Between 2014 and the onset of the pandemic, the number of people going hungry and suffering from food insecurity had been gradually rising. The COVID-19 crisis has pushed those rising rates even higher. The war in Ukraine is further disrupting global food supply chains and creating the biggest global food crisis since the Second World War. The COVID-19 crisis has also exacerbated all forms of malnutrition, particularly in children.

In 2020, between 720 and 811 million persons worldwide were suffering from hunger, as many as 161 million more than in 2019. Also in 2020, over 30 percent – a staggering 2.4 billion people – were moderately or severely food-insecure, lacking regular access to adequate food. This represents an increase of almost 320 million people in the course of just one year.

Globally, 149.2 million children under five years of age, or 22.0 percent, were suffering from stunting (low height for age) in 20202, the proportion has decreased from 24.4 percent in 2015. These numbers may become higher, however, owing to continued constraints on accessing nutritious diets and essential nutrition services during the pandemic, with the full impact possibly taking years to manifest itself. To achieve the target of a 5 percent reduction in the number of stunted children by 2025, the current rate of decline of 2.1 percent per year must double through global efforts to 3.9 percent per year.

In 20202, wasting (low weight for height) affected 45.4 million children under five years of age (6.7 percent) and overweight affected 38.9 million children under five years of age (5.7 percent). Wasting will be one of the conditions most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in the short term; about 15 percent more children than currently estimated may have been suffering from wasting, owing to deterioration in household wealth and disruptions in the availability and affordability of nutritious food and essential nutrition services. Childhood overweight may also be on the rise in some countries where unhealthy food replaced fresh, nutritious food and movement restrictions have constrained opportunities for physical activity for long periods of time.

In women, anemia increases the risk of adverse maternal and neonatal outcomes. Since 2015, the prevalence of anemia in women of reproductive age has been stagnant globally, with over half a billion women aged 15-49 years with anemia in 2019, representing a prevalence of 29.9 percent (29.6 percent in non-pregnant women and 36.5 percent in pregnant women).

In three-quarters of the limited number of countries with data, small-scale food producers show an average annual income of less than half that of large-scale food producers. Similarly, the labor productivity of small-scale food producers continues to lag behind that of larger-scale producers. Among small-scale food producers, the income of women-headed production units is systematically lower than the income of those units headed by men, accounting for half of the countries to only 50-70 percent of the income of the units headed by men.

The world is still far from maintaining the genetic diversity of farmed and domesticated animals, either in the field or in gene banks. For 62 percent of local livestock breeds, the risk status remains unknown. Of the limited number of surveyed local livestock breeds, 72 percent are deemed at risk of extinction. At the same time, only 277 out of a global total of 7,704 local livestock breeds are sufficient material in gene banks to reconstitute the breeds in case of extinction.

The share of countries burdened by high food prices, which had been relatively stable since 2016, rose sharply from 16 percent in 2019 to 47 percent in 2020, reflecting mainly trends in international markets.
International prices of food items soared in the second half of 2020, more than offsetting declines in the first five months of the year, supported by the increase in international demand for cereals, vegetable oils, sugar, and dairy products associated with the easing of the restrictive measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic. In domestic markets, upward pressure was also exerted by rising costs of freight and agricultural inputs as well as logistical bottlenecks and market uncertainty.