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Data

Number of severely food insecure people

3-year average – UN FAO
See all data and research on:
Agricultural Production

What you should know about this indicator

How is this data described by its producer - UN FAO?

Item: Number of severely food insecure people (million) (3-year average)

Description: Estimated number of people living in households classified as severely food insecure. It is calculated by multiplying the estimated percentage of people affected by severe food insecurity (I_2.4) by the total population.

Metric: Value

Source
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
February 25, 2026
Next expected update
February 2027
Date range
2015–2023
Unit
people

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations – Food Security and Nutrition: Suite of Food Security Indicators

The Suite of Food Security Indicators presents the core set of food security indicators.

Following the recommendation of experts gathered in the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) Round Table on hunger measurement, hosted at FAO headquarters in September 2011, an initial set of indicators aiming to capture various aspects of food insecurity is presented here. The choice of the indicators has been informed by expert judgment and the availability of data with sufficient coverage to enable comparisons across regions and over time.

Many of these indicators are produced and published elsewhere by FAO and other international organizations. They are reported here in a single database with the aim of building a wide food security information system. More indicators will be added to this set as more data will become available. Indicators are classified along the four dimensions of food security -- availability, access, utilization and stability.

Retrieved on
February 25, 2026
Retrieved from
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/FS
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations - Food Security and Nutrition: Suite of Food Security Indicators (2025).

The Suite of Food Security Indicators presents the core set of food security indicators.

Following the recommendation of experts gathered in the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) Round Table on hunger measurement, hosted at FAO headquarters in September 2011, an initial set of indicators aiming to capture various aspects of food insecurity is presented here. The choice of the indicators has been informed by expert judgment and the availability of data with sufficient coverage to enable comparisons across regions and over time.

Many of these indicators are produced and published elsewhere by FAO and other international organizations. They are reported here in a single database with the aim of building a wide food security information system. More indicators will be added to this set as more data will become available. Indicators are classified along the four dimensions of food security -- availability, access, utilization and stability.

Retrieved on
February 25, 2026
Retrieved from
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/FS
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations - Food Security and Nutrition: Suite of Food Security Indicators (2025).

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

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Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Number of severely food insecure people”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser (2023) - “Agricultural Production”. Data adapted from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/number-of-people-severely-food-insecure.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Number of severely food insecure people – UN FAO – 3-year average” [dataset]. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “Food Security and Nutrition: Suite of Food Security Indicators” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/number-of-people-severely-food-insecure.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

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Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-people-severely-food-insecure.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-people-severely-food-insecure.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-people-severely-food-insecure.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-people-severely-food-insecure.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-people-severely-food-insecure.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-people-severely-food-insecure.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-people-severely-food-insecure.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-people-severely-food-insecure.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear