One in Three People Worldwide Cannot Afford a Healthy Diet, UN Report Finds

One in three people worldwide cannot afford a healthy diet, according to a new United Nations report that pairs modest progress on hunger with a stark warning about the cost of eating well.

There are 2.69 billion people unable to afford a diverse diet meeting their energy and nutrient needs, the annual report from five UN agencies found, and it will take "immense" work to achieve the global target of zero hunger by 2030.

The headline trend is genuinely positive. Global hunger declined for a third consecutive year in 2025, affecting 7.8% of people, down from 8.1% in 2024. There were also signs that a prolonged upward trend in Africa was coming to a halt.

But the proportion of people who cannot afford a healthy diet remains "extremely high", said Maximo Torero, chief economist of the Food and Agriculture Organization and one of the report's authors. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026 calculated the cost of a healthy diet at 4.28 purchasing power parity dollars a day — meaning that in any country, a healthy diet costs the amount of local currency with the same buying power as $4.28 in the US.

Set against the poverty line, that figure is damning. "The extreme poverty line is $3PPP per person," Torero said. "So it's significantly higher." In other words, a person can be above the threshold at which the world declares them not extremely poor and still be unable to afford adequate nutrition.

Torero traced part of the problem to policy design. Governments have typically focused on subsidising cereals and starchy staples rather than meat, dairy, fruit and vegetables. "That means calories, but not a diversity of diet," he said — a pattern he linked to rising rates of obesity and diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

World Health Organization figures in the report show adult obesity rose from 12.1% in 2012 to 16.2% in 2024. "It's extremely urgent," Torero said. "Obesity is growing at a very steep level, so we need to now work intensively on trying to minimise those risks and those hidden costs."

He called for investment in infrastructure and in research and development. Modelling in the report suggests more efficient supply chains could bring down the cost of meat and dairy as well as fruit and vegetables, and that policies encouraging greater consumption of produce could reduce the economic burden of diet-related illness.

The regional picture is sharply uneven. In Africa, 66.6% of the population could not afford a healthy diet in 2025 — more than double the levels in Asia or Latin America and the Caribbean. Africa is now home to the highest number of hungry people for the first time, with about 309 million, surpassing Asia's 292 million.

Reported from the Guardian.