If you’ve ever thought about which country faces the harshest hunger crisis, the Global Hunger Index offers insight. 

The index measures four components: undernourishment, child wasting, child stunting, and child mortality. 

Countries are scored from 0 to 100, with four severity bands. 

The map above visualizes the top 26 countries in the “serious” or “alarming” territory. 

It comes at a moment when the UK government has warned that the world is sleepwalking into a global food crisis, with 45 million people facing acute hunger. 

TL;DR

• Somalia leads the Global Hunger Index 2025 with a score of 42.6, the closest any country has ever come to the “extremely alarming” threshold of 50, which has never been reached in the index’s history.
• India scores 25.8, ranked fifth in the chart, but with 1.43 billion people, it represents the largest absolute hunger burden of any country in the dataset by an enormous margin

Five Alarming Nations

Five nations have crossed from “serious” into “alarming” territory, defined as a score of 35 or above. 

Haiti sits at 35.7, the sole Western Hemisphere country in the dataset’s worst tier, where gang control of food distribution systems has replaced any functional state food management. 

Madagascar follows at 35.8, an island nation 400 kilometers off Africa’s eastern coast, entirely dependent on maritime supply chains with no overland alternative when global shipping is disrupted.

The Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan are tied at 37.5. 

DRC has approximately 100 million people (a population nearly 10 times larger than South Sudan’s 11 million), making the same score represent dramatically different absolute scales of suffering.

The India Number

India scores 25.8, ranking fifth-lowest in the chart and sitting in “serious” territory alongside Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau. 

Based on its position in the ranking, India appears to be a mid-severity case. By population, it is not.

India has approximately 1.43 billion people. A “serious” hunger score applied to that population represents more food-insecure people in absolute terms than the entire rest of the chart combined. 

The GHI scores countries per capita. 

What it cannot show is what 25.8 means at the population scale. 

Nigeria, at 32.8 with approximately 220 million people, carries the same invisible multiplier. 

Hormuz Shock Landing on a Crisis

The Strait of Hormuz (the narrow waterway through which approximately 20% of global oil trade and significant food commodity shipping moves) has seen its daily vessel traffic fall from 90 to 5. 

That disruption is not contained to energy markets.

Several countries already in the GHI dataset sit directly in the path of that supply chain collapse. 

• Pakistan scores 26.0 in the index (already in serious hunger territory) and depends on Gulf-region freight lanes for wheat and cooking oil imports. 
• Afghanistan, at 29.0, imports food through supply routes that are priced against Gulf shipping availability. 
• Syria, at 30.6, has had its food import channels progressively restricted since 2011 and depends on whatever regional logistics remain functional.

The Hormuz disruption does not appear in the GHI 2025 data, which was measured before the shipping collapse reached its current severity. 

The index shows where these countries stood before that additional shock arrived. The 2026 GHI will be the first edition to measure what comes after.

ELI5

The Global Hunger Index ranks countries by the severity of their hunger crisis. Somalia is the worst in the world right now at 42.6, close to a level never reached before. India scores 25.8, which sounds okay, but because India has 1.4 billion people, that small score means hundreds of millions going hungry. A blockage in the Strait of Hormuz is now making it harder to ship food to countries already on this list, worsening an already bad situation.

Source: 

Global Hunger Index 2025