Global Hunger Index

Hunger has many faces: increased susceptibility to disease, shortfalls in nutritional status, loss of energy, disability, and death due to starvation or infectious diseases whose lethal course is the result of weakened general health. At the national level, interactions between economic development, technology, policy, culture, ecological factors and the availability of natural resources are crucial.


These factors influence households and communities in terms of food availability, basic education and knowledge, caring capacity for children, old people, and the sick, and the general health environment. Shortfalls in these areas can rapidly push individuals into a vicious cycle of insufficient dietary intake, weight loss, a weakened immune system, and infections accompanied by loss of appetite and energy-consuming fever.


The GHI is designed to capture several dimensions of hunger and undernutrition. They include: insufficient food availability (as compared to requirements), shortfalls in nutritional status, and deaths that are directly or indirectly attributable to undernutrition. This definition goes beyond insufficient dietary energy availability at the household level, which is the focus of the FAO measure of undernourishment. Sufficient dietary energy availability at the household level does not mean that all individual household members benefit equally. Nor does it guarantee that small children will be fed food that is adequate for their age or that sick familiy members are able to biologically utilize the available food. The Global Hunger Index is therefore based on a three-dimensional definition which encompasses the outcomes of insufficient quantity, quality or safety of food as well as the consequences of a failure to utilize nutrients biologically.


The combination of the proportion of the undernourished in the entire population with the two indicators relating to children under five ensures that both the food supply of the entire population and the effects of inadequte nutrition on a physiologically vulnerable group are captured. Children´s nutritional status is of particular importance because nutritional deficiencies put them at high risk of physical and/or mental impairment and mortality. For many children in developing countries who die from infectious diseases, the indirect cause of death is a weakened immune system due to lack of dietary energy, vitamins and minerals. Because the first two indicators - the proportion of undernourished and the prevalence of underweight children - do not reveal premature death as the most tragic consequence of hunger, the child mortality rate is also included.