Visualizing Food Unaffordability Across The World

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.

ℹ️ A person is food insecure when they lack regular access to enough safe and nutritious food for normal growth and development and an active and healthy life.

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.

Ranked: Food Unaffordability as a Share of Population

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.

Geographically, eight out of 10 people in sub-Saharan Africa and seven out of 10 people in South Asia cannot afford a healthy diet versus three out of 10 in Europe and one out of 10 in North America.

Healthy Diet vs. Nutrient and Calorie Sufficiency

When reducing the quality of diet, food becomes a little more affordable.

For example, in Indonesia, nearly 71% of the population cannot afford a healthy diet. However this drops to 64% for a nutrient-sufficient diet, and only 3% for a calorie-sufficient diet.

While the aim is to have every single person able to afford a healthy diet, it is useful to track progress across diets to see which countries are making strides in food affordability, whether it comes from growing incomes or improved supply.

At a regional level, these nuances reveal geographic differences in food unaffordability.

While sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have comparable shares of population unable to afford healthy and nutrient sufficient diets, the gap widens immensely when looking at just calorie-sufficient diets, nearly 25% versus 2.6%.

For countries in South Asia, this could help target efforts to improve affordability for more than the most basic of diets.