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In the world · Food · 21 May 2026

Hunger in Colombia: what DANE measured in 2025

In Colombia, moderate or severe food insecurity fell to 21.1% of households in 2025, according to DANE. Chocó, Sucre and La Guajira remain close to half.

bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published

Moderate or severe food insecurity fell in Colombia in 2025: it reached 21.1% of households, compared with 25.5% in 2024, according to the bulletin of the National Administrative Department of Statistics, DANE, published on May 21, 2026. Counting people, there are still about 12 million living in this situation, and in three departments it reaches close to half of households.

What happened

DANE measures hunger with the Food Insecurity Experience Scale, FIES, created by FAO. It consists of eight questions about the last 12 months, ranging from worrying about not having enough food to going a whole day without eating. The questions have been part of the National Quality of Life Survey since 2022, with a sample of more than 85,000 households.

The 2025 results, according to DANE's technical bulletin:

  • Households in moderate or severe insecurity: 21.1%, compared with 25.5% in 2024.
  • Households in severe insecurity: 3.4%, compared with 5.0% in 2024.
  • People in moderate or severe insecurity: 22.8% of the population, or 12,078,000 people, compared with 27.6% the previous year.
  • People in severe insecurity: 3.7%, about 1,968,000. That is 779,000 fewer people in this condition in one year.

The decline was not equal across the country. The departments with the highest proportion of households in moderate or severe insecurity were Chocó, with 56.8%, Sucre, with 50.1%, and La Guajira, with 47.8%, according to El Tiempo. In Chocó, the rate rose from 36.3% to 56.8% in one year, according to DANE's own table. Bogotá stood at 9.6%.

The regional picture comes from the SOFI 2026 report, by the UN agencies. In Latin America and the Caribbean, chronic hunger affected 4.8% of the population in 2025. In South America, a group that includes Colombia and Brazil, it stood at 3.5%, while the Caribbean remained at 16.6%, according to UN News. Even so, 22.9% of Latin Americans experienced moderate or severe food insecurity, and a healthy diet in the region is the most expensive in the world, 4.91 dollars in purchasing power parity per person per day, according to FAO.

Why it matters

The national average hides very different maps. In regions where roads are poor, power fails and fresh food arrives expensive or not at all, hunger persists even when the country improves. Chocó, on the Pacific coast, and La Guajira, in the northern desert, are examples of places where distance and climate weigh as much as income.

The comparison with Brazil helps explain the region's moment. Both countries improved their indicators, and the UN attributes the decline in South America to the combination of school meals, cash transfers and support for family farming. But in both, pockets remain where public policy does not yet arrive with the same strength, and where food logistics is part of the problem.

In Bairo's view

Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez was born in Colombia, in 1982, and lives in Brazil, where he built the fronts he founded. For him, DANE's numbers have faces. In Bairo's reading, hunger in Colombia and in the rest of Latin America is, to a large extent, the same one he learned to see in Brazil: food that exists in one region and is missing in another, for lack of a path, of cold storage or of information.

He sees the 2025 decline as good news, and the departments left behind as the place where the next response needs to arrive. For Bairo, regions such as Chocó and La Guajira are precisely those where a food that needs no refrigerator and travels well would make the most difference.

Where this meets the ecosystem

Instituto CEASA, the humanitarian front founded by Bairo, proposes turning the surplus of the wholesale supply centers into shelf-stable food, designed for places without a cold chain. Today the project is being set up and focused on Brazilian supply centers; taking the model to other countries in the region is a vision for the future, not a plan with a date. The goal of a shelf life of up to two years without refrigeration depends on a stability study and sanitary registration. Stated website: institutoceasa.org (site under construction).

Xperienc, which Bairo also founded, proposes, in health, to bring together patients and professionals who speak different languages. The same concern, that no one be left out because of a border or a language, runs through the humanitarian proposal.

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