World agriculture already has enough calories to feed all the people in the world, but hundreds of millions of people are still hungry every night. This is not a paradox of scarcity but one of access, distribution, and instability. Over 20 years ago the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and World Food Programme (WFP) noted that "hunger in a world of food abundance is principally a result of negligence, as it lies within mankind's capacity to put in place the policies, institutions, technologies and logistics both to prevent and eradicate hunger (FAO et al., 2002). More than two decades later, that observation remains strikingly true. Although the report notes modest improvements in global hunger over the past three years, the most recent State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report estimates that about 645 million people were hungry in 2025, and that about 2.7 billion people did not have access to a healthy diet (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, & WHO, 2026). Hunger is not a problem of food abundance, but is best understood as a product of a complex array of factors: armed conflict and displacement, poverty and unaffordability, climate volatility and increasing input costs, and chronic underinvestment in the rural economies of the majority of hungry people. If hunger is a systems failure, not a production failure, then the first step to improving real food security in the world is to understand this.
Abundance Without Access
Over the last 50 years, the world has seen a huge increase in its food production capacity. In fact, the historical analysis conducted by FAO revealed that agricultural production in the world has increased by about 17 percent per capita in the last 30 years despite a 70 percent increase in the world's population during the same period (FAO et al., 2002). This trend has continued ever since. Despite recent shocks, the World Bank's latest Food and Nutrition Security Update indicates that food supplies are "broadly adequate" on the global level, with overall cereal stocks remaining stable, though there has been a decline in stocks at the local level (World Bank, 2026). That is, there is no food shortage. What the world lacks is an effective system for getting food—and the income needed to buy it—to the people who need it most. According to the World Bank, food security is defined by four interdependent dimensions: physical availability, economic and physical access, utilization, and stability over time; and that food security objectives can only be achieved if all four dimensions are met (World Bank, n.d.). Availability is the dimension most closely related to production, yet it is the least significant determinant of today's hunger crisis. The system fails in terms of access and stability, which are influenced by income, markets, conflict and governance.
This is important because it shifts the policy dialogue. If hunger were a production problem, the answer would be agronomic, that is, better seeds, more fertilizer, more land. While these tools are still useful, they are not the answer to a crisis that stems from a family's lack of money to buy food already on the shelf, or from a farmer's fear of violence in the fields and not being able to plant a crop safely. The distribution and affordability issue is not a production constraint, as a world that wastes about one-third of the food it produces, or about 1.3 billion tonnes per year according to FAO estimates, and at the same time leaves hundreds of millions of people hungry is a world with a distribution and affordability problem. But it's not easy to accept, since it implies that hunger is not a random occurrence of nature, but the predictable result of decisions made about where investments, protection and assistance go and where they do not.
Conflict as the Primary Driver
The access-not-availability explanation is more evident in conflict areas, and Nigeria's worsening hunger crisis is a prime example. In November 2025, the WFP reported that the increased instability in northern Nigeria, including a rise in insurgent attacks, was "driving hunger to levels never seen before" (World Food Programme, 2025). The Cadre Harmonisé (CH) food security analysis estimated that almost 35 million Nigerians would be severely food insecure during the lean season of 2026, the highest in the country and the highest in Africa (World Food Programme, 2025). The New York Times reported on the human side of this statistic, noting that farmers are reluctant to go to their fields because of attacks and mass kidnappings, while one Nigerian agricultural economist explained that people are too scared to move from community to community (The New York Times, 2025). This is the heart of the conflict-hunger equation: it is not that the land has become less fertile; rather, farmers cannot safely access it, markets cannot operate safely, and humanitarian convoys cannot safely transport food where it is needed. This trend is echoed in the wider region, with the 2026 World Bank update indicating that 52.8 million people in West and Central Africa could experience acute food insecurity in the 2026 lean season, with over 34.7 million of these in Nigeria alone, due to conflict, displacement and economic pressures in the central Sahel and Lake Chad Basin. The same update documents indicated that parts of Sudan were at risk of famine due to the continuing conflict, and credible famine risk in parts of Somalia, while there were an estimated 44-47 million people across Eastern and Southern Africa in need of food assistance (World Bank, 2026).
This isn’t a geographical accident. The conflict-hunger cycle was a key characteristic of food insecurity that was identified over 20 years ago by FAO, IFAD, and WFP: "Very few new conflicts begin in a food secure environment, and hunger itself can be a cause of instability when people feel they have nothing to lose" (FAO et al., 2002). Conflict can break food systems, drive farmers out of their homes and cut off supply chains, and food insecurity can aggravate the sense of urgency and grievance that leads to more conflict. On top of this cycle, humanitarian funding has recently shrunk. The reduction in funding due to diminished international aid contributions has resulted in WFP scaling back its operations in the northeast of Nigeria from more than a million beneficiaries to a small proportion of that population (World Food Programme, 2025). Food insecurity does not just continue when conflict escalates at the same time that humanitarian capacity is declining.
