The UN said nearly 2.7 billion people across the globe still cannot afford a healthy diet, with the cost of nutritious food continuing to increase faster than the incomes of many households.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said that ahead of the release of the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026 report on July 21, the global cost of a healthy diet has increased by 25% over the past five years.
The average cost of a healthy diet was $4.28 per person per day in 2020, adjusted for purchasing power across countries, according to the FAO Chief Economist Máximo Torero Cullen. That is above the international extreme poverty threshold of $3.00 per person per day and highlights the gap between levels of poverty and the cost of meeting basic nutritional needs. “As a consequence, 2.69 billion people, nearly 1 in 3 people in the world, still cannot afford a healthy diet,” Torero told reporters on the eve of the report’s release.
FAO said the biggest problem is not a lack of food or calories but the cost of food that is rich in nutrients. “Calories are cheap, nutrition is not,” Torero said.
Cereals and root vegetables, which are staple foods, account for around 13% of the cost of a healthy diet while providing most of the daily calorie intake, the agency said. Meanwhile, fruits and vegetables make up 16% of total food costs but merely around 5% of daily calories. Almost 30 per cent of the total cost is for animal-source foods.
“The findings point to the need to improve access to affordable, nutritious foods to address global malnutrition, even when calories are adequate.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) recognises unhealthy diets as a major risk factor for the global burden of disease and a major contributor to noncommunicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer.
