Global food insecurity: The shocking numbers
In October 2023, the World Bank published the updated World Food Security Outlook (WFSO) report designed to monitor and analyze global food security, offering insights into severe food insecurity worldwide. Key components of the WFSO cover severe food insecurity prevalence, estimates for countries lacking official data, population sizes of the severely food insecure, and required safety net financing. One of its primary uses lies in complementing official data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) published in the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report, filling in gaps for unreported countries and a forward-looking view based on a machine learning model that leverages the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI) database and the IMF’s World Economic Outlook (WEO).
The WFSO includes estimates for safety net financing needs following past International Development Association (IDA) approaches originally used in IDA (2020). In the World Bank Food Security Update for December 2023, the October 2023 WFSO was used to analyze major trends in global food security. At a glance, the latest projections suggest that global food security conditions are stabilizing slowly in 2024, but that disparities between income groups are increasing.
Disparities among Income Groups: Widening Divides
The October 2023 WFSO shows stark disparities among income groups, revealing that the overall stabilization in global food security masks underlying challenges. While upper middle-income countries show promising improvements, lower middle-income nations experience only short-term gains, and low-income countries face a projected further increase in food insecure populations. Heavily indebted poor countries are particularly vulnerable, facing both economic challenges and elevated levels of food insecurity. As global food security conditions evolve, the financial requirements to establish safety nets are escalating. The WFSO projects an annual financing need of $41 billion in International Development Association (IDA) countries and $47 billion in International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) countries, nearly doubling pre-pandemic estimates.
Projections indicate a continuous increase in safety net costs for low-income counties and lower middle-income countries. To provide a basic social safety net that covers 25 percent of daily caloric needs for the acutely food insecure, the World Food Security Outlook (WFSO) estimates annual global financing needs at approximately $90 billion from now until 2030. However, in scenarios of heightened inflation, lower economic growth, and high commodity prices, these needs could reach 1.3 times the current estimates, elevating annual financial requirements to around $120 billion. Additionally, addressing malnutrition among women and children is estimated to cost over $11 billion annually while transforming the global food system may demand $300-400 billion each year. Collectively, these expenses could total up to $500 billion annually necessary for addressing worldwide food and nutrition security. This figure, represents roughly 0.5% of global GDP (but) is likely conservative, as it does not fully account for complete caloric needs or adequate nutrition, nor does it reverse the long-term impacts of current malnutrition. The burden of these costs is disproportionately heavy for low-income countries, where the required funding instead equates to about 95% of their total GDP. This highlights the need for a shared global responsibility in addressing these challenges.
Note: This edited article is published to help readers better understand the issue of global food insecurity in the context of challenges confronting the wider international community.