How Many People Are Undernourished — The 673 Million Figure Behind the Counter, and Why It Doesn't Tick

One number sits underneath every conversation about hunger, food and how the world feeds itself: how many people do not get enough to eat. It is counted carefully, published once a year by the United Nations, and it is large enough to be hard to take in. Unlike the births, energy and spending counters beside it, this one does not climb second by second — and understanding why is the key to reading it honestly.

The number, and what it means

On the most recent UN estimate, about 673 million people were undernourished in 2024 — roughly one person in eleven alive, and about one in five in Africa.

"Undernourished" here is a specific, measured condition, not a figure of speech. It means a person's habitual food intake is too low to provide the dietary energy needed for a normal, active and healthy life, sustained over a year. The UN calls it the prevalence of undernourishment, and it is the most clearly defined of the world's hunger numbers.

It is narrower than two figures often quoted alongside it:

• food insecurity — people who face uncertainty about getting enough safe, nutritious food at some point in the year — runs to about 2.3 billion;
• people who cannot afford a healthy diet number around 2.6 billion.

Our counter shows the chronic-hunger figure: the people for whom there is simply not enough food energy, year-round.

Why this counter sits still

Every other counter on this screen ticks, because it is built on a rate — births per second, tonnes of CO₂ per second, dollars per second. Hunger has no such honest rate.

The UN publishes this figure once a year, as a single point estimate with a stated margin of uncertainty. For 2024 that estimate is 673 million, and it sits inside a published range of 638 to 720 million. There is no defensible number of people who "become undernourished per second," so making the figure climb or fall in real time would be invention, not measurement.

So this counter does the honest thing and holds steady at the published figure. It is the one number on the wall that is meant not to move.

The honest version of a grim counter

Some live-counter sites show a running tally of people who have "died of hunger today," built from a guessed daily death rate. We deliberately do not. No source measures hunger deaths to that precision, and a ticking death clock built on a guess fails the same honesty test as any other invented number.

Instead we show how many people are living undernourished right now — a real, published, sourced figure — rather than a fabricated count of the dead. It is the same concern, shown in the form the data can actually support.

Is it getting better or worse?

The figure has eased slightly for two years running, but remains far above pre-pandemic levels:

• about 757 million at the 2021 peak;
• about 733 million in 2023;
• about 673 million in 2024 — roughly 8.3 per cent of the world, down from 8.5 per cent the year before.

The recent improvement is real but uneven, driven by southern Asia and Latin America. Hunger is still rising across much of Africa and western Asia, and the global figure sits well above the roughly 580 million of the late 2010s. On current trends the UN projects about 512 million people could still be chronically undernourished in 2030 — far short of the goal of ending hunger.

Where the figure comes from

It is published in The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI), the annual UN flagship report jointly produced by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), IFAD, UNICEF, the World Food Programme and the World Health Organization. The FAO compiles it from national food-supply balances, population data and household surveys, and — unusually for a headline statistic — publishes it with its uncertainty range, which is why we show a point estimate and name the range rather than implying false precision.

The same underlying FAO series feeds the World Bank indicator that our per-country map is built on, so the world figure here and the map below share one source.

See where hunger is worst

A single 673-million figure says nothing about where the hunger is. Open the undernourishment map in Atlas and every country appears recoloured by the share of its people who are undernourished — from the worst-hit countries of sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia to the many wealthy nations where hunger is statistically near zero. And for the other side of the world's food story, the overweight map shows where the opposite problem has taken hold: the two maps are the two faces of how the world eats. This counter is the world's hunger as one standing figure; Atlas is where it lives on the map.