Unpacking the 2026 SOFI Report, with Maximo Torero

In two to three minutes, what does this year's SOFI report tell us? Can you give us the top headlines?

Yeah, the SOFI report this year always has two areas.

One area is an update of the number of people in hunger, the situation in nutrition, the access to healthy diets.

And the second part is thematic that tries to resolve some of the challenges.

So this year we're looking at the cost of healthy diets.

So let me start first with the numbers, which are interesting.

First, we show an steady decline of hunger in terms of prevalence.

It moved from 8.6 in 2022 to 8.1 in 2024 to 7.8. That means right now we are in 644.6 million people chronically undernourished.

So the number continues to go down for the third year consecutively, which is good news, although there are important heterogeneities and there are important problems that we are facing that could affect this improvement.

What is heterogeneity is mostly driven by a reduction in Asia, South Asia, especially India, significant reduction on the number of people in hunger and the prevalence.

But what is important also this year is for the first time in the last 10 or more years, we see that Africa starts to stabilize and that's a little bent, a little reduction in terms of hunger.

Although In terms of the number of people that are facing hunger in Africa is now higher than the number of people in Asia.

Why is this? In Africa, we have a bigger population growth.

The growth rate of population is significantly bigger, over 2% relative to Asia, which has put Africa in 309 million hungry people today compared to to 99 million people in Asia.

So that's an important result.

But also, as I said before, the change in the trend in Africa is important, especially with the reduction of ODA, which has been higher than 25%.

So imagine the contrafactual where we didn't have that reduction, where we didn't have all the challenges of the war in Ukraine, COVID-19, and so on and so forward.

Maybe we will have to be facing a better improvement in terms of hunger in the case of Africa.

Now, the second part of the report then looks at the cost of healthy diets.