10/01/2025
Highlights of Global Hunger Index 2024
By hammadiep on January 10, 2025
Muhammad Hammad
Over the past decade, worldwide progress against hunger has slowed to a troubling degree. The 2024 Global Hunger Index (GHI) score for the world is 18.3, considered moderate, down only slightly from the 2016 score of 18.8. This global score obscures wide variations in hunger by region. The situation is most severe in Africa, South of the Sahara and South Asia, where hunger remains serious. South of the Sahara’s high GHI score is driven by the highest undernourishment and child mortality rates of any region by far.
In South Asia, serious hunger reflects rising undernourishment and persistently high child under nutrition, driven by poor diet quality, economic challenges, and the increasing impact of natural disasters. The goal of Zero Hunger by 2030 now appears unreachable, and if progress remains at the pace observed since the 2016 global GHI score, the world will not reach even low hunger until 2160 more than 130 years from now.
Trends in Hunger
The 2024 GHI results reflect a barrage of successive and overlapping challenges that have hit the world’s poorest countries and people hardest, amplifying structural inequalities. These challenges include large-scale armed conflicts, increasingly severe climate change impacts, high domestic food prices, and market disruptions, high debt burdens among low- and middle-income countries, income inequality, and economic downturns.
Conflicts have raised the spectre of famine. The wars in Gaza and Sudan have led to exceptional food crises. Conflict and civil strife also generate food crises elsewhere, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Mali, and Syria.
The right to food is largely unrealized and unenforced. Despite the international community’s repeated emphasis on the importance of the right to adequate food, there remains a troubling disparity between the standards established and the reality. In many parts of the world, the right to food is being blatantly disregarded.
Examples of progress and hope exist amid crises and worrying trends. Contrary to the global trend, a few countries have significantly improved their GHI scores, even if hunger in these countries remains too high.
Discriminatory norms and gender-based violence often place women at a heightened risk of food and nutrition insecurity and climate change impacts. Efforts to improve gender equity hold promise for enhancing household and community food and nutrition security and boosting resilience to climate change.
Gender Justice
Gender inequality, food insecurity, and climate change converge to place households, communities, and countries under extreme stress. Women and girls are typically hardest hit by food insecurity and malnutrition. They also suffer disproportionately from the effects of weather extremes and climate emergencies.
Gender justice that is, equity between people in all spheres of life is critical to a just world and to achieving climate and food justice. It consists of three interconnected dimensions: recognition, redistribution, and representation.
Recognitional justice entails transforming gender discriminatory norms to change how households, communities, and the wider culture view gender roles and capacities. It means acknowledging that different groups of people have different needs, vulnerabilities, and opportunities and that their physical location and social position can intersect to intensify injustices.
Redistributive justice involves directing resources and opportunities to redress gender inequalities. Ensuring women’s access to and control over critical productive resources, can challenge inequitable power dynamics and create an enabling environment for food and nutrition security.
Representation refers to closing the gender gap in women’s participation in politics and decision-making at multiple levels. Legal changes and women’s political participation and leadership may help push policies toward gender equity, though such outcomes are not assured and can take time.
Reforms are needed to incorporate gender justice at all scales and levels, ranging from individuals to entire systems and from formal mechanisms to informal social and cultural norms. While enabling access to resources for women are essential, structural inequalities including class dynamics, rising income inequality, corporate control over production systems, and lack of high-quality basic services must be addressed for real systemic and social change to happen.
Redistribution of power and resources at the household and community levels must be underpinned by universal social protection and macroeconomic measures, such as tax and trade policies, that support the most vulnerable.
Policy Recommendations
Strengthen accountability
States need to uphold and expand their legal obligations to eliminate gender discrimination, ensure the right to food, and alleviate hunger, including during disasters and conflicts, based on the Voluntary Guidelines to Support the Progressive Realization of the Right to Food and related guidance.
States must formalize the right to food in concrete laws and regulations, accompanied by transparent monitoring and robust accountability mechanisms. Food and nutrition security analysis should include the perspectives and experiences of affected communities, and early warning systems should be directly linked to prompt political action and automatic funding for relief. Citizens, civil society, and national human rights institutions must be supported so they can advocate for the right to food.
Promote food systems and climate policies and programs
To formulate effective, context-sensitive policies and programs that avoid adverse effects, policymakers and practitioners must recognize how food systems and climate resilience are influenced by diverse needs and vulnerabilities and complex socioeconomic factors such as gendered power dynamics and divisions of labour.
All climate and food systems policy processes and initiatives must ensure the representation and leadership of women and marginalized groups and draw on their expertise in managing natural resources. Governments need to establish inclusive, participatory governance structures with adequate decision-making power and budgets at all levels, from local citizens’ councils to the global Committee on World Food Security.
Integrated investments that promote gender, climate, and food justice
Governments must redistribute public resources to redress structural inequalities and enable gender-equitable access. For example, public investments in care, education, health, and rural development should be used to address discriminatory norms and promote equitable distribution of labour within households and communities.
Commitments to maternal, infant, and child health must be strengthened through, for example, the extension of the World Health Assembly targets and the upcoming Nutrition for Growth Summit.
Development partners and governments should harmonize policies across sectors and coordinate relevant ministries. For example, governments need to invest in and promote food systems that produce affordable, nutritious, climate-resilient foods, and reduce women’s poverty to improve their socioeconomic status
