Hunger Doubled to 266 Million While the Aid Meant to Meet It Fell Back to 2016 Levels

Acute hunger has doubled worldwide over the past decade and now affects 266 million people across 47 countries and territories, according to a report released by Action Against Hunger ahead of World Food Day on October 16. The same report finds that humanitarian food aid in crisis-hit countries fell by 59 percent between 2022 and 2025, returning to levels last recorded in 2016 and 2017.

The two figures describe a single problem. Need rose while the response to it retreated.

The report, titled The 10 Largest Global Food Crises, draws on the 2026 Global Report on Food Crises, FAO-WFP Hunger Hotspots reports and Action Against Hunger operations in more than 50 countries. That separate Global Report on Food Crises 2026, released by an international alliance, independently shows acute hunger doubling over the past decade. It records two famines declared last year — the first in the report's history — and finds ten countries accounted for two-thirds of acute food insecurity.

The concentration is sharp. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and Sudan account for 82.9 million people facing acute hunger, roughly a third of the global total. The crisis is global in scale and heavily localised in impact.

Funding is contracting on two fronts. Official development assistance declined by 23 percent in 2025, with a further drop expected. Humanitarian food aid to crisis-hit countries is now back where it stood in 2016 and 2017, before the decade-long rise in acute hunger.

What it documents is a widening gap between the number of people who need emergency food assistance and the resources reaching them.

Several questions remain open. The report does not name the locations of the two famines declared last year, and it does not specify which countries and territories make up the 47 affected. How the expected further decline in development assistance will affect emergency food assistance in 2026 is not yet quantified.

World Food Day is marked on October 16, the date the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations was founded in 1945.