More than 266 million people across 47 countries experienced high levels of acute food insecurity in 2025 — nearly double the proportion recorded in 2016 — with two-thirds of all those affected living in just ten nations, according to the 2026 Global Report on Food Crises. The UN-backed report, published Friday by an alliance of UN agencies, the European Union and humanitarian partners, identifies Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen as the primary centres of concentrated hunger. At the most extreme end of the scale, famine was confirmed in Gaza and parts of Sudan — the first time in the report's ten-year history that two separate famines have been recorded in a single year.

Conflict remains the single largest driver of acute food insecurity, accounting for more than half of all severely hungry people worldwide. In Sudan, prolonged civil war has pushed vast numbers into catastrophic conditions, while in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, overlapping crises of armed conflict, displacement and economic collapse have entrenched hunger over multiple years. Climate shocks compound the picture almost everywhere. In Pakistan, devastating monsoon rains and flash floods in 2025 affected more than six million people, destroying cropland and infrastructure across Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh. Around 11 million Pakistanis faced acute food insecurity last year, with 9.3 million classified in