2026 Global Hunger Index: A New Perspective on Food Security

For nearly two decades, the story of global hunger was one of hard-won, steady progress. That story is changing. The 2026 Global Hunger Index (GHI), released this month by Alliance 2015 partners Welthungerhilfe and Helvetas, and the Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict, records the first interruption in the long-term decline in global hunger since tracking began in 2000. The global score now stands at 18.1 — still “moderate,” but higher than 2018's 17.6, and a signal that the trendline development professionals have relied on for planning and advocacy is now bending the wrong way.

Here's what's driving that reversal, and what it means for how we talk about — and fund — food security.

Progress has stalled — and in some places, reversed

Between 2000 and 2018, the global GHI score fell by more than a third, moving the world from the “serious” to the “moderate” category. Since 2018, that progress has essentially flatlined, and for 32 countries, hunger has gotten measurably worse. Three of the four component indicators — undernourishment, child stunting and child wasting — deteriorated over that period; only child mortality kept improving.

There are also stark regional disparities. Africa South of the Sahara, already the world's most food-insecure region, posted its first increase in GHI score since tracking began, driven by rising undernourishment and child stunting. Somalia holds the highest score of any country this year (47.0), followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad and Madagascar. Nigeria recorded the largest single-country point increase in the entire report — from 28.2 in 2018 to 34.3 now — as insecurity in the north cut off access to markets and pastures.

South Asia remains the second-most food-insecure region, though its overall score has been comparatively flat since 2018. Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only countries in the region where scores have worsened over that period, both driven by rising undernourishment and, in Afghanistan's case, the return of 2.78 million refugees from neighboring countries in 2025 alone.

Not every region is moving backward. Latin America and the Caribbean continues to post the lowest regional score globally (7.4), and countries like Uganda, Venezuela, Togo, Nepal, and Rwanda have each cut their GHI scores by more than 25 percent since 2018 — genuine proof that sustained, multi-sector investment still work, even in a harder environment.

Conflict is the primary driver

Conflict remains the primary driver of acute food insecurity. Countries in chronic, severe conflict have a median GHI score of 22.1 — worse than the average score for countries at peace in the year 2000. That's a full generation of progress lost. Conflict-affected but not chronically-conflict countries score 14.2; countries with no conflict at all score 9.7.

This year's report also marks a grim first: 2025 saw Famine (IPC Phase 5) confirmed in two separate contexts — parts of Sudan and Gaza — in the same year, the first time that has happened since area-level famine classification began nearly two decades ago. Four of the six largest conflict-driven food crises globally are concentrated in Africa South of the Sahara: Nigeria, DRC, Sudan and South Sudan.

The report's six regional essays, written by practitioners and academics across Latin America, the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, Asia, Europe and West Asia/North Africa, converge on the same argument from different angles: Food insecurity and instability are mutually reinforcing, not sequential. Conflict destroys food systems; food insecurity, in turn, erodes trust in institutions and raises the risk of unrest. The Sahel essay in particular traces how insecurity restricts pastoral mobility and disrupts regional trade, while economic marginalization feeds recruitment into armed groups — a circular dynamic rather than a one-way causal chain.

New pressure on global food security

The report devotes a dedicated analysis to the escalation of the US-Israel-Iran conflict since early 2026 and its effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz — a chokepoint for roughly a third of global seaborne fertilizer trade. The authors frame this as the latest in a pattern: COVID-19, the Russia-Ukraine war, and now this conflict has each driven global commodity markets to eventually settle, while the hunger left in their wake recedes far more slowly, if at all.

Projections in the report suggest the current shock could push acute hunger up by 45 million people, with 8 to 19 million more people chronically undernourished by 2030 than in a no-shock scenario. For countries already dependent on Gulf fertilizer imports, many of whom also carry high humanitarian vulnerability, the exposure is compounding rather than additive.

The financing gap is now a measurement gap, too

Perhaps the most operationally relevant finding for our sector: Funding for food security and nutrition response in food crisis contexts fell in 2025 to levels last seen in 2016–2017. Only $10.55 billion of the $29 billion required had been received by the end of October. Nearly half of the global reduction in humanitarian assistance was concentrated in just five countries — Yemen, DRC, Somalia, Afghanistan and South Sudan — four of which carry this year's “alarming” designation.

That funding retreat is also degrading our ability to see the problem clearly. FEWS NET reporting was interrupted for six months in 2025 following the pause in US foreign assistance. The Global Report on Food Crises now has its lowest country coverage with technically adequate acute food insecurity data in a decade. Four countries — Burundi, Sudan, South Sudan and Yemen — could only be provisionally designated “alarming” this year because there wasn't enough data to calculate an actual score.

As the report's authors put it, where hunger goes unmeasured, it goes unanswered. For those of us who rely on GHI data and IPC classifications to make the case for funding, that's a genuine structural risk: The places facing the worst hunger burdens are increasingly the places we can least clearly document. This is happening, notably, against a backdrop of record global military spending in 2025, even as official development assistance has fallen for a third consecutive year and is projected to fall again in 2026.

Report recommendations

The GHI's policy section lands on four pillars for anyone doing advocacy or program design work in this space:

• Embed food and nutrition security into national security and resilience frameworks — not as an adjacent humanitarian concern, but as a core input to crisis preparedness planning, with dedicated and predictable multi-year funding.
• Invest in resilient, diversified food systems — reducing dependence on concentrated suppliers, trade routes and inputs, paired with expanded social protection that can scale quickly during shocks.
• Strengthen early warning and data systems, including sustained funding for data collection and access for independent monitoring in hard-to-reach settings.
• Intensify diplomacy to prevent and end conflict-induced hunger, including accountability for violations of UN Security Council Resolution 2417, which prohibits using starvation as a weapon of war.

Reshaping the narrative

The throughline here is a useful reframing of a long-discussed challenge: Food security isn't a downstream consequence of instability — it's a determinant of it. This moves the conversation from “hunger as symptom” to “hunger as structural risk factor,” which resonates more with audiences increasingly focused on peace, stability and resilience framing rather than pure humanitarian need.

The uncomfortable part of this report is that it arrives at a moment when the tools we'd normally reach for — humanitarian financing, monitoring capacity or political pressure — are all under strain simultaneously. The encouraging part is that the countries bucking the trend (Uganda, Nepal, Sierra Leone and Rwanda) show this isn't inevitable. Progress against hunger has never come from a single lever; it comes from sustained, overlapping investment in nutrition, health, education and social protection, linked beyond elections or funding cycles.