FAO: The Cost of Healthy Diets Obstructs Global Nutrition Goals

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026 (SOFI) report, issued by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), stresses that the rising cost of healthy diets is a major barrier to achieving global targets such as ending hunger and malnutrition by 2030. The report focuses on the affordability of healthy diets.

The newly released edition proposes policy solutions to make healthy diets more accessible, recalling earlier findings from 2020 that revealed 2.6 billion people were unable to afford a healthy diet last year. It also highlights the enormous economic burden of unhealthy diets, estimated at 8% of global GDP.

According to the report, the daily per capita cost of a healthy diet reached USD 4.46 (PPP) in 2024—well above pre‑pandemic levels—driven by two waves of inflation: supply chain disruptions during COVID‑19 and the Russia–Ukraine war’s direct impact on grain and fertilizer markets. As a result, 2.6 billion people, or 31.9% of the world’s population, could not afford a healthy diet in 2024. Although this figure declined slightly from 2.68 billion in 2022, it remains hundreds of millions higher than pre‑pandemic levels.

The report emphasizes that the problem is not global food scarcity but sharply unequal purchasing power. While Asia and Latin America saw improvements in recent years, Sub‑Saharan Africa and low‑income countries experienced continuous deterioration since 2022. The world is not facing a single food crisis, but rather a widening divide between economies resilient enough to absorb inflationary shocks and structurally fragile ones lacking foreign currency reserves and import capacity. Food poverty, it argues, is a direct outcome of weak macroeconomic resilience, not merely high prices.

The Arab region is particularly vulnerable due to structural dependence on food imports. A comprehensive assessment showed that in 2020 the daily cost of a healthy diet was USD 3.47 per person, unaffordable for more than half the region’s population—162.7 million people—with the share rising to 88% in the least developed Arab countries. Egypt alone lost 30% of its food purchasing power between Q3 2022 and the end of 2024 due to foreign currency shortages and rising import costs. In West Asia, hunger affected 12.7% of the population—over 39 million people—well above the global average of 8.2%.

The report notes stark disparities within the food basket itself: animal products are the most expensive globally, averaging USD 1 per day for required quantities, followed by vegetables (USD 0.76) and fruits (USD 0.67). In contrast, staple starches, oils, and fats remain cheapest. This imbalance makes healthy diets more inflation‑sensitive than calorie‑dense diets, pushing poorer households toward cheap carbohydrates while excluding them from proteins, vegetables, and fruits. This explains the coexistence of obesity and stunting in the Arab region, where adult obesity rates exceed twice the global average.

Healthy food has not become an absolute luxury, but balanced diets have turned into a class‑based commodity. Those with stable incomes are shielded from inflation’s impact on diet quality, while one‑third of the world’s population is forced to choose between cheap calories and proper nutrition. This is not a consumer luxury but a developmental failure, as the basic right to nutrition becomes income‑dependent. The true cost is paid later in chronic disease, declining productivity, and mounting pressure on public health systems—especially in Arab countries with high import dependence.

The report argues that solutions go beyond direct cash subsidies, requiring three parallel tracks:

1. Investment in local agricultural production, cold chains, and storage to reduce losses that sometimes exceed one‑third of output in key staples.
2. Coordinated monetary and fiscal policy to curb inflation expectations, rather than distortive tools like price controls or export bans that worsen scarcity.
3. Building precise agricultural and nutrition information systems to target vulnerable groups more effectively than broad, inefficient subsidies.

It adds that Arab states adopted the Arab Food Security Strategy at the Baghdad Summit in 2025 to address these challenges, aligned with Jordan’s Economic Modernization Vision 2033 in its agriculture and food security pillar.

The SOFI report is jointly issued each year by five organizations: FAO, UNICEF, WHO, WFP, and IFAD.