Third of world’s population can’t afford healthy diets – FAO report

More than a third of the world’s population could not afford healthy diets in 2022, and some regions have yet fully to recover from the harms wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a data set published in the 2024 edition of The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World.

This flagship hunger report was issued last week by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and four other United Nations agencies.

While food prices increased throughout 2022, pushing up the average cost of a healthy diet, this was largely offset by economic recovery and the ensuing positive income effects, according to FAO. As a result, some 35.4 percent of the global population, equal to 2.826 billion people, were unable to afford a healthy diet in 2022.

The Chief Economist of FAO, Maximo Torero, said that “in 2022 the number of people unable to afford a healthy diet dropped below pre-pandemic levels in the group of upper-middle and high-income countries. In contrast, low-income countries had the highest levels since 2017,” the first year for which FAO has published estimates.

The finding highlights “a major structural problem of our agrifood systems,” said David Laborde, Director of FAO’s Agrifood Economics and Policy Division.

He noted that this part of the SOFI 2024 report revealed significant variation across and within regions that in turn point to where national and international attention should be prioritized.

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The share of people in Africa unable to afford a healthy diet was 64.8 percent. In Asia, the figure indicated 35.1 percent; in Latin America and the Caribbean, 27.7 percent; in Oceania 20.1 percent; and in Northern America and Europe, 4.8 percent.

In low-income and lower-middle-income countries, the number of people unable to afford healthy diets grew from 2019 to 2022, an outcome that reflects how post-pandemic economic recoveries were unevenly shared and how more advanced economies were better placed to cope with supply-chain shocks and worldwide inflationary pressure on food commodity prices, FAO stated.

The organisation explained that the SOFI 2024 report details the methodology used to calculate the affordability of a healthy diets, defined as comprising diversity, adequacy, moderation and balance.

The main takeaway is that the prices, in purchasing power parity (PPP), rose significantly – a global average of 6 percent in 2020 and 11 percent in 2021 – but the impact was diluted where income growth was also robust and where food as a share of household budgets was lowest, as in higher-income countries with greater fiscal capacities.

“The uneven progress in the economic access to healthy diets cast a shadow of achieving Zero Hunger in the world, six years away from the [United Nations] 2030 deadline,” the SOFI report says.

“There is the need to accelerate the transformation of our agrifood systems to strengthen their resilience to the major drivers and address inequalities to ensure that healthy diets are affordable for and available to all.

“But there is also a need to assure people that can access and consume healthy diets,” said Torero.