Global Hunger Index


The Global Hunger Index is a tool that measures and tracks hunger globally as well as by region and by country. The GHI is calculated annually, and its results appear in a report issued in October each year.
Created in 2006, the GHI was initially published by the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute and Germany-based Welthungerhilfe. In 2007, the Irish NGO Concern Worldwide also became a co-publisher. In 2018, IFPRI stepped aside from its involvement in the project and the GHI became a joint project of Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide.
The 2019 Global Hunger Index report presents a multi-dimensional measure of national, regional, and global hunger by assigning a numerical score based on several aspects of hunger. It then ranks countries by GHI score and compares current scores with past results. After declining since 2000, hunger at the global level lies on the cusp between moderate and serious, according to the 2019 report. Many individual countries have also achieved reductions in hunger since 2000, but in some countries hunger persists or has even worsened.

Calculation of the Index

The Index ranks countries on a 100-point scale, with 0 being the best score and 100 being the worst, although neither of these extremes is reached in practice. The severity of hunger associated with the range of possible GHI scores is as follows:
India
Low ≤ 9.9
Moderate 10.0-19.9
Serious 20.0-34.9
Alarming 35.0-49.9
Extremely alarming ≥ 50.0
The GHI combines 4 component indicators:
1) the proportion of the undernourished as a percentage of the population;
2) the proportion of children under the age of five suffering from wasting, a sign of acute undernutrition;
3) the proportion of children under the age of five suffering from stunting, a sign of chronic undernutrition; and
4) the mortality rate of children under the age of five.
The data and projections used for the 2019 GHI are for the period from 2014 to 2018—the most recent available data for the four components of the GHI. The data on the proportion of undernourished come from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN and include authors' estimates. Data on child wasting and stunting are collected from UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, WHO, , the Indian Ministry of Women and Child Development, and also include the authors’ own estimates. Data on child mortality are from the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation.
Besides presenting GHI scores, each year the GHI report includes an essay addressing one particular aspect of hunger. The 2019 report considers the issue of hunger and climate change.
In previous years, topics included:
In addition to the yearly GHI, the Hunger Index for the States of India was published in 2008 and the Sub-National Hunger Index for Ethiopia was published in 2009.
An allows users to visualize the data for different years and zoom into specific regions or countries.

Global and regional trends

The global 2019 GHI score of 20.0 falls on the cusp of moderate and serious. This is down from 29.2 in 2000. However, levels of hunger are still serious or alarming in 47 countries and extremely alarming in one country.
Hunger varies enormously by region. The 2019 GHI scores of South Asia and Africa south of the Sahara, at 29.3 and 28.4, respectively, reflect serious levels of hunger that are dramatically higher than in any other region of the world. South Asia's high GHI score of 29.3 is driven by its high rates of child undernutrition: rates of child stunting and child wasting there are the highest levels of any region in the report.
With a 2019 GHI score of 28.4, Africa South of the Sahara also suffers from a serious level of hunger. The region's score is driven up by its undernourishment and child mortality rates, which are the highest of any region, while its child stunting rate is nearly as high as that of South Asia. Troublingly, while the prevalence of undernourishment in Africa South of the Sahara consistently declined from 1999–2001 to 2013–2015, it has since reversed course and begun to rise.
In contrast, hunger is low or moderate in Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, Latin America and the Caribbean, East and Southeast Asia, and the Near East and North Africa, where 2019 regional GHI scores range from 6.6 to 13.3. Yet even some countries within those regions have serious or alarming levels of hunger and undernutrition.

Ranking

Country rankings as per the Global Hunger Index.
Legend
— = Data are not available or not presented. Some countries did not exist in their present borders in the given year or reference period.
Note: Rankings and index scores from this table cannot be accurately compared to rankings and index scores from previous reports.
Countries are ranked according to 2019 GHI scores. Countries that have identical 2019 scores are given the same ranking. The following countries could not be included because of lack of data: Bahrain, Bhutan, Burundi, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, Moldova, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, Somalia, South Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, and Tajikistan.

Focus of the 2019 GHI: The Challenge of Hunger and Climate Change

The 2019 GHI report notes that climate change is making it ever more difficult to adequately and sustainably feed and nourish the human population. Climate change has direct and indirect negative impacts on food security and hunger through changes in food production and availability, access, quality, utilization, and stability of food systems. In addition, climate change can contribute to conflict, especially in vulnerable and food-insecure regions, creating a double vulnerability for communities, which are pushed beyond their ability to cope.
Furthermore, climate change raises four key inequities that play out at the interface of climate change and food security:
1. the degree of responsibility for causing climate change
2. the intergenerational impacts of climate change
3. the impacts of climate change on poorer people in the Global South
4. the ability and capacity to deal with climate change impacts
Current actions are inadequate for the scale of the threat that climate change poses to food security. Transformation—a fundamental change in the attributes of human and natural systems—is now recognized as central to climate-resilient development pathways that can achieve zero hunger. Individual and collective values and behaviors must push toward sustainability and a fairer balance of political, cultural, and institutional power in society.

