Food

Lane Kenworthy, The Good Society
February 2025

Food is among the most basic of human needs.

Lack of sufficient food kills. And even when it doesn’t result in death, it can have harmful consequences: “Everyday want of food, and the malnutrition that follows, deforms bodies and minds in highly specific ways. When people eat the cheapest calories available, and don’t have enough of high-quality foods that deliver essential nutrients, immediate and longer-term health problems result…. Exposure to long-term hunger also makes some diseases more likely — research has brought to light a correlation between food insecurity, high blood pressure, and diabetes. In young children, lack of food leads to stunted growth, and negatively affects brain development, resulting in cognitive deficits that can never be made up…. Hunger can devastate mental health; those who experience hunger describe suffering from anxiety and depression. Neuroscientists believe that long-term exposure to hunger can cause ‘toxic stress,’ a prolonged activation of the body’s defenses that affects the very architecture of the brain…. Children growing up in a food-insecure household are more likely to suffer from poor mental and physical health later in life, leaving them less able to find decent work and care for their own children.”1

We produce enough food to provide adequate nourishment to every person in the world. In fact, we produce enough for everyone to get 5,000 calories per day — far more than the 2,000 to 2,500 calories per day that people need in order to be healthy.2

However, not everyone actually gets enough. How many people lack sufficient food? What are the causes? How can we do better?

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FOOD INSUFFICIENCY

We’ve made significant progress in reducing hunger, including in the world’s poorer countries, as figure 1 shows. Even so, about 9% of the world’s population, 700 million people, suffer from undernourishment (“chronic hunger”), when a person has enough food to survive but not enough to thrive.3

Figure 1. Undernourishment
Share of the population that has a daily food intake insufficient to provide the amount of dietary energy required to maintain a normal, active, and healthy life. Data source: Our World in Data, “Hunger and Undernourishment,” using data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

An estimated 3%, about 250 million people, suffer from “acute hunger” — lack of food that is life-threatening.4

In the worst case, people die. Here too there’s been significant progress, but death from food insufficiency still happens, as figure 2 indicates. According to these estimates, approximately 200,000 people a year die from malnutrition.5

Figure 2. Deaths from malnutrition
Per 100,000 population. Estimated deaths from protein-energy malnutrition. Data source: Our World in Data, “Hunger and Undernourishment,” using data from IHME, Global Burden of Disease.

Even in the United States, one of the world’s richest countries, not everyone can take food sufficiency for granted. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that about 10% of Americans are “food insecure,” which means that in the past year a household was, at times, “unable to acquire adequate food for one or more household members because the households had insufficient money and other resources for food.”6 However, very few people in the United States and other affluent democratic natioms are undernourished, and hardly anyone dies from malnutrition.7

WHAT ARE THE CAUSES?

There are various reasons why people don’t get enough food. Some are small-scale farmers who produce their own food and something happens that significantly reduces their production. Some people who purchase their food have income that is too low or decreases suddenly. Some people purchase food and something causes a reduction in supply, which results either in insufficient food being available to buy or an unaffordable increase in food prices. Finally, among those who need humanitarian food assistance, something may prevent that aid from reaching them.

Small-scale farming

About one-third of the world’s population are small-scale farmers, working on plots that average just five acres in size.8 Although productivity tends to be low because of the small size, many are successful, regularly providing more than enough food for their family. But quite a few barely scrape by, which means their supply of food is vulnerable to illness or injury, drought, natural disasters, theft, and more.

Low income

The other two-thirds of the world’s population purchase most or all of the food they eat. A significant number have incomes that are too low to support an adequate diet. One way to see the impact of low income on food insufficiency is via the pattern in figure 3: poorer countries tend to have higher rates of undernourishment.

Figure 3. GDP per capita and undernourishment
2021. 104 countries. Nations with GDP per capita above $20,000 aren’t included. GDP per capita: gross domestic product per person, adjusted for cost of living differences across countries. In 2017 international dollars. “k” = thousand. Undernourshed: Share of the population that has a daily food intake insufficient to provide the amount of dietary energy required to maintain a normal, active, and healthy life. Data source: Our World in Data, “Hunger and Undernourishment,” using data from the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The line is a loess curve.

