In the UN's accounting, you can be malnourished without being hungry
The Food and Agriculture Organization treats hunger, malnutrition and food insecurity as overlapping but distinct. Every hungry person is malnourished and food insecure, yet someone eating plenty of calories while missing key micronutrients, or even consuming too much and becoming obese, counts as malnourished without being hungry at all.
For relief workers, hunger means more than the appetite everyone feels before lunch. The FAO's standard measure, chronic undernourishment, applies when calorie intake falls below a minimum dietary energy requirement, the energy needed for light activity while keeping an acceptable weight for one's height. Thresholds differ by country to reflect climate and culture, and estimates are typically built from yearly national food balance sheets.
The vocabulary has other layers. Food insecurity describes being at risk of, or worried about, not meeting food needs in quantity or nutrition. Acute hunger usually signals famine-level severity rather than duration, though it has no formal definition, and people can suffer acute and chronic hunger at once. In 2006 an American statistics committee recommended the label food insecure with hunger for very low food supply, to separate the bodily sensation from measures of access. Not every relief group uses the FAO definition; some adopt broader ones closer to malnutrition.
The long-term trend was encouraging for decades. War, plague and bad weather historically caused prolonged hunger, but after the Second World War new technology and cooperation made big reductions seem possible, and by 2015 extreme hunger had receded for much of humanity. Then, from about 2017, chronic hunger crept back up, rising further in 2020 and 2021 with the COVID-19 pandemic. The FAO blames climate extremes, conflict and economic slowdowns, with most of the recent increase in Africa and South America.
Recent figures show slight easing: 8.7 percent of people faced hunger in 2021, 8.5 percent in 2022, 8.2 percent in 2023 and an estimated 7.8 percent in 2025, helped by gains in South-eastern and Southern Asia and South America. The annual global report is led by the FAO with the WFP, IFAD, WHO and UNICEF, and its 2024 edition focused on financing. Thousands of groups, from UN agencies to neighbourhood soup kitchens, work toward the goal of Zero Hunger by 2030.
Source: Hunger
