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Data

Share of people who are undernourished

UN FAO

What you should know about this indicator

  • Hunger has been a severe problem throughout history. For most people, growing enough food to feed their family was a daily struggle. Food shortages, malnutrition, and famines were common around the world.
  • This data estimates the share of people who are undernourished — those whose daily energy (calorie) intake is too low to support a normal, active, and healthy life.
  • Undernourishment is determined solely by whether a person gets enough calories. It does not account for the quality or diversity of their diet. Therefore, it is only one aspect of malnutrition, a broader term that captures other deficiencies, such as micronutrients.
  • Minimum calorie needs vary by sex, age, body size, and activity level. Researchers use demographic data to account for these differences in each country's estimates.
  • The data is published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). It is based on a statistical model that combines national food supply data, demographic projections, and, where available, household food consumption surveys. To reduce short-term variability on country-level data, the FAO sets the values for a given year to the average of the last three years.
  • Many countries, especially high-income ones, are shown at 2.5% because the FAO reports values between 0% and 2.5% as "<2.5%", due to uncertainty at very low levels of undernourishment.
  • The world has made significant progress in reducing undernourishment. However, this data shows we are still far from ending hunger: nearly 1 in 10 people globally don't get enough to eat. Hunger worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic and remains a major challenge.

Sustainable Development Goals

Goal 2: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.

Target 2.1: By 2030, end hunger and ensure access by all people, in particular the poor and people in vulnerable situations, including infants, to safe, nutritious and sufficient food all year round.

Indicator 2.1.1: Prevalence of undernourishment

  • Definition: The prevalence of undernourishment (PoU) (French: pourcentage de sous-alimentation; Spanish: porcentaje de sub-alimentación; Italian: prevalenza di sotto-alimentazione) is an estimate of the proportion of the population whose habitual food consumption is insufficient to provide the dietary energy levels that are required to maintain a normal active and healthy life. It is expressed as a percentage.
  • Concepts: Undernourishment is defined as the condition by which a person has access, on a regular basis, to the amount of food that are insufficient to provide the energy required for conducting a normal, healthy and active life, given his or her own dietary energy requirements. Though strictly related, “undernourishment” as defined here is different from the physical conditions of “malnutrition” and “undernutrition” as it refers to the condition of insufficient intake of food, rather than to the outcome in terms of nutritional status. In French, Spanish and Italian the difference is marked by the use of the terms alimentation, alimentación, or alimentazione, instead of nutrition, nutrición or nutrizione, in the name of the indicator. A more appropriate expression in English that would render the precise meaning of the indicator might have been “prevalence of under-feeding” but by now the term “undernourishment” has long been associated with the indicator. While the undernourishment condition applies to individuals, due to conceptual and data-related considerations, the indicator can only be referred to a population, or group of individuals. The prevalence of undernourishment is thus an estimate of the percentage of individuals in a group that are in that condition, but it does not allow for the identification of which individuals in the group are, in fact, undernourished.
Share of people who are undernourished
UN FAO
Share of the population whose daily food intake does not provide enough energy to maintain a normal, active, and healthy life.
Source
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
March 17, 2025
Next expected update
March 2026
Date range
2000–2023
Unit
percent

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

This dataset includes a selection of indicators used to monitor progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These indicators cover topics such as poverty, health, education, and the environment. They are published by the United Nations and its partner agencies, based on data reported by national governments. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is responsible for several SDG indicators related to food and agriculture, developing methodologies, collecting data from national sources, and publishing standardized global estimates.

Retrieved on
March 17, 2025
Retrieved from
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/SDGB
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations - SDG Indicators (2025).

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
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Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Share of people who are undernourished”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser (2023) - “Agricultural Production”. Data adapted from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20250718-111234/grapher/prevalence-of-undernourishment.html [online resource] (archived on July 18, 2025).
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Share of people who are undernourished – UN FAO” [dataset]. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “SDG Indicators” [original data]. Retrieved July 18, 2025 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20250718-111234/grapher/prevalence-of-undernourishment.html (archived on July 18, 2025).