Things have been getting better. One of the main reasons undernourishment and deaths from malnutrition have been decreasing, as we saw in figures 1 and 2 above, is that incomes have been rising.9 But we need a good bit more progress.

Supply shortages in food markets

In principle, all food could be produced where it is most efficient to do so — where land is most fertile, water most available, and weather conditions most conducive — and then transported to where people are located, where they would purchase it for consumption.

There was a period not too long ago when it looked as though this model would indeed work. After World War II, the United States and the United Kingdom “modernized their agriculture, replacing farmhands with machines that dramatically reduced the amount of labor needed to grow grain. They also provided generous subsidies to farmers to incentivize them to grow as much food as possible. Production soared…. The West’s surpluses ushered in an era of low global food prices that for a long time looked like a win-win arrangement: as Western farmers produced more and more food, newly independent countries could easily afford to import the surpluses. Flows of cheap food from abroad — whether as commercial imports or food aid — were a safety net of sorts for the developing world.”10

But relying on the market comes with risk. Bad weather, drought, transportation problems, mismanagement, and war can cause shortfalls in the supply of food, leading to price increases that are unaffordable, particularly to people in poor countries. Going forward, climate change may increase the likelihood of food supply shortages.11

Some countries — the US, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Russia, Tanzania, Uganda, Ukraine, among others — aren’t vulnerable to supply shortages because they are fully or nearly self-sufficient in food production. Other rich and middle-income countries can afford to pay higher prices during occasional food shortfalls. But some nations, or particular people within nations, don’t produce enough food and don’t have enough money to get by if things go bad on the global food market.

Drought

Drought — a lack of sufficient rainfall — is one of the most common causes of food supply shortage.

In some parts of the world, drought is a recurrent feature of life. “When prices spike in the dry season, some starving Nigeriens pay more for a pound of millet than a Westerner does for a pound of wheat flour at the supermarket. Sometimes double the price, during all-too-common seasonal shortages. Often, people borrow cups of precious grain at extortionate interest rates because they have no choice. They need to eat.”12

Sometimes drought becomes much more intense for an extended period of time. “During the 1970s and 1980s,” reports Jean-Martin Bauer, “rainfall in the Sahel was 30 percent below average. One of the worst droughts of the twentieth century, it decimated farming and herding. In fact, the drought of 1973 was so devastating that the people who experienced it still talk about it today in hushed tones. ‘That year,’ an older Senegalese colleague said, ‘we ate what animals eat.’ He meant grass and bark; there were no alternatives.”13

Disease

Insufficient food increases people’s vulnerability to disease. And disease can increase the likelihood of hunger.

The AIDS crisis in southern Africa that began in the 1990s is illustrative. “As HIV/AIDS killed young adults and breadwinners, surviving family members simply did not have the manpower to grow enough food, or to earn the money needed to feed themselves. By the early 2000s, 13 percent of all children in southern Africa were orphans, half of them because their parents had died of AIDS. The loss of a significant portion of a whole generation also meant that certain kinds of knowledge — such as the preparation of wild foods — were not being passed down to the next generation, who were losing important coping strategies that had sustained people through droughts and other hard times. Surviving adults had to care for sick relatives and AIDS orphans (many sent from cities to rural areas), thus diverting more labor away from farming.”14

In the mid-2010s, the Ebola pandemic in western Africa killed more than 10,000 people. “The measures adopted, which banned gatherings — even those meant to grow crops — devastated the family farms that account for the bulk of food production in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone…. The impact on the harvest was serious: in the worst affected districts within Liberia and Sierra Leone, the rice harvest dropped by as much as 20 percent. By mid-2015, 2.2 million people had been dragged into a food crisis while millions more were able to feed themselves only by selling their belongings or cutting back on essentials.”15

The worldwide Covid pandemic in the early 2020s had a far-reaching impact on hunger. The virus itself coupled with lockdowns that closed businesses and disrupted markets resulted in a doubling of acute hunger, from 135 million people to 270 million.16

