean seasons. Over time, this kind of chronic inadequacy leads to micronutrient deficiencies, weakened immune systems, and reduced productivity, even if it never reaches the point of visible starvation.