🍚 Famine & Hunger

Background: why this matters

Famine is widespread starvation serious enough to cause mass death. Today it is almost always caused by people rather than nature. Droughts and price shocks create the conditions, but conflict, sieges and blocked aid usually turn a food crisis into a famine. The 20th century's deadliest famines, in the Soviet Union, China and elsewhere, were driven largely by policy and war.

To make famine an objective finding rather than a political claim, aid agencies built the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). It rates areas on five phases: Minimal, Stressed, Crisis, Emergency and Famine. Phase 5 (Famine) requires evidence that at least 20% of households face extreme food gaps, at least 30% of children are acutely malnourished, and deaths exceed 2 per 10,000 people per day. The scale grew out of work in Somalia in the 2000s. Famine was declared there in 2011, and a later study for FAO and FEWS NET estimated about 258,000 deaths.

Famine has returned in recent years. In August 2024 the IPC's Famine Review Committee found famine conditions in the Zamzam displacement camp in Sudan's North Darfur. In August 2025 it confirmed famine in Gaza Governorate. Many more people live in Phase 4 Emergency conditions, which the IPC describes as large food gaps with high acute malnutrition and excess deaths.

This factor uses FEWS NET, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. The U.S. government set it up in 1985 after the Ethiopian famine, and it monitors about 30–40 of the most food-insecure countries every month. For each country we take the worst current IPC-compatible phase found anywhere in it. That makes the score sensitive to local catastrophes, but it means countries without FEWS NET coverage are not counted. FEWS NET's work was interrupted in 2025 when US foreign-aid funding was frozen, which is why the history chart has a gap.

What experts watch: humanitarian access in conflict zones (Sudan, Gaza, Haiti, Yemen, the Sahel, eastern DRC); rainfall forecasts and El Niño; staple food prices; funding for the World Food Programme; and population displacement.