War and other violent conflict

Wars and other types of violent conflict heighten food insufficiency in a host of ways. The deaths and injuries they cause reduce the number of people available to work in food production. Combatants sometimes use destruction of food as a tactic. And violence impedes food distribution, disrupting food markets, redirecting food from ordinary citizens to soldiers, and obstructing the efforts of humanitarian aid providers. According to the Global Network Against Food Crises, conflict tends to be the single largest contributor to acute hunger, ahead of economic shocks and extreme weather.17

The Central African Republic (CAR) has been plagued by civil war and instability since 2012. “The conflict in CAR devastated agriculture: two-thirds of the livestock were lost, killed, or stolen. In 2014, with its trading routes in disarray, its markets broken, and its farmers harassed by armed men, the nation’s food production shrank by 58 percent…. In 2023, a record 3 million people, half the population, were in a food crisis that had engulfed every district in the country.”18

The civil war in Syria from 2011 to 2024 was similarly devastating. “A decade of war … turned Syria’s farming sector — once the envy of its neighbors in the Middle East, countries to which it had exported grain, livestock, and vegetables — into a shell of its former self. Wheat production plunged by half, from more than 4.1 million tons per year in 2011 to 2.2 million in 2019…. In what has become a grim ritual, every May armed men set thousands of acres of wheat on fire, just as the harvest approaches. In May 2019, more than 110,000 acres of land burned in northwest Syria in just a few weeks — a third of all agricultural land in the area. While some of the fires were incidental, or a by-product of fighting, much of the burning was intentional. Incendiary weapons were used to torch the maturing crop in order to starve the people, or to undermine those who control it…. The first decade of the war cost 350,000 lives. With so many dead at the front, Syrian society now suffers from a shortage of men, which is reshaping social norms, and also leading to long-term food insecurity. Households headed by women are much more common, and because they are missing one income earner, such families are more likely to live in poverty. There were 5 million children born in Syria between 2011 and 2021; as of 2021, between a quarter and a third of them are malnourished…. In 2021 a record 60 percent of Syrians were acutely food insecure.”19

A civil war in Sudan that began in 2023 killed 2 million people in its first year. If it continues, analysts project “mass starvation on a scale not seen in decades” and approximately 6 million deaths by 2027.20

Discrimination and social inequality

Some people lack sufficient food because of systematic discrimination and other sources of inequality. Historically this has been front and center as a source of hunger. That’s less true today, but it remains a problem.

The Haratin caste in Mauritania are illustrative “The Haratin may be nominally free — as were Black Americans in the Jim Crow era — but in practice, they still struggle to access land to grow crops or to secure anything other than menial jobs working the fields or driving cattle…. Because of their lesser status, Haratin communities farm only the poorest, most marginal land…. As hard as the Haratin work, they don’t own the land. Customary law dictates that a share of their beans go to their former masters, the Moors. Confined to the poorest land, their crop devoured by insects, the profit from their labor confiscated because of feudal landholding arrangements, the Haratin community is stalked by hunger.”21

In many places food hunger is more common among women than men.22 In parts of the Sahel, the burden of feeding a household “falls squarely on the shoulders of overworked and undervalued women, many of whom live in extreme poverty. While men do support their families, they must often migrate for work, keeping them away from home for months on end. And polygamous marriages remain common in rural Niger, meaning that income from men is divvied up among different spouses. There is no fat, no protective cushion. All it takes is a stroke of bad luck — an illness, an accident, a drought — for an entire family to tip into hunger.”23

Bad governance

Government indifference, corruption, or repression can cause ongoing food insufficiency or inadequate response to a food crisis. In the late 1999s, Amartya Sen pointed out that “No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy — be it economically rich (as in contemporary Western Europe or North America) or relatively poor (as in postindependence India, or Botswana, or Zimbabwe). Famines have tended to occur in colonial territories governed by rulers from elsewhere (as in British India or in an Ireland administered by alienated English rulers), or in one-party states (as in the Ukraine in the 1930s, or China during 1958-1961, or Cambodia in the 1970s), or in military dictatorships (as in Ethiopia, or Somalia, or some of the Sahel countries in the near past).”24

Inadequate humanitarian aid

When all else fails, delivery of food by humanitarian agencies and aid workers is vital. Aid organizations do heroic work in attempting to get food to people whose crops have failed, whose income has declined, who live in a war zone, who have been hit by an earthquake or flood or other natural disaster, whose regular food purchases have been cut short by price surges, who have been forced to move from their home to a refugee camp. In 2023 the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) delivered 15 billion meals to more than 100 million people in over 120 countries.25

However, providers of food assistance face large and sometimes insurmountable obstacles.26 Limited information can derail efforts. Difficult terrain or ruined roads can make it impossible to reach a community. Military combatants may steal their food or block them from delivering it.

HOW CAN WE DO BETTER?

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal #2 is “Zero hunger.” While we surely won’t achieve this by the target date of 2030, the aim is a sensible one. How can we make progress?

Get richer

As we saw above, a country’s economic affluence is a very strong predictor of the share of its citizens who are undernourished. Affluence helps not only directly but also indirectly, by boosting citizens’ desire for fairness and widespread opportunity.27

A straightforward strategy for reducing hunger is therefore to help poor nations get richer. That has proved very challenging.28 But we’ve made some progress, and there is good reason to think we can do better.

Improve agricultural productivity

Increases in agricultural productivity — via better machinery, irrigation, improved planting and harvesting strategies, the addition of fertilizers to soil, better seed varieties, and more — have been the most important contributor to reduction of hunger.29 We can go further. Particularly valuable would be better use of soil nutrients and improved seed varieties in developing nations along with a shift away from farm-grown livestock.30

School meals

Most children now are enrolled in and attend K-12 school, and a growing share are in some form of childcare and preschool (“early education”). Providing school breakfast and lunch is an effective and affordable way to ensure that children get adequate food.31 That’s true not only in poor countries but also in affluent ones.32

School meals also have beneficial ripple effects. They increase the incentive for children to attend school, and they improve students’ attentiveness and learning throughout the school day.33 They increase families’ disposable income by providing, at little or no cost, something the family might otherwise have to purchase at market prices. They can provide a large and stable source of demand for local farmers.

Guaranteed minimum household income

Many rich democratic nations have a de facto guaranteed minimum income.34 This increases the likelihood that even the least well-off households will have some ability to purchase food if and when circumstances get dire. The logistics of this type of government transfer are feasible even in very poor countries, given widespread mobile phone use.

Enforce the new international legal prohibition of starvation as a tactic of war

Although wars and other types of violent conflict have decreased, it’s difficult to have much confidence that this trend will continue. There is, however, an important food-related element of war where we very likely can make progress: the intentional use of starvation as a tactic of war.

During its siege of Leningrad from 1941 to 1944, the German army aimed to starve Soviet civilians. Eventually, due to lack of food along with cold, about one million die. Yet the German commander who engineered the mass starvation was acquitted of war crimes. From 1967 to 1970, secessionists in the Biafra region in Nigeria fought against the country’s Federal Military Government. “The Federals set up a naval blockade and besieged the secessionists, with the explicit objective of starving out rebels and civilians. They also denied access to aid agencies, who resorted to risky night flights to bring in aid…. Biafrans were faced with a stark choice: surrender or starve. They fought on for almost three grueling years. Two million people died.”35

The establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2002 was a key step in enhancing legal authority to prosecute cases of intentional starvation. While the ICC’s foundational statute gave it such authority only for wars between countries, in 2019 that was changed to also include civil wars.36 As of 2024 there haven’t yet been any prosecutions, but there is reason to hope that this change in international law will make a difference.

Better management of post-conflict reintegration

Wars are devastating. Their end is a blessing. But the process of moving from the end of war to genuine peace and stability is challenging. If it isn’t successful, fighters are more likely to take up arms again.

