Food is the palate’s poetry, the body’s fuel, and a shared language transcending cultures... when people can afford it.
As Visual Capitalist's Pallavi Rao details below, the World Health Organization found that the COVID-19 pandemic and war in Ukraine pushed 122 million more people into food insecurity between 2019 and 2022. Higher food prices, combined with increasing poverty, have resulted in rising food unaffordability, especially in certain regions of the world.
Our World in Data uses statistics gathered by the World Bank to map the share of the population that cannot afford a healthy diet in every country it has data for.
A healthy diet—in this case, one that meets government dietary guidelines—is considered unaffordable in a country when its cost exceeds 52% of per capita income per day.
Immediate trends in food unaffordability are discoverable from a glance at the map. The wash of red in Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia indicates the regions where the majority of the population cannot afford a healthy diet.
Ranking the countries by pure percentages in the table below allows us to get a closer look at country-level issues.
At the top of the list, nearly 98% of Madagascar’s population cannot afford a healthy diet. The country is facing a prolonged drought in the southern region since 2019, affecting agriculture. A series of cyclones in 2021–2022 destroyed rice fields and damaged critical infrastructure, like road networks, putting further pressure on food prices. Finally, the rising price of oil due to the Russian invasion has pushed up transport costs. All these factors have resulted in food prices jumping nearly 20% in three years.
As a result, food insecurity in Madagascar has risen dramatically—by nearly one million people every year since 2019, of which 250,000 are classified under a “famine situation.”
A mix of similar factors affect the next five countries with the highest share of population unable to afford food—Burundi, Malawi, Central African Republic, Nigeria, and Liberia.
In Haiti, ranked 7th, a reliance on food imports makes the country vulnerable to inflation and price volatility, which has been markedly worse in the last two years.
On the other hand, predictably, the top five countries with the least food unaffordability—Cyprus, Finland, Luxembourg, Slovenia, and Switzerland—are all from Europe with 0% of the population unable to afford a healthy diet.
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