Focus of the 2018 GHI: Forced Migration and Hunger

The 2018 Global Hunger Index report—the 13th in the annual series—presents a multidimensional measure of national, regional, and global hunger by assigning a numerical score based on several aspects of hunger. It then ranks countries by GHI score and compares current scores with past results. The 2018 report shows that in many countries and in terms of the global average, hunger and undernutrition have declined since 2000; in some parts of the world, however, hunger and undernutrition persist or have even worsened. Since 2010, 16 countries have seen no change or an increase in their GHI levels.
The essay in the 2018 GHI report examines forced migration and hunger—two closely intertwined challenges that affect some of the poorest and most conflict-ridden regions of the world. Globally, there are an estimated 68.5 million displaced people, including 40.0 million internally displaced people, 25.4 million refugees, and 3.1 million asylum seekers. For these people, hunger may be both a cause and a consequence of forced migration. Support for food-insecure displaced people needs to be improved in four key areas:
• recognizing and addressing hunger and displacement as political problems;
• adopting more holistic approaches to protracted displacement settings involving development support;
• providing support to food-insecure displaced people in their regions of origin; and
• recognizing that the resilience of displaced people is never entirely absent and should be the basis for providing support.
The 2018 Global Hunger Index report presents recommendations for providing a more effective and holistic response to forced migration and hunger. These include focusing on those countries and groups of people who need the most support, providing long-term solutions for displaced people, and engaging in greater responsibility sharing at an international level.

Focus of the 2017 GHI: The Inequalities of Hunger

The 2017 highlights the uneven nature of progress made in reducing hunger worldwide and the ways in which inequalities of power lead to unequal nourishment.
Achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals’ aim of “leaving no one behind” demands approaches to hunger and malnutrition that are both more sensitive to their uneven distribution and more attuned to the power inequalities that intensify the effects of poverty and marginalization on malnutrition. The report emphasizes the importance of using power analysis to name all forms of power that keep people hungry and malnourished; the significance of designing interventions strategically focused on where power is exerted; the need to empower the hungry and malnourished to challenge and resist loss of control over the food they eat.

Focus of the 2016 GHI: Getting to zero hunger

The 2016 Global Hunger Index presents a multidimensional measure of national, regional, and global hunger, focusing on how the world can get to Zero Hunger by 2030.
The developing world has made substantial progress in reducing hunger since 2000. The 2016 GHI shows that the level of hunger in developing countries as a group has fallen by 29 percent. Yet this progress has been uneven, and great disparities in hunger continue to exist at the regional, national, and subnational levels.
The 2016 GHI emphasizes that the regions, countries, and populations most vulnerable to hunger and undernutrition have to be identified, so improvement can be targeted there, if the world community wants to seriously Sustainable Development Goal 2 on ending hunger and achieving food security.

Focus of the 2015 GHI: Armed Conflict and Chronic Hunger

The chapter on hunger and conflict shows that the time of the great famines with more than 1 million people dead is over. There is, however, a clear connection between armed conflict and severe hunger. Most of the countries scoring worst in the 2015 GHI, are experiencing armed conflict or have in recent years. Still, severe hunger exists also without conflict present as the cases of several countries in South Asia and Africa show.
Since 2005 and increase in armed conflict can be seen. Unless armed conflicts can be reduced there is little hope for overcoming hunger.

Focus of the 2014 GHI: Hidden Hunger

Hidden hunger concerns over 200 million people worldwide. This micronutrient deficiency develops when humans do not take in enough micronutrients such as zinc, folate, iron and vitamins, or when their bodies cannot absorb them. Reasons include an unbalanced diet, a higher need for micronutrients but also health issues related to sickness, infections or parasites.
The consequences for individuals can be devastating: these often include mental impairment, bad health, low productivity and death caused by sickness. In particular, children are affected if they do not absorb enough micronutrients in the first 1000 days of their lives.
Micronutrient deficiencies are responsible for an estimated 1.1 million of the yearly 3.1 million death caused by undernutrition in children. Despite the magnitude of the problem, it is still not easy to get precise data on the spread of hidden hunger. Macronutrient and micronutrient deficiencies cause a loss in global productivity of 1.4 to 2.1 billion US Dollars per year.
Different measures exist to prevent hidden hunger. It is essential to ensure that humans maintain a diverse diet. The quality of produce is as important as the caloric input. This can be achieved by promoting the production of a wide variety of nutrient-rich plants and the creation of house gardens.
Other possible solutions are the industrial enrichment of food or biofortification of feedplants.
In the case of acute nutrient deficiency and in specific life phases, food supplements can be used. In particular, the addition of vitamin A leads to a better child survival rate.
Generally, the situation concerning hidden hunger can only be improved when many measures intermesh. In addition to the direct measures described above, this includes the education and empowerment of women, the creation of better sanitation and adequate hygiene, and access to clean drinking water and health services.

