Brazil off the Hunger Map: what the exit says, what's left

Brazil left the UN Hunger Map on July 28, 2025, when the SOFI 2025 report, by FAO and four other United Nations agencies, showed undernourishment in the country below 2.5% of the population on average from 2022 to 2024. A year later, SOFI 2026 confirmed that the country remains off. Leaving the map, however, does not mean everyone eats well.

What happened

The Hunger Map brings together the countries where more than 2.5% of the population lives in chronic undernourishment, that is, does not habitually consume enough calories for an active and healthy life. The calculation uses a three-year average. SOFI 2025 was launched in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, during the second stocktake of the UN Food Systems Summit, and showed Brazil below the line on average from 2022 to 2024.

It was the second time. The country had left the map in 2014 and returned to it at the end of the decade, when the average of the crisis years exceeded the threshold. A study by the Legislative Consultancy of the Federal Senate, published in September 2025, attributes the new exit to a set of measures: cash transfers, minimum wage increases, school meals and government purchases of food from family farming.

In July 2026, SOFI 2026 kept Brazil below 2.5%, now on the 2023 to 2025 average. According to Agência Brasil, the report estimates that 9.6% of the population, about 20.3 million people, are Brazilians in moderate or severe food insecurity, and 0.6%, about 1.2 million, live with the severe form. Meanwhile, 21.1% of the population, close to 44.8 million people, cannot afford a healthy diet.

The Brazilian measure, made by IBGE with its own scale, points in the same direction. In the PNAD Contínua (continuous household survey) for the fourth quarter of 2024, released in October 2025, severe food insecurity fell to 3.2% of households, the lowest value in the series, according to IBGE. Even so, 24.2% of households experienced some degree of food insecurity, and the North Region had 6.3% of households in severe insecurity, compared with 1.7% in the South.

Why it matters

The Hunger Map measures a lack of calories. It is an important indicator, but a narrow one. It does not show who eats enough in quantity and still eats poorly, nor who skips meals in some months of the year. That is why the UN reports themselves track, alongside undernourishment, food insecurity and access to a healthy diet.

Millions of Brazilians left hunger behind in a few years. But one in five people still cannot afford a diet with enough fruit, vegetables and protein, and severe hunger remains more present in the North and in rural areas.

In Bairo's view

For Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, Brazil's exit from the Hunger Map is an achievement that deserves to be celebrated, one that belongs to public policy, family farming and society. In his reading, it also shows the size of the next step: after guaranteeing calories, the challenge is to guarantee quality, and quality depends precisely on fresh foods, the hardest to carry far.

A Colombian who, as he tells it, arrived in Brazil in 2002, Bairo tends to look at hunger from the side of connection. For Bairo, the country produces food at scale, and what still fails is the path between the surplus in one place and the shortage in another. It is from this view that the image he uses for Instituto CEASA is born, that of a place where hunger stops being the problem and the pain, always as a proposal, never as a result.

Where this meets the ecosystem

Instituto CEASA proposes using the surplus of the wholesale supply centers as raw material for shelf-stable food that does not depend on a refrigerator, designed for regions where the cold chain is the bottleneck, such as much of the North and the countryside. The project is being set up, and the goal of a shelf life of up to two years depends on a stability study and sanitary registration. Stated website: institutoceasa.org (site under construction).

Traceability of donations, where the food came from, when it was processed and where it went, is another proposal: recording each step on BTZ Chain, a record network under development, so that those who donate and those who oversee see the same path.

Sources

• FAO, 07/28/2025: Hunger declines globally, but rises in Africa and western Asia: UN report
• Federal Senate, Discussion Paper 351, September 2025: O Brasil saiu (novamente) do Mapa da Fome da ONU: algumas explicações (Brazil has left the UN Hunger Map (again): some explanations)
• Agência Brasil, July 2025: Brazil off hunger map
• Agência Brasil, 07/22/2026: Brasil continua fora do Mapa da Fome, aponta relatório da ONU (Brazil remains off the Hunger Map, UN report shows)
• g1, 07/21/2026: Brasil melhora indicadores sobre segurança alimentar e segue fora do Mapa da Fome (Brazil improves food security indicators and stays off the Hunger Map)
• IBGE, October 2025: More than two million homes got out of food insecurity in 2024

Read also

• SOFI 2026: hunger falls to 645 million, diets cost more
• Ceasas: 16.6 million tonnes and the end-of-day surplus
• Instituto CEASA: what it is and why it matters
• When Bairo Gonzalez arrived in Brazil