A perfect storm of war, pestilence and budget cuts has dashed any hope of ending national and global hunger by 2030, anti-poverty advocates say.
The United Nations set a goal in 2015 of eradicating global food insecurity by the end of this decade. Former President Joe Biden set the same objective for the United States in 2022.
Jeremy Everett
But COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, inflation, the demise of the U.S. Agency for International Development, known as USAID, and federal spending cuts mean hunger will not be beaten in the next five years, said Jeremy Everett, executive director of the Baylor University Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty.
“When we think about how we end hunger by 2030, these factors basically are setting us back to where we were closer to 2005 or 2000. We’re moving in the wrong direction,” Everett insisted.
Between 638 million and 700 million people — or nearly 9% of the world’s population — experienced food insecurity in 2024, the UN said in its latest report on the state of global nutrition and food security.
“While some progress and recovery have been made in recent years, the world is still above pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels and far from eradicating hunger and food insecurity by 2030,” the report said.
The additional goal of ending malnutrition in children under age 5 and targeting the nutritional needs of girls, pregnant women and seniors also has been pushed further into the future.
The study “highlights how elevated inflation in many countries has undermined purchasing power and, especially among low-income populations, access to healthy diets,” the UN report noted.
In the United Stated, Feeding America reported more than 47 million people — more than 14% of the population — were food insecure in 2023, the latest year for which figures are available.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported 18 million American households experienced food insecurity in 2023. That figure represents more than 13% of all U.S. households.
“… the problem now is the wheels have fallen off.”
The 2030 goal was established when logistics were improving and when the collective desire and willpower existed to tackle food insecurity in ambitious ways, Everett said.
“That was all very positive, but the problem now is the wheels have fallen off. You have global conflict that you know has exploded,” he said.
“The Ukrainian-Russian border accounts for a huge percentage of the food that is provided to not only European countries, but to African nations and Southeast Asia. It provides the fertilizer that goes to farms in those areas of the world, also.”
Hunger and mass starvation are growing in Gaza and South Sudan due to conflicts in those areas, Everett added.
“What’s important to know is that hunger is not causal. It’s the result of other broken social systems. So, whenever you have big upstream issues like a war or an economic downturn or a pandemic, it always results in hunger.”
President Trump’s dissolution of USAID, the agency once responsible for administering foreign assistance and development, already has had devastating effects on world hunger, Everett said.
“It’s estimated that 300,000 people have already died due to food-based interventions that would have happened had USAID continued to operate as normal,” he noted.
The president’s action also destroyed much of the global network of nongovernmental organizations that delivered USAID assistance to local communities.
USAID’s absence has crippled regional economies by eliminating programs that taught people how to grow and sell their own food, which in turn supported local markets, Everett said.
“Overall, the effects have been catastrophic.”
“It has decimated the middle class in many places, which was helping provide food to people who needed it in these countries,” he explained. “Overall, the effects have been catastrophic.”
The 30% cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, will be just as damaging to hunger eradication efforts in the United States, Everett added.
Nearly $300 billion slashed from the program in President Trump’s recently passed spending bill is the largest reduction to the program in history. It will deprive much-needed nutrition to children and elderly people on fixed incomes.
Cuts to SNAP and other food assistance programs “are also going to have a huge effect on food banks, which already don’t have enough food to provide to families,” Everett said. “When you add on the staff reductions (at food banks) as a result of these cuts, that’s going to be very difficult for many households.”
Baylor’s Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty is developing a program to train Texas communities to address hunger in systemic capacities, Everett said.
In conjunction with the Alliance to End Hunger, a new Hunger Free Community certificate program will offer training for people interested in combatting hunger in comprehensive and holistic ways.
“It can be led by congregations. It can be led by community nonprofits,” Everett said. “It builds upon the idea that no one organization or sector can end hunger by themselves, and it gives a step-by-step process on how you get the community working in concert with each other to be able to solve food insecurity in their neighborhoods.”
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