Food and famine – we need to do more
As a leading voice in food and health, HDHL takes this World Food Day 2025 to highlight the urgent global issues that define the state of our food systems as we near the end of 2025.
Food insecurity
For those who have food, conversations increasingly centre on the healthiness and sustainability of what we eat. Yet, for millions of others, the reality is dire — meaning the absence of food altogether. After decades of progress in reducing stunting and undernutrition, the global trends have reversed.
According to the Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC) 2025, six territories are currently facing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity: Sudan, Gaza, South Sudan, Yemen, Haiti, and Mali. Conflict, economic shocks and weather extremes, compounded by systematic fragilities, continue to drive these food crises. At the same time, humanitarian aid shortfalls and budget cuts in the nutrition sector are worsening the situation worldwide.
The World Food Programme, the world’s largest humanitarian food agency, estimates that it will reach almost 16.7 million fewer people in 2025 than in 2024. This means that 2.3 million children will be left without treatment for severe acute malnutrition, a tragedy that can result in an additional 369,000 preventable child deaths every year.
Food is a fundamental human right
This devastating picture of global food and nutrition insecurity stems largely from political instability and conflict. Many international organisations, including the International Union of Nutrition Societies (IUNS) have condemned the use of food as a weapon of war. The IUNS states:
“Food is being weaponized in several countries leading to widespread human suffering, starvation and death, with lasting trauma and damage into the future for entire populations. We, the global nutrition community, strongly condemn the use of food as a weapon of war and call for a stop now to these overt violations of human rights.”
At HDHL we affirm that the right to a healthy diet and a healthy life, is a fundamental human right.
On this World Food Day 2025 we call on policymakers, researchers and communities across the world to place the right to food at the heart of all our conversations, activities and the global agenda. For far too many, there is no food, only hunger.