UN report finds healthy diet cost up 25% since 2021
The daily cost of a healthy diet reached $4.28 in purchasing power parity dollars per person in 2025, a nearly 25% increase from $3.44 in 2021 and up from $2.94 in 2017, according to the United Nations’ annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report published Tuesday.
The report, produced by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in partnership with the World Health Organization and other agencies, calculates the minimum outlay needed to purchase locally available food that meets energy and nutritional requirements for a diet the agencies define as adequate, balanced, diverse and moderate. The dollar figure is expressed in purchasing power parity terms — an adjustment that accounts for how much a given currency buys relative to what $4.28 buys in the United States.
Latin America and the Caribbean faced the highest costs globally at $4.91 in purchasing power parity dollars per person per day. Asia’s costs were lower, but Africa registered the highest proportion of people who could not meet the threshold: two-thirds of the continent’s population, more than double the proportion in Latin America and the Caribbean and Asia.
An estimated 2.69 billion people — roughly one-third of the global population — could not afford a healthy diet in 2025. That figure represents a decline of 280 million from 2021, when 2.97 billion people, or 37.4% of the population, fell below the affordability line.
“The proportion of people unable to afford to eat properly remains extremely high,” said FAO chief economist Maximo Torero, noting that the $4.28 figure is “significantly higher” than the extreme poverty threshold of $3 in purchasing power parity dollars per person per day.
Global hunger fell for a third straight year to 7.8% of the population, down from 8.6% in 2022 — a decline of nearly 30 million people.
“While we welcome the clear progress we have made in reducing hunger, a healthy diet still remains unaffordable for one in three people globally,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “Obesity is rising and progress on maternal and child nutrition is stalling.”
Ghebreyesus said that policies such as front-of-pack food labeling, taxing unhealthy products and protecting children from harmful marketing are known to be effective. “Healthy diets are not a luxury — they are the foundation of health and must be within everyone’s reach,” he added.
International Fund for Agricultural Development President Alvaro Lario called for investment in resilient value chains, market systems and rural economies to make healthy food affordable.
Torero warned that the report’s 2025 figures likely understate the current situation. Development assistance to Africa has been cut significantly since the data were collected, he said, and Africa has overtaken Asia as the continent with the largest number of people suffering from hunger. He also cautioned that rising shipping costs from the disruption of commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — tied to the U.S.-Iran war — would probably affect the 2026 report when it is published next year.
The U.N. cautioned that the decline in the proportion of people unable to afford a healthy diet masked large discrepancies among regions and that reducing costs alone would not be enough to improve diet quality and nutrition. The 2030 goal of ending hunger, boosting nutrition and promoting sustainable agriculture remains distant, the report indicated.