What's Our Roadmap To Nourish The World: Warnings From The SOFI Report

Forbes

4 days ago

This week, the annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report was released during the U.N. Food Systems Summit Stocktake (UNFSS+4) in Addis Ababa. The SOFI report, like the Stocktake convening itself, is designed to analyze global progress on food and nutrition security and to try to find common ground on our next steps.
So where do we stand now in 2025, five years out from the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and five years away from the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals for the year 2030?
I have to say: It's complicated. On the one hand, we're seeing that certain metrics are cautiously improving, which is a small relief from the 2023 and 2024 SOFI reports that called out tragic concerns for the food system. But on the other hand, as has been the case for several years, the rate at which we're making progress is not nearly ambitious enough to outrun new challenges, nourish our vulnerable communities, and meet vital global goals.
'We are witnessing the collapse of a moral contract,' Emily Farr, Oxfam's Food and Economic Security Lead, said quite powerfully this week. 'While some regions have seen some modest gains, the world is veering dangerously off track, leaving the poorest and more vulnerable behind. …This is not a crisis of scarcity—it is a crisis of inequality.'
Big-picture, both global hunger and food insecurity rates appear to be decreasing, but very slowly. While 8.7 percent of the global population may have faced hunger in 2022 and 8.5 percent in 2023, the new SOFI report shows that number at about 8.2 percent. From 2019 to 2024, the number of people unable to afford a healthy diet fell from 2.76 billion to 2.60 billion.
In my book, that's not a decrease we can celebrate when it still means fully 1 in 3 people around the world cannot necessarily afford nourishing food. And when we zoom in, we find that any food system progress we are making is not taking place equitably.
Across every region of the world, food insecurity and nutrition challenges are still more prevalent among women than men—and this is an area in which we appear to be backsliding. This gender gap had been narrowing in recent years, but now, one-third of women aged 15-49 years old are unable to achieve minimum dietary diversity.
And in particular, the global food movement cannot continue leaving folks behind here in Africa. Food security is improving in Southeast Asia and South America, but in Africa, the number of people unable to afford a healthy diet has risen from 864 million to 1 billion. The rate of moderate or severe food insecurity on the continent is now more than double the global average. And by 2030, an estimated 60 percent of all chronically undernourished people worldwide will be in Africa.
Let's talk solutions: Like many global reports, the SOFI report highlights a variety of high-level, institutional approaches regarding data-sharing, open global trade, and sustainable investment—and, to be clear, I do think these are good ideas—but I also think that we have to look to folks on the ground to find the kinds of localized transformations that will move the needle in our own communities.
One stunning success story comes from Brazil. Since 2022, the number of people experiencing moderate or severe food insecurity fell from 70.3 million to 28.5 million. Looking specifically at severe food insecurity, the rate plummeted by two-thirds, and the number of folks unable to afford healthy diets dropped 20 percent.
Brazil's roadmap is a powerful reminder that solving hunger—feeding the world—is a political question. The country has implemented policies we would all benefit from: school meals sourced from local and agroecological producers, higher minimum wages, support for smallholder and Indigenous farmers, expanded food banks, and legal recognition of the right to food.
Here in Africa, economic access to nourishing food is a major concern. As Fitsum Assefa, the Minister of Planning and Development for Ethiopia, pointed out, the SOFI report 'calls on us to move beyond concerns of food availability and focus squarely on the affordability of food — a key policy challenge we can no longer afford to overlook."