UN Hunger Map: 2023 severe food insecurity drops 85% in Brazil

The 2024 edition of the United Nations report The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI 2024), released on Wednesday, July 24, in Rio de Janeiro, shows that severe food insecurity dropped by 85% in Brazil last year.

UN data indicate that we are on the right path: over just one year of this government, we have reduced severe food insecurity by 85%. We have lifted 14.7 million Brazilian citizens from this condition.” — Wellington Dias, Minister of Social Development and Assistance, Family and the Fight Against Hunger

In absolute numbers, 14.7 million people have been spared from going hungry in Brazil in 2023. Severe food insecurity —, which affected 17.2 million Brazilians in 2022 — dropped to 2.5 million the following year, a reduction from 8% of the population to just 1.2%.

“UN data indicate that we are on the right path: over just one year of this government, we have reduced severe food insecurity by 85%. We have lifted 14.7 million Brazilian citizens from this condition,” stated the Minister of Development and Social Assistance, Family and the Fight Against Hunger, Wellington Dias.

According to FAO methodology, severe food insecurity occurs when a person has no access to food and goes a whole day or more without eating. This represents acute hunger, which, if experienced regularly, can lead to severe physical and mental health issues, particularly in early childhood, affecting development and cognitive formation.

PROGRESS – The report, produced jointly by UN agencies such as FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, annually updates the “Hunger Map”, as it is better known in Brazil. The report launch occurred on the same day as the Ministerial Meeting of the G20 Task Force for a Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty.

The SOFI report highlights important progress in the efforts to combat hunger in Brazil. It shows that severe food insecurity dropped from 8.5%, in the 2020-2022 period, to 6.6%, in 2021-2023. This indicates a drop in the number of Brazilians facing severe food insecurity from 18.3 million to 14.3 million over that period.

In absolute numbers, 4 million people were lifted from severe food insecurity over those three-year periods. However, since the FAO indicator is a triennial average—a combined average of three years—it does not clearly reflect the impact of the most recent year, 2023, on Brazil’s progress in overcoming hunger, as the results still include data from 2021 and 2022.

Brazil had left the Hunger Map in 2014 and sustained this status up to 2018. Between 2019 and 2022, however, a trend of increasing and extreme poverty and food and nutritional insecurity emerged. The country re-entered the Hunger Map over the 2019-2021 period and remained there through 2022.

The individual data for 2023 shows that, despite some technical differences between the FAO and IBGE scales, the FAO's measurement of severe food insecurity is consistent with the reduction observed using the EBIA (Brazilian Food Insecurity Scale), of around 24 million people between 2022 and 2023. If adjustments are made to align the PNADc-IBGE results with the scale used by the Rede PENSSAN in 2022 (since IBGE did not measure the scale in 2022), the reduction would be about 20 million people between 2022 and 2023.

NUTRITION – In the prevalence of undernourishment indicator (PoU), a second metric used by SOFI that relies on macroeconomic data such as food production, consumption and distribution relative to income rather than survey sampling, Brazil has also turned around the upward trend in hunger seen during the previous administration.

If the year 2023 is considered individually, compared to the 2020-2022 triennium, the prevalence of undernourishment in Brazil dropped from 4.2% to 2.8%, representing a one-third reduction. According to FAO data (available in the FAOSTAT database, which is updated along with the report), when comparing the 2020-2022 triennium with the year 2023, 3 million people were lifted out of chronic undernourishment in 2023 (from 9 million to 6 million Brazilians experiencing chronic undernourishment).

In the three-year average used in the SOFI report, the prevalence of undernourishment in Brazil decreased from 4.2% in the 2020-2022 triennium to 3.9% in the 2021-2023 triennium. This indicator is still heavily influenced by the high levels observed in 2021 and 2022.

However, similarly to the food insecurity scale, the SOFI-reported trend of decreasing hunger is "diluted" in the triennial average, with the 2023 results being offset by those from 2021 and 2022.

FIND OUT MORE — The PoU is the indicator used to determine a country's presence in the Hunger Map. A country is removed from this map when the indicator for the most recent triennium drops below 2.5%.

“The data from this edition strengthen our confidence that we will remove Brazil from the Hunger Map in the 2023-2025 triennium," celebrated Minister Wellington Dias. "For 2023 alone, we reduced food insecurity from 4.2% to 2.8% in just one year. This increases the likelihood of achieving a triennial average below 2.5%, which would set a new global record," added the minister.

“The data from this edition strengthen our confidence that we will remove Brazil from the Hunger Map in the 2023-2025 triennium. In 2023 alone, we reduced food insecurity from 4.2% to 2.8% in just one year. This increases the likelihood of achieving a triennial average below 2.5%” — Wellington Dias, Minister of Social Development and Assistance, Family and the Fight Against Hunger

“We will keep working to ensure that no one is excluded from the social protection network and that no Brazilian man or woman has to endure this hardship any longer. This will also mean delivering on the President’s promise to provide the conditions for people to have breakfast, lunch and dinner every day.”

GLOBAL DATA — With the release of SOFI 2024, global hunger data has also been updated. Unfortunately, there has been little progress at the global level: it is estimated that 733 million people worldwide experienced hunger in 2023, nearly the same number as reported in the 2022 edition, which was 735 million people.

The report projects that, if current trends continue, 582 million people will still be chronically malnourished by 2030. “Even with the end of the pandemic, the world in general has not been able to resume hunger fighting measures,” stated Minister Wellington Dias.

The report shows that hunger continues to grow in Africa and has stayed relatively stable in Asia, whereas Latin America has registered notable progress. Africa continues to have the largest percentage of the population suffering from hunger: 20.4%, compared to 8.1% in Asia, 6.2% in Latin America and the Caribbean and 7.3% in Oceania. Nonetheless, Asia still houses more than half of all people going hungry in the world.

The prevalence of moderate to severe food insecurity remained virtually unchanged in Africa, Asia, North America and Europe between 2022 and 2023, while it worsened in Oceania. In contrast, the report also noted significant progress in Latin America on this indicator, partly due to improvements in Brazil.

GLOBAL ALLIANCE — The minister highlighted the important symbolism of launching this report outside of Rome or New York. “There’s a clear reason for launching it in Brazil: today we are taking the first steps in forming a new Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty in the world, a proposal put forward by President Lula. [The Alliance] is expected to work to reverse this trajectory and fulfill the promises of Sustainable Development Goals 1 and 2, eliminating extreme poverty and achieving zero hunger by 2030,” stated Dias. “If everything goes well, we want to reach 2030 being able to say that hunger is a problem of the past. Brazil’s progress shows that it really is possible to rapidly reduce hunger when there is political will and knowledge to implement public policies that bring results. This is the proposal of the Alliance,” he added.