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Data

Prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity in the total population

3-year average – UN FAO
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Agricultural Production

What you should know about this indicator

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

Item: Prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity in the total population (percent) (3-year average)

Description: The prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity is an estimate of the percentage of people in the population who live in households classified as moderately or severely food insecure. The assessment is conducted using data collected with the Food Insecurity Experience Scale or a compatible experience-based food security measurement questionnaire (such as the HFSSM). The probability to be food insecure is estimated using the one-parameter logistic Item Response Theory model (the Rasch model) and thresholds for classification are made cross country comparable by calibrating the metrics obtained in each country against the FIES global reference scale, maintained by FAO. The threshold to classify "moderate or severe" food insecurity corresponds to the severity associated with the item "having to eat less" on the global FIES scale. In simpler terms, a household is classified as moderately or severely food insecure when at least one adult in the household has reported to have been exposed, at times during the year, to low quality diets and might have been forced to also reduce the quantity of food they would normally eat because of a lack of money or other resources. It is an indicator of lack of food access.

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
percent

Related research and writing

Sustainable development goal 2: Zero Hunger

End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture

Our World in Data team

How is food insecurity measured?

Hannah Ritchie

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.

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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: Prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity in the total population”, 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/share-of-population-with-moderate-or-severe-food-insecurity.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. “Prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity in the total population – 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/share-of-population-with-moderate-or-severe-food-insecurity.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

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Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-moderate-or-severe-food-insecurity.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-moderate-or-severe-food-insecurity.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/share-of-population-with-moderate-or-severe-food-insecurity.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/share-of-population-with-moderate-or-severe-food-insecurity.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/share-of-population-with-moderate-or-severe-food-insecurity.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-moderate-or-severe-food-insecurity.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-moderate-or-severe-food-insecurity.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-moderate-or-severe-food-insecurity.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear