By Siena Cicarelli and Noah Fritzhand
In July 2025, a grouping of UN Agencies (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, and WHO) released the 2025 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI), an annual accounting of hunger, food security, and nutrition worldwide. The report was launched in tandem with the United Nations Food Systems Summit +4 Stocktake (UNFSS+4) in Ethiopia – a convening of ~3000 stakeholders on whether efforts to transform the agri-food system are working to achieve multilateral sustainable development and nutrition goals.
This year’s UNFSS+4 and SOFI both demonstrated that political, environmental, and financial challenges have overshadowed incremental steps toward ending hunger and malnutrition. For example, while the most recent data shows a slight downward trend in hunger, with 8.2 percent of the global population facing hunger in 2024 compared to 8.5 percent in 2023 and 8.7 percent in 2022, other indicators like food unaffordability, malnutrition, and regional disparities remain firmly entrenched. Gendered gaps in food security, nutrition, and other critical health indicators also increased between 2023 and 2024, as women and other vulnerable populations continue to be disproportionately affected by hunger and malnutrition. It’s also worthwhile to note that the 2025 SOFI largely predated the dissolution of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Resulting funding and expertise gaps – combined with broader policy shifts throughout the United States and Europe – are expected to worsen the state of food security and global nutrition in future reporting.
Overall, these trends present real security risks, as persistent inequality, hunger, price inflation, biosecurity threats, and more have the power to spiral into inter- or intra-state conflict, enhance governance challenges, and fuel recruitment by extremist organizations. Policymakers and security actors must therefore make note of the key themes from this year’s SOFI and UNFSS+4 – and take steps to mitigate these security risks:
- Conflict continues to be a primary driver of food insecurity: Conflict remains the main driver of acute hunger and famine, with the two often trapped in a persistent feedback loop at the expense of local populations’ food security and agricultural resources. The food crises highlighted in the SOFI and at UNFSS+4 – including Haiti, Palestine, Sudan, and South Sudan – all exist in the context of conflict or armed violence, as well as state fragility. This complicates the delivery of aid or emergency assistance, challenges diplomatic efforts, and often damages local supply chains. Notably, while the weaponization of food and agricultural resources is hardly a new phenomenon, reporting emphasizes the recent uptick in states leveraging food as a central strategic pillar in armed conflict. This includes Russia’s strategic targeting of Ukraine’s agricultural infrastructure and subsequent food security challenges well beyond the boundaries of the conflict itself, as well as Israel’s repeated blockades of food aid and systematic destruction of nearly all farmland and fishing supplies in Gaza. Elsewhere, violent non-state actors have also continued to leverage food insecurity as a recruitment tool, promising access to additional food sources and controlling access within their area of influence.
- Food price inflation and unaffordability exacerbate existing gaps: A key theme of this year’s SOFI was that ongoing global food price inflation has worsened existing food access and nutrition inequalities in low-income countries (LICs) and low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Inflation rates have exceeded 10% in 65% of LICs and 61% of LMICs and have disproportionately inflated the price of nutrient-dense foods, making healthy diets unattainable for one-third of the global population. This has led to increased food insecurity in particularly vulnerable demographics such as women, children, rural households, and the poor. Combined with gender-based income inequality and other systemic inequalities, food price inflation compounds to leave vulnerable communities more at risk to the impacts of climate change and conflict.
- Extreme weather events and cascading climate risks threaten agri-food systems: As the impacts of climate change accelerate, extreme weather events and unanticipated weather patterns pose serious threats to agri-food systems. This includes floods, droughts, cyclones, and erratic rainfall patterns, all of which disrupt traditional growing seasons, risk crop yields, and heighten vulnerability. As funding for food and emergency assistance falls significantly short, millions could be driven further into poverty, or if capable, forced to permanently migrate away from their homes. The UNFSS+4 Summit and SOFI both recognized the need to better acknowledge these impacts – and dismantle silos between the food and climate communities.
- Uneven regional gains persist – leaving African partners at risk: Despite a global decrease in the prevalence of undernourishment (PoU) from 8.5% in 2023 to 8.2% in 2024, these gains are not uniform across all regions. In fact, regional differences are quite stark. In South-eastern Asia, Southern Asia, and Latin America, for example, PoU dropped 0.3%, 1.2%, and 0.3%, respectively. This is in contrast to Africa, where hunger levels rose across the entire continent except Eastern Africa. It is estimated that more than one in five people in Africa are now facing chronic hunger. In the context of already-fragile governments, steadily diminishing foreign assistance, and high debt levels, these trends represent a strong warning light for African governments and their partners – and a security risk down the line.
- Clear threats at the nexus between biosecurity and food security: This year’s SOFI highlighted that biological threats such as animal diseases and plant pests have “emerged as potent inflationary forces in global food markets.” This includes recent outbreaks of swine fever and bird flu, which have driven the slaughter of thousands of livestock and raised prices on pork and eggs, as well as the climate-fueled spread of plant pests and diseases into new regions. From a security perspective, these biological threats have the potential to be weaponized by state or non-state actors to disrupt harvests, raise prices for local consumers, or spread disease. When combined with uneven or under-regulation, this bio-food nexus offers ample opportunities for biological threats to threaten or even collapse key elements of the agri-food system.
The 2025 SOFI report demonstrates that despite marginal progress, the systemic changes needed to manage risks at the nexus of food, climate, and national security have gained little traction. Although global expenditures on agriculture increased in 2024, spending in other sectors increased proportionally—meaning the percentage share stayed stagnant at 2.3%.
The lack of systemic progress is also evidenced by this year’s Independent Stakeholder Report, released at the UNFSS+4 Summit alongside the SOFI, which highlighted calls from non-state actors involved in food systems transformation for more equitable and inclusive governance structures, investments in crisis-sensitive frameworks, and to embed food security considerations into existing national strategies (i.e., NDCs, adaptation plans, social protection plans, etc.). Increased investments are critical for helping mitigate the impacts of future climate and conflict shocks. Such investments could be targeted at resilient transport infrastructure (i.e., maritime corridors and ports), resilient storage infrastructure (i.e., warehouses and cold chains), and small/medium-sized sourcing, processing, packaging, and distributing enterprises. Investments in these sub-sectors can help limit the risks at critical bottlenecks and minimize post-harvest losses. These actions, alongside investments in social protections such as temporary tax relief on essential goods, can help address food security risks in both the short- and long-term horizons.
Ultimately, the SOFI and UNFSS+4 serve as yet another indicator of the changes needed to build systemic resilience to climate and conflict shocks. As multilateral leaders prepare for upcoming high-level discussions at UN High-Level Week, COP, and the G20 this fall, it’s critical that the nexus of security and agri-food systems remains on the investment and policy agenda.