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Data

Number of people who cannot afford a calorie sufficient diet

See all data and research on:
Food PricesPoverty

What you should know about this indicator

  • An energy sufficient diet provides enough of a starchy staple food for day-to-day subsistence, without either nutrient adequacy or adherence to dietary guidelines.
  • This indicator is calculated as the percentage of a country's population that is unable to afford an energy sufficient diet, multiplied by the country's population.
  • Population counts all residents regardless of legal status or citizenship.
  • A value of zero indicates a null or a small number rounded down at the current precision level.
Number of people who cannot afford a calorie sufficient diet
Total number of people who cannot afford an energy-sufficient diet.
Source
FAO and World Bank (2025), using data and methods from Herforth et al. (2022) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
August 4, 2025
Next expected update
August 2026
Date range
2021–2021
Unit
people

Related research and writing

Almost three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet

Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Herforth et al. (2022), adapted by World Bank – Food Prices for Nutrition

Food Prices for Nutrition provides indicators on the cost and affordability of healthy diets in each country, showing the population's physical and economic access to sufficient quantities of locally available items for an active and healthy life. It also provides indicators on the cost and affordability of an energy-sufficient diet and of a nutrient-adequate diet. These indicators are explained in detail in the Food Prices for Nutrition DataHub.

Retrieved on
August 4, 2025
Retrieved from
https://databank.worldbank.org/source/food-prices-for-nutrition
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 Prices for Nutrition provides indicators on the cost and affordability of healthy diets in each country, showing the population's physical and economic access to sufficient quantities of locally available items for an active and healthy life. It also provides indicators on the cost and affordability of an energy-sufficient diet and of a nutrient-adequate diet. These indicators are explained in detail in the Food Prices for Nutrition DataHub.

Retrieved on
August 4, 2025
Retrieved from
https://databank.worldbank.org/source/food-prices-for-nutrition
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.

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.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

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 people who cannot afford a calorie sufficient diet”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser (2023) - “Food Prices”. Data adapted from Herforth et al. (2022), adapted by World Bank. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/number-calorie-diet-unaffordable.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:

FAO and World Bank (2025), using data and methods from Herforth et al. (2022) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

FAO and World Bank (2025), using data and methods from Herforth et al. (2022) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Number of people who cannot afford a calorie sufficient diet” [dataset]. Herforth et al. (2022), adapted by World Bank, “Food Prices for Nutrition 4.0” [original data]. Retrieved April 2, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/number-calorie-diet-unaffordable.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

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Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-calorie-diet-unaffordable.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-calorie-diet-unaffordable.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-calorie-diet-unaffordable.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-calorie-diet-unaffordable.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-calorie-diet-unaffordable.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-calorie-diet-unaffordable.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

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