In 2025, 266 million people across 47 countries experienced high levels of acute food insecurity, according to the Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC). And as of 2024, 673 million people worldwide – roughly one in twelve – were undernourished.

Through the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of 2015, countries around the world pledged together to eradicate world hunger by 2030. With fewer than five years remaining, the situation has deteriorated and is in fact worse than it was when the goals were adopted. A sharp rise in world hunger occurred in 2020, which can be associated with the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. But there is a host of other factors driving food insecurity and undernourishment.

The attempt to fully understanding what is behind the problems that people face in putting food on the table, has led to the rise of the holistic concept of ‘food systems’. This concept “refers to the constellation of activities involved in producing, processing, transporting and consuming food”. It includes issues surrounding agricultural inputs and production, processing and storage, supply chains, distribution, pricing, and waste.

This article attempts to provide a broad overview of some of the issues facing food system around the world.

Harvesting cabbage, Bulgaria (Photo: sandsun / Shutterstock.com)

The current food crisis

As seen in the opening lines of this article, the challenges facing the world are daunting. In any given year, hundreds of millions of people suffer from acute hunger, which refers to a inadequate short-term consumption of calories and protein. Extreme shortages can quickly become life-threatening.

Chronic hunger, on the other hand, may not be immediately life-threatening, but it can have long-term effects, especially among children, where it can cause stunting and affect overall development. The number of people facing such chronic hunger is far greater than the number experiencing acute hunger.

The number of people suffering from acute food insecurity can be seen from data produced through the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system. This initiative is the collective work of a partnership of 21 organizations and intergovernmental institutions. The classification system ranks levels of acute hunger on a scale of one to five, with phase one referring to situations with minimal or no hunger, and phase five meaning a state of catastrophe or famine.

At the time of writing, some 138.7 million people in the 47 countries of greatest concern were considered to be in phase three or above – meaning a crisis situation. The countries with the highest number of people at these levels of hunger were Nigeria (34.8 million people), the Democratic Republic of Congo (26.5 million people), and Afghanistan (13.8 million people). People found to be suffering at catastrophe levels (phase five), were in Sudan (200,000 people), South Sudan (73,000 people), Nigeria (15,000 people), and Gaza (2,000 people).

Issues with food consumption are not simply about quantity, however. They also concern the quality of nutrition that can be obtained. Through this lens, the problem becomes even greater. It has been reported, for example, that 2.6 billion people – almost one in three people – are unable to afford a healthy diet. Conversely, as of 2022, as many as 890 million people were thought to be obese.

Beans on sale in a market, Uganda (Photo: Alliance of Biodiversity International and CIAT / Flickr [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0])

Conflict and climate change

At present it appears that, in terms of calories, there is still enough food being produced in the world to adequately feed its population. The fact that so many people are in situations of acute or chronic hunger suggests that there are problems with distribution. But the balanced distribution of food throughout the world is no simple task, and problems with distribution are difficult to separate from those with production.

Vast numbers of people rely primarily, for example, on locally produced foods. If, for some reason, the availability of local sources of foods is suddenly reduced or cut off, supplementing or replacing that food with distant sources has considerable logistical and cost implications.

Why might sources of food be cut off? Armed conflict is one such factor. It remains the leading cause of acute hunger in the world. All of the countries listed above are experiencing armed conflict, as are most other countries facing large-scale hunger, such as Somalia, Yemen, and Haiti. Conflict disrupts food production, blocks food supply chains, destroys livelihoods, and forces displacement. In some cases, belligerents to the conflict deliberately block the supply of food, effectively turning hunger into a weapon or war. Recent examples include actions by both major belligerents in Sudan, and by Israel in Gaza.

Natural disasters, such as droughts and floods, can affect food production and distribution in similar ways. Climate change amplifies these impacts, with extreme heat and other weather conditions making droughts and floods more prolonged, frequent, and/or intense. Damage to food production caused by climate change, both land-based and aquaculture, is long-term, and is expected to worsen over time.

Food-related aid

Emergency food aid, provided by UN agencies such as the World Food Programme (WFP), or local and foreign governments and non-governmental organizations, becomes an important stopgap measure in the case of acute hunger at times of crisis.

A large amount of this aid is provided in kind, with large quantities of food being shipped from the donor countries. This practice helps farmers in the donor country to sell their produce (in this case to the donor government), but it can be detrimental to farmers in the target country, as the influx of food depresses the prices for those who are able to produce and sell food. Local procurement of food aid is seen as a preferable way to maximize the benefit to those in need, and minimize the harm to local producers.

Checking for signs of malnutrition, Bangladesh (Photo: WFP_Shehzad-Noorani, via Peter Casier / Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0])

A more recent, and potentially more alarming shift, however, is the major decline in the levels of food aid being provided. This reflects overall de-prioritization of official development assistance in many high-income countries, which coincides with increasing military budgets in those countries. Between 2022 and 2025, the total amount of emergency aid provided for food and farming programs has fallen by 59%. This is likely to adversely affect millions of lives.

