That is what the United Nations said Tuesday. The annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report found the daily cost of eating adequately jumped almost a quarter between 2021 and 2025, from $3.44 to $4.28 in purchasing-power-parity dollars — the currency adjustment that measures what a dollar actually buys in a given country. The figure has risen from $2.94 in 2017. Twenty-six percent in four years. Forty-four percent in eight.
The food agency’s chief economist, Maximo Torero, pointed out that the global poverty line sits at $3 per person per day. A healthy diet costs a dollar forty more than poverty. That is not a rounding error. That is a structural gap between what food costs and what people have.
Two-point-six-nine billion people — almost a third of the planet — cannot clear that gap. The number is down from 2.97 billion in 2021, which the U.N. treated as progress. It is progress the way a man who has been drowning for an hour and now has his nose above the waterline is making progress. The hunger rate fell for a third straight year to 7.8 percent of the global population, down from 8.6 percent in 2022, about 30 million fewer people. But the cost of eating well keeps climbing, and the people who cannot pay it keep numbering in the billions.
The U.N. said Africa is where the crisis concentrates now. Two-thirds of the continent’s population cannot afford a healthy diet — more than double the rate in Latin America and Asia. Torero warned that significant cuts in development assistance to Africa would likely worsen the picture in the next report, and that the disruption to commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz from the U.S.-Iran war would push costs higher still.
Here is what those numbers mean where I sit, in Friendship, Wisconsin, in Adams County, where the nearest full-service grocery store is a twenty-five-mile round trip.
The Dollar General in town stocks shelf-stable processed food. It does not stock what the U.N. calls “adequate, balanced, diverse and moderate.” The Family Dollar where the grocery store used to be on Main Street stocks roughly the same shelf. When the supermarket left, the dollar stores moved in, and what they sell is what the global food system produces cheapest — the processed commodity output of the same consolidation that closed the store in the first place.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — the old food stamps — pays a family of four about $975 a month, which works out to $6.33 per person per day. That clears the $4.28 threshold. But the money does not buy what is not on the shelf, and what is on the shelf in a dollar store in a town that lost its grocery store is not a healthy diet by any definition the Food and Agriculture Organization or the World Health Organization would recognize. The same administration that raised tariffs on imported food — pushing grocery prices to a three-year high — is now proposing to cut the program that keeps rural families fed.
The U.N.’s numbers are the global version of what Adams County has been living for a decade. The cost of food goes up. The places that sell food worth eating disappear. The corporate machinery that produces calories cheaply and profitably does not produce nutrition cheaply or profitably, because nutrition is not what it was built to produce. What it was built to produce is margin.
Wendell Berry wrote forty years ago that industrial agriculture operates with an “extractive mind” — the same mentality that treats land and animals and people as expendable inputs in a production process. The U.N’s report is the global audit of what that extraction costs. A healthy diet costs $4.28 a day. Two-point-six-nine billion people do not have $4.28 a day. The system that produces the food is the system that prices the food beyond the reach of the people it was supposed to feed.
In Friendship, the extraction looks like this: the corn and soybeans leave the county on trucks and rail cars, bound for feedlots and ethanol plants and export terminals. The dollar stores that replaced the grocery store sell the processed residue back to the same county at a markup. The farmers who grow the commodity crops are themselves squeezed — caught between input costs set by four consolidated agribusinesses and commodity prices set by global markets they do not control. The food that actually nourishes — the fruits, the vegetables, the protein that is not mechanically separated and reconstituted — costs more every year, and the places that sell it get further away.
This is not an accident. It is not a market failure in the economists’ technical sense of the term, where a well-functioning system produces an unintended bad outcome. It is the system functioning as designed. The consolidation of agriculture, the consolidation of grocery retail, the consolidation of food processing — each stage extracts margin from the product and from the community, and the community is left with what the margin does not take. In Adams County, what is left is a Dollar General.
The WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said healthy diets are “not a luxury — they are the foundation of health and must be within everyone’s reach.” That is true. It is also a statement that acknowledges, without quite saying it, that a healthy diet is in fact a luxury for a third of the human race, and that the distance between where we are and where Tedros says we must be is not closing fast enough to matter for the people on the wrong side of it now.
The International Fund for Agricultural Development called for “resilient value chains” and “market systems and rural economies that make healthy food affordable for all.” That is the institutional version of what Berry has been saying in simpler language for decades: the economy of food should serve the people who eat it and the people who grow it, and when it serves neither, the problem is not insufficient market systems. The problem is who the market system was built to serve.
The U.N.’s report will be cited in policy papers and development briefings and the speeches of fund administrators for the next twelve months. In Friendship, the numbers will not change the trip to the store. The dollar stores will still stock what the consolidation feeds them. The nearest produce aisle will still be across the county. And the global food system will continue to extract margin from the land, from the labor, and from the plate — and call it progress because 30 million fewer people are going hungry than last year.
Progress, measured that way, is real. But the cost of eating well rose twenty-six percent in four years, and the places that sell food worth eating keep closing, and the system that produces the calories does not produce the nutrition, and two-and-a-half-billion people cannot afford to eat the way a human body needs to eat. The extraction continues. The margin holds. The county that grows the food goes to the dollar store.