LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition 2025: STATISTICS AND TRENDS

1.1 Prevalence of undernourishment

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) prevalence of undernourishment (PoU) is an indicator of chronic energy deprivation that is derived from official country data on food supply, food consumption and dietary energy needs in the population considering demographic characteristics such as age, sex and levels of physical activity. FAO strives always to improve the accuracy of the PoU estimates by taking into account new information; the entire historical series is updated for each report. For this reason, only the current series of estimates should be used, including for values in past years.^{1 1} For more information on the methodology see: FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP & WHO. 2025. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2025 – Addressing high food price inflation for food security and nutrition. Rome. https://doi.org/10.4060/cd6008en

The latest PoU estimates show an improvement at the global level after several challenging years (Figure 1). Following a slow but steady increase since 2017, and a sharp increase between 2020 and 2021, due largely to the COVID-19 pandemic, hunger affected 8.2 percent of the global population in 2024 (673.2 million people). This represents a decrease of 15.2 million people compared with 2023 and 22 million compared with 2022.

In LAC, hunger declined steadily from 2002 until 2014, after which it began to rise, peaking at 6.1 percent in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic (Figure 1). Following 2020, undernourishment decreased for four consecutive years, reaching 5.1 percent of the population in 2024, equivalent to 33.6 million people (Table 2). This represents a reduction of 1.5 million people compared with 2023 and 6.2 million compared with 2020.

Despite this improvement, significant differences remain among the three subregions in LAC (Figure 2). South America had the lowest prevalence of hunger in 2024, estimated at 3.8 percent, and also recorded the largest decrease in undernourishment compared with 2020, when the prevalence was 5.5 percent. In Mesoamerica, hunger was estimated at 5 percent in 2024, the same as in 2023, representing a marginal improvement of 0.5 percentage point compared with 2020. Finally, the Caribbean had the highest prevalence among the three subregions, estimated at 17.5 percent, which has remained relatively unchanged over the past three years.

An estimated 33.6 million people faced hunger in LAC in 2024 (Figure 3 and Table 2). South America accounted for the largest number of undernourished people, at 16.7 million, followed by Mesoamerica with 9.1 million and the Caribbean with 7.8 million.

National estimates for the 2022–2024 triennium show that, in LAC, the prevalence of undernourishment was below 2.5 percent in four countries: Brazil, Costa Rica, Guyana, and Uruguay. Chile and Mexico were close to this threshold as estimates in this same period show a prevalence of 2.5 and 2.7 percent, respectively, over the same period. In addition, Argentina, Barbados, Colombia, Dominica and the Dominican Republic recorded prevalence levels below 5 percent. Overall, 19 countries in the region had undernourishment levels below the global estimate for the latest available period. A comparison between the 2022–2024 estimates and the 2014–2016 period indicates that 11 countries in the region were able to reduce hunger.^{2 2} These countries are: Chile, Colombia, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama and the Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of).

At the same time, national estimates (Figure 4) show significant variance between countries in the region. Haiti had the highest prevalence of undernourishment, estimated at 54.2 percent, while prevalence levels in the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Honduras and Ecuador were estimated at 21.8, 14.8 and 12.1 percent, respectively.