One strategy that tends to help is Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR). It involves “collecting combatants’ weapons, disbanding their units, and supporting their life as civilians, typically through training and monetary grants, and often with counseling.”37

More effective delivery of food aid

Humanitarian food agencies can improve the targeting and effectiveness of food delivery to populations in need by continuing to embrace technological advances — satellite identification of crisis areas, surveys via mobile phone, digital payments, robotics, artificial intelligence, and more.38

  1. Jean-Martin Bauer, The New Breadline: Hunger and Hope in the Twenty-First Century, Knopf, 2024, p. 33. ↩︎
  2. Hannah Ritchie, Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, Little, Brown Spark, 2024, p. 146. ↩︎
  3. A related indicator is “food insecurity,” which is when a person doesn’t have access at all times to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. Hannah Ritchie, ‘How Is Food Insecurity Measured?,” Our World in Data; FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, and WHO, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2024, pp. 222-23. ↩︎
  4. Bauer, The New Breadline, p. 33. ↩︎
  5. (2.5 / 100,000) * 8 billion = 200,000. ↩︎
  6. US Department of Agriculture, “Food Security in the U.S. — Measurement.” ↩︎
  7. In rich countries a more important problem is the share of people who consume too much food rather than too little. Lane Kenworthy, “Weight Moderation,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  8. Bauer, The New Breadline, p. 52. ↩︎
  9. Lane Kenworthy, “Progress,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  10. Bauer, The New Breadline, pp. 53-54. ↩︎
  11. David Wallace-Wells, “Food as You Know It Is About to Change,” New York Times, 2024. ↩︎
  12. Bauer, The New Breadline, p. 42. ↩︎
  13. Bauer, The New Breadline, p. 35. ↩︎
  14. Bauer, The New Breadline, pp. 132-33. ↩︎
  15. Bauer, The New Breadline, pp. 148-50. ↩︎
  16. Bauer, The New Breadline, p. 131. ↩︎
  17. Global Network Against Food Crises, Global Report on Food Crises 2024. ↩︎
  18. Bauer, The New Breadline, pp. 86, 89. ↩︎
  19. Bauer, The New Breadline, pp. 100-110. ↩︎
  20. The Economist, “Anarchy in Sudan Has Spawned the World’s Worst Famine in 40 Years,” 2024. ↩︎
  21. Bauer, The New Breadline, pp. 43-44. ↩︎
  22. World Food Program USA, “Gender Inequality.” ↩︎
  23. Bauer, The New Breadline, pp. 44-45. ↩︎
  24. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, Knopf, 1999, p. 16. For more detail, see Joe Hassell and Max Roser, “Famines,” Our World in Data. ↩︎
  25. World Food Programme, “Emergency Relief”; World Food Programme, “Our Impact.” ↩︎
  26. Bauer, The New Breadline. ↩︎
  27. Lane Kenworthy, “Affluence and Progress,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  28. Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion, Oxford University Press, 2007. ↩︎
  29. Ritchie, Not the End of the World, ch. 5. ↩︎
  30. Ritchie, Not the End of the World, ch. 5. ↩︎
  31. Gordon Brown and Kevin Watkins, “School Meals Provide Food for Thought — and Fuel for Development,” Project Syndicate, 2025. ↩︎
  32. Laura Pryor, Adriana Ramos-Yamamoto, and Monica Saucedo, “Universal School Meals Help All California Children Thrive,” California Budget and Policy Center, 2024. ↩︎
  33. Kevin Watkins, “School Meals Programmes and the Education Crisis,” Sustainable Financing Initiative for School Health and Nutrition, 2022. ↩︎
  34. Sarah Marchal and Ive Marx, Zero Poverty Society: Ensuring a Decent Income for All, Oxford University Press, 2024. ↩︎
  35. Bauer, The New Breadline, pp. 90-91. ↩︎
  36. Bauer, The New Breadline, pp. 91-92. ↩︎
  37. Bauer, The New Breadline, pp. 126-27. ↩︎
  38. Bauer, The New Breadline, p. 7. ↩︎