Across Africa last year, fewer people were uncertain about their ability to obtain adequate food or were forced to reduce the quality and quantity of what they ate. It was the first continent-wide improvement in food insecurity in a decade. The Hunger rate declined for the first time in nearly a decade, from 20.3 percent in 2024 to 20 percent in 2025. Moderate or severe food insecurity fell from 58.5 to 56.6 per cent, which is 8.6 million fewer people. Severe food insecurity also declined. Child stunting is falling. Even hunger, which had been rising on the continent since 2017, appears to have stopped climbing.
The change is modest, but it could mark a real turning point. After a decade of deterioration, Africa has shown that the architecture behind food security can work. Keeping that progress alive will require a second shift: from reducing hunger alone to making nutritious diets affordable. Investments in institutions, infrastructure, markets, and fiscal choices shape prices long before food reaches a household. For twenty years, a core of African countries has been building parts of that architecture: agricultural research and extension services, veterinary networks, rural roads and market links, and statistical agencies that measure deprivation through household surveys. The gains arrived as external financing was becoming less reliable. Aid remains essential, especially in conflict-hit countries where it keeps people alive. But this moment makes national capacity, smarter public spending, and resilient supply chains more important. Whether governments now apply those tools to the cost of healthy diets will decide whether 2025 opens an era of durable progress or records a single good year.
Africa still confronts a food security challenge larger than any other region’s. The continent has more hungry people than anywhere on earth, 309 million, and by 2030 it will be home to 56 per cent of everyone still facing hunger worldwide. Two in three Africans cannot afford a healthy diet, a share still rising even as it falls in other parts of the world. Yet the gains rest on long national records. Over the past two decades, Senegal cut the share of its people facing hunger from 15.8 to 5.3 per cent. Togo went from 24.6 to 10.2 per cent, Ghana from 11.1 to 6.4, Côte d’Ivoire from 17.6 to 11.4, Rwanda from 31.8 to 22.6, and Mozambique from 29.2 to 22.3, holding course through price crises and a pandemic. Progress of that length is policy, not weather.
Making healthy diets affordable will be harder than reducing hunger alone. The obstacle is the price of the foods that make a diet healthy rather than merely filling: milk, eggs, fish, meat, fruits, vegetables, and legumes. Animal source foods are the highest-cost food group in Africa, and 69 per cent of African countries rank in the highest-cost tercile globally for this category, while starchy staples contribute relatively little to the total cost of a healthy diet. Those prices are built link by link, through animal disease, limited cold chains, weak roads, high energy costs, and thin local markets, long before anything reaches a market stall. Staples have kept getting cheaper while many of the foods that matter most remain stubbornly dear.
African governments can fund much of this shift by redirecting subsidies they already pay. A blanket 10 per cent production subsidy cuts the cost of a healthy diet by about 4 per cent in Africa, roughly half of what the same money buys in Latin America, so the question is where those budgets are aimed more than how large they are. Point them at animal health, breeding and aquaculture, at cold chains, rural roads and cheaper power, at research into the fruits, vegetables, and legumes every healthy diet needs, and the cost structure that keeps two in three Africans priced out begins to move.
African systems cannot yet do every part of this job alone. In the countries locked in acute food crises, the same conflict-hit states dragging the continental averages, external assistance keeps people alive. The statistical services that made this year’s gains visible also depend on funding now under pressure. The 2025 estimates describe conditions before this year’s cuts fully arrived; the bill comes due in 2026 and beyond.
One year of progress does not make a trend, but it does clarify the task. African governments have shown what their systems can do against the odds. The same capacity now needs to be aimed at the cost of nutritious food, the one number still moving the wrong way. The first improvement in a decade is on the board. The job now is to make it permanent.
Opinion piece by Maximo Torero, Chief Economist for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
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