Focus of the 2013 GHI: Resilience to build food and nutrition security

Many of the countries, in which the hunger situation is "alarming" or "extremely alarming", are particularly prone to crises: In the African Sahel people experience yearly droughts. On top of that, they have to deal with violent conflict and natural calamities. At the same time, the global context becomes more and more volatile.
The inability to cope with these crises leads to the destruction of many development successes that had been achieved over the years. In addition, people have even less resources to withstand the next shock or crises. 2.6 billion people in the world live with less than US$2 per day. For them, a sickness in the family, crop failure after a drought or the interruption of remittances from relatives who live abroad can set in motion a downward spiral from which they cannot free themselves on their own.
It is therefore not enough to support people in emergencies and, once the crises is over, to start longer-term development efforts. Instead, emergency and development assistance has to be conceptualized with the goal of increasing resilience of poor people against these shocks.
The Global Hunger Index differentiates three coping strategies. The lower the intensity of the crises, the less resources have to be used to cope with the consequences:
Based on this analysis the authors present several policy recommendations:
Increasingly, Hunger is related to how we use land, water and energy. The growing scarcity of these resources puts more and more pressure on food security.
Several factors contribute to an increasing shortage of natural resources:
  1. Demographic change: The world population is expected to be over 9 billion by 2050. Additionally, more and more people live in cities. Urban populations feed themselves differently than inhabitants of rural areas; they tend to consume less staple foods and more meat and dairy products.
  2. Higher income and non-sustainable use of resources: As the global economy grows, wealthy people consume more food and goods, which have to be produced with a lot of water and energy. They can afford not to be efficient and wasteful in their use of resources.
  3. Bad policies and weak institutions: When policies, for example energy policy, are not tested for the consequences they have on the availability of land and water it can lead to failures. An example are the biofuel policies of industrialized countries: As corn and sugar are increasingly used for the production of fuels, there is less land and water for the production of food.
Signs for an increasing scarcity of energy, land and water resources are for example: growing prices for food and energy, a massive increase of large-scale investment in arable land, increasing degradation of arable land because of too intensive land use, increasing number of people, who live in regions with lowering ground water levels, and the loss of arable land as a consequence of climate change.
The analysis of the global conditions lead the authors of the GHI 2012 to recommend several policy actions:
The report cites 3 factors as the main reasons for high volatility, or price changes, and price spikes of food:
Volatility and prices increases are worsened according to the report by the concentration of staple foods in a few countries and export restrictions of these goods, the historical low of worldwide cereal reserves and the lack of timely information on food products, reserves and price developments. Especially this lack of information can lead to overreactions in the markets. Moreover, seasonal limitations on production possibilities, limited land for agricultural production, limited access to fertilizers and water, as well as the increasing demand resulting from population growth, puts pressure on food prices.
According to the Global Hunger Index 2011 price trends show especially harsh consequences for poor and under-nourished people, because they are not capable to react to price spikes and price changes. Reactions, following these developments, can include: reduced calorie intake, no longer sending children to school, riskier income generation such as prostitution, criminality, or searching landfills, and sending away household members, who cannot be fed anymore. In addition, the report sees an all-time high in the instability and unpredictability of food prices, which after decades of slight decrease, increasingly show price spikes.
At a national level, especially food importing countries (those with a negative food trade balance, are affected by the changing prices.

Focus of the 2010 GHI: Early Childhood Under-nutrition

Under-nutrition among children has reached terrible levels. About 195 million children under the age of five in the developing world—about one in three children—are too small and thus underdeveloped. Nearly one in four children under age five—129 million—is underweight, and one in 10 is severely underweight. The problem of child under-nutrition is concentrated in a few countries and regions with more than 90 percent of stunted children living in Africa and Asia. 42% of the world's undernourished children live in India alone.
The evidence presented in the report
shows that the window of opportunity for improving nutrition spans is the 1,000 days between conception and a child's second birthday. Children who are do not receive adequate nutrition during this period have increased risks to experiencing lifelong damage, including poor physical and cognitive development, poor health, and even early death. The consequences of malnutrition that occurred after 24 months of a child's life are by contrast largely reversible.

Other activities

IFPRI is a partner in , a partnership that develops and disseminates evidence-based advice to politicians and other decision-makers aimed at ending hunger and undernutrition in the coming 10 years. The Compact2025 uses GHI data.