There is another factor behind the decline in available food aid. At the same time that the total amount of money available for food-related aid is decreasing, the cost of the food itself is increasing. As such, the amount of food that can be bought with the same amount of money is falling.

Food prices

This leads us to a broader issue facing food systems. Even if food is available in the right place at the right time, households will not be able to access that food if the price is unaffordable.

In recent years, the world as a whole has been experiencing considerable food inflation. The global trade in food sources has meant that prices are not impacted just by the situation in the immediate area surrounding the sources of production, but are increasingly impacted by global supply and demand. That is, food prices around the world are linked.

This inflation was seen most notably in 2021-2022, with the timing being linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and an increase in climate shocks in major food producing regions. But the inflation was not evenly distributed. One 2025 analysis showed that while many high-income countries were able to largely contain this inflation, double-digit inflation persisted in low- and middle-income countries, possibly due to a larger reliance on raw commodities.

Food at a deli, Canada (Photo: Dennis Sylvester Hurd / Flickr [Public domain])

The 2026 war launched by the US and Israel against Iran greatly exacerbated the problem. The resultant closing of the Strait of Hormuz prevented the export of oil and gas, causing a major rise in energy costs. This impacted the production of food in a number of ways – it raised the energy costs for ploughing, irrigation, harvesting, and added to the transportation costs for moving inputs and harvests. It has also impacted the production and distribution of nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers. The impact has been particularly damaging considering that as much as 30% of the world trade in fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz. Although it is too early to tell, the tentative reopening of the Strait in June 2025 appears to have improved the flow of fertilizer.

Commercialization and profiteering

Temporary shocks associated with pandemics and conflicts are not the only issues that need considering when looking at the pricing of food. There are a number of far more systemic factors that impact various levels of the value chain of food production and distribution. This includes the transfer of profits realized from food production and distribution from the producer of the raw materials to other actors.

This can be seen at the level of agricultural inputs. Powerful multinational agrochemical corporations and their state backers have worked in recent decades, for example, to introduce laws to African countries that force the privatization of seeds, allowing patent holders to profit from control over the trade in seeds. This raises the prices of seeds, and in some cases, it renders illegal the age-old practice of farmers sharing and exchanging their seeds.

Unfair trade in agricultural produce is also a chronic problem facing the global food industry. In the international value chain of food production and distribution, large corporations are able to exert considerable power in setting the price for agricultural produce. Thus, while powerful supermarkets and trading companies reap large profits from the distribution and sale of food, chronic poverty continues to affect many of the farmers, who are unable to secure a fair price for their produce.

Seeds from a farmer’s seed bank, Kenya (Photo: Alliance of Biodiversity International and CIAT / Flickr [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0])

Profiteering in the sale of agricultural produce through futures markets is another issue worth noting. Futures contracts were created to help market participants manage risk by locking in prices in advance, especially to hedge against events like poor harvests or sudden price changes. However, many futures trades are settled financially rather than through physical delivery of the underlying produce. As a result, the market can become dominated by speculation and by expectations about future supply and prices. In some situations, this can amplify volatility and create or intensify price swings, contributing to food price increases that impact vulnerable households.

Finally, financial considerations also have an impact on food waste. In some cases, for example, farmers may choose not to harvest (or destroy) produce if a buyer is not available, or if the price is insufficient. At the retail level, companies tend to discard edible foods that don’t match certain cosmetic standards that they believe are expected by the customers. They may also overstock foods to avoid running out of supply, later discarding the excess. These are some of the factors behind the large-scale discarding of agricultural produce after production.

The rise of the concept of food systems

With these interconnected issues in mind, how are measures to improve food systems being coordinated? Activities associated with the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition (2016-2025, later extended to 2030) emphasized the concept of ‘food systems’, and were instrumental in promoting greater awareness of a need for a more holistic approach towards the issue of food.

These activities laid the groundwork for a Food Systems Summit held in 2021, which aimed to “awaken the world to the fact that we all must work together to transform the way the world produces, consumes and thinks about food”. This was not simply a political event for the heads of state of members of the UN. It was held in conjunction with groups representing farmers, women, youth, indigenous, and other civil society actors from around the world.

UN Food Systems Stocktake, Addis Ababa, 2025 (Photo: Ecuador Dice No Más / Wikimedia Commons [Public domain])

The Summit established five action tracks, “with a view to fostering new actions and partnerships and amplifying existing initiatives”. The tracks were set out as follows: 1) Ensuring access to safe and nutritious food; 2) shifting to sustainable consumption patterns; 3) boosting nature-positive production; 4) advancing equitable livelihoods; and 5) building resilience to vulnerabilities, shocks and stress. Further stocktaking summits have since been held in Rome in 2023 and Addis Ababa in 2025.

While these measures are promising, progress in improving food systems and reducing global food insecurity remains limited. Lasting improvement will require much greater coordinated efforts that address the root causes of the problem.

Writer: Virgil Hawkins