Poverty, Affordability, and the Cost of a Healthy Diet
Where there is a market and food is available, poverty is the deciding factor in who can make it a meal. According to the latest SOFI report, a healthy diet is still unaffordable for about a third of the world's population, mainly in low-income and lower-middle-income countries, where low incomes and price fluctuations compound the issue of affordability (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, & WHO, 2026). At the household level, the June 2026 update to the World Bank's Food Price Index (FPI) confirms this: domestic food inflation declined in the high-income groups between April and May 2026, while it increased in the low-income groups, raising the proportion of countries with inflation rates above five percent from 40 to 45 percent (World Bank, 2026). Even small increases in food prices for poor households can lead to a decline in calorie consumption and dietary diversity, due to the fact that the poor already spend a larger portion of their income on food. This is why in years of good harvests around the world, hunger can still increase: global food abundance offers little relief if a family doesn't have the money to buy the food available.
This is exacerbated by chronic under-investment in the rural economies of the majority of poor and hungry people. FAO, IFAD, and WFP reported that about three-quarters of the poor in developing countries reside in rural areas and rely on agriculture, but that the average amount of government expenditure per agricultural worker in the poorest, most food-insecure countries is only a small fraction of that of wealthier, food-secure countries (FAO et al., 2002). The report also noted that official development assistance to agriculture had dropped significantly in the 1990s, despite the increasing need for investment, which was "worrying" and inconsistent with the role of agriculture in reducing poverty (FAO et al., 2002). Today, that imbalance – the ability to invest much more per farmer in stable countries than in fragile ones – is a structural barrier to sustainable food security.
Climate Volatility and Rising Input Costs
The third driver of conflict and poverty is the increasing volatility of the inputs and weather conditions on which farmers rely. According to the World Bank's 2026 update, global fertilizer prices increased 35 percent in the first five months of this year compared with the same period in 2025, due mainly to supply disruptions and geopolitical tensions in the regions where fertilizer is produced. This type of shock does not show up in the hunger statistics right away: the shock is felt months later as a result of lower applications, leading to lower harvests. Adding to this stress, the likelihood of El Niño conditions continuing into 2027 was estimated at approximately 82 percent, and could lead to a 20 to 50 percent reduction in rice production in the most vulnerable areas of South Asia, Southern Africa and East Asia (World Bank, 2026). Such shocks hit smallholder farmers hardest because they often lack the savings and infrastructure needed to withstand even a single poor season. This is a good example of how volatility, rather than scarcity, is a key component of the "stability" dimension of food security that the World Bank recognizes as being as important as availability, access and utilization (World Bank, n.d.).
Toward a Twin-Track Response
Hunger is not caused by a lack of food, but by multiple problems of access, affordability, and stability; solutions must focus on the problems of access, affordability, and stability, not on production. Twenty years ago, FAO, IFAD, and WFP put forward a "twin-track strategy" that involved both direct interventions to provide immediate food assistance to the very poorest (e.g., safety nets, school feeding, nutrition programs) and long-term investments in smallholder agriculture and rural development to establish durable pathways out of poverty (FAO et al., 2002). This model is still highly pertinent. Re-establishing and securing humanitarian funding in conflict-affected countries like Nigeria, Sudan and Somalia is critical in the short term, as food assistance in these countries is not a substitute for peace, but a lifeline that holds people together until peace returns. In the longer term, increasing public investment in smallholder agriculture, improving rural infrastructure and market access, and strengthening climate resilience by improving seed varieties, irrigation and early-warning systems can help lessen the vulnerability that can trigger humanitarian crises. Reducing the estimated 33% of food that is lost or wasted across global supply chains would also help relieve the pressure on prices and the environment without the need for more land and water (FAO, 2025).
Conclusion
Hunger is not proof that humanity has failed to solve a technical problem; it is proof that humanity has failed to solve a political and economic one. On the whole, harvests are adequate worldwide. What is lacking is protection from violence for farmers, income for households to buy food, resilience of agricultural systems to price and climate shocks, and political will to continue to invest and provide humanitarian assistance when it is needed most. Nigeria's crisis, Sudan's famine risk, and the millions of people around the world who cannot afford a healthy diet are not separate problems of agronomy; they are manifestations of failures in distribution, protection, and investment. Improving food security globally in the coming years will rely more on the development of peace, income security, and resilient food systems that will ensure that the food humanity already produces reaches every table than on the production of more food.
References
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2025). FAO policy series: Food loss and food waste. https://www.fao.org/policy-support/policy-themes/food-loss-and-food-waste/fao-policy-series--food-loss---food-waste
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, International Fund for Agricultural Development, & World Food Programme. (2002). Reducing poverty and hunger: The critical role of financing for food, agriculture and rural development. https://www.fao.org/4/y6265e/y6265e.pdf
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, International Fund for Agricultural Development, UNICEF, World Food Programme, & World Health Organization. (2026). The state of food security and nutrition in the world 2026. https://www.fao.org/publications/fao-flagship-publications/the-state-of-food-security-and-nutrition-in-the-world/en
The New York Times. (2025, November 25). Violence Is Driving Catastrophic Hunger in Nigeria, U.N. Report Says. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/world/africa/nigeria-food-violence-usaid.html
World Bank. (2026, June). Food and nutrition security update (Edition 123). https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/40ebbf38f5a6b68bfc11e5273e1405d4-0090012022/related/Food-and-Nutrition-Security-Update-edition-123-June-2026.pdf
World Bank. (n.d.). What is food security? There are four dimensions. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/agriculture/brief/food-security-update/what-is-food-security
World Food Programme. (2025, November 25). Increased insurgent attacks in Nigeria threaten regional stability and drive sharp spike in hunger. https://www.wfp.org/news/increased-insurgent-attacks-nigeria-threaten-regional-stability-and-drive-sharp-spike-hunger