Uncharted Waters' Food Security Indicator - Q2 2025
Q2 2025
Uncharted Waters continues to develop and refine our Food Security Indicator (FSI), providing near real-time insights into global food security patterns at the country level. Our Q2 2025 analysis reveals persistent challenges driven primarily by trade and production factors, with conflict continuing to shape food security across multiple regions. While our methodology improvements have refined how we assess multi-actor violence, the fundamental drivers of food insecurity remain consistent: inadequate food supply relative to demand, ongoing conflicts, and regional instability that creates cascading effects across borders.
The second quarter of 2025 shows mixed patterns across regions, with some improvements alongside gradual changes in already affected areas. Regional impacts have shifted since Q1 in Central America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia, while several nations continue to experience reductions in food storage capacity. Our analysis indicates that countries struggling to meet basic food demands face ongoing challenges from both immediate supply constraints and longer-term structural vulnerabilities.
The Global Situation
Figure 1: Food Security Indicator for Q2 2025. Lower scores (darker brown) indicate lower food security (Conflict data from ACLED, accessed 15-05-’25).
Our Q2 2025 analysis reveals a complex global food security landscape where trade and production factors continue to be the primary drivers of national-level food insecurity. The most significant finding is that high FSI values are predominantly attributed to low realized food demand, in either total food availability or specific crops experiencing the greatest supply shortages.
Several regions show persistent vulnerability. In the Caribbean, Haiti, Belize, and Cuba face potentially unmet food demands, with Haiti experiencing particularly severe challenges with significant storage reductions that directly impact our FSI calculations. Venezuela and Colombia in South America continue to struggle with food access, reflecting ongoing economic and political instability that constrains their ability to secure adequate food supplies through trade or domestic production, and to ensure effective distribution and access within these countries.
The East African situation remains critical, with Somalia, Uganda, South Sudan, and Sudan all showing signs of potentially unmet food demands. The Sudanese Civil War and ongoing tensions in South Sudan continue to severely impact food security in these countries, creating a regional crisis that extends beyond national borders. In other parts of Africa, Libya, Botswana, and Equatorial Guinea face similar challenges, with Equatorial Guinea among the few countries where large storage reductions are directly reflected in FSI scores.
Asia presents a mixed picture, with Bhutan facing food demand challenges while North Korea experiences both potentially unmet demands and significant storage reductions that impact its FSI rating. The Pacific Island Nations, particularly the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, continue to face structural vulnerabilities due to their geographic isolation and limited domestic production capacity.
Production anomalies have been observed in West Africa and parts of the Middle East, including Iran, Iraq, and Turkmenistan. While these production issues don't directly impact FSI calculations, their effects cascade through our FOODDivider digital twin, creating secondary impacts on global food trade patterns and regional food security.
Regional Highlight
Sub-Saharan Africa: Mixed Patterns in an Ongoing Challenge
Figure 2: Change in Food Security Indicator from previous quarter. Orange indicates that the food security situation has declined while green indicates it has improved.
Sub-Saharan Africa presents a complex picture of gradual changes within the region's ongoing food security challenges. While the overall regional impact has shifted since Q1 2025, the pattern shows variations rather than uniform trends across countries that were already experiencing food insecurity.
The most significant factor continues to be the cascading effects of conflict, particularly the Sudanese Civil War, which creates spillover impacts affecting neighboring countries beyond Sudan's borders. These regional conflict effects demonstrate how food insecurity can transcend national boundaries, with trade disruptions and population movements affecting broader areas than the immediate conflict zones.
Storage capacity changes vary significantly across the region. While several countries have experienced reductions in food reserves, Equatorial Guinea and South Sudan are among the few where these storage reductions directly impact FSI calculations. This suggests that most countries in the region maintain some buffer capacity, though the countries where storage affects FSI scores represent particularly vulnerable situations where reserve depletion directly threatens food access.
The integration of economic equality measures within our FSI continues to reveal how food insecurity disproportionately affects the poorest citizens within countries, even where national-level indicators might suggest adequate food availability. This internal distribution factor remains a critical component of understanding true food security conditions across the region.
Changes from Previous Quarter
The transition from Q1 to Q2 2025 reveals mixed patterns across regions, with some improvements alongside gradual changes in countries already experiencing food security challenges. Regional impacts have shifted across Central America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia, representing changes in existing conditions rather than new countries becoming food insecure.
Our refined methodology for processing conflict data has resulted in some notable changes in how we assess food security impacts. The new approach reduces the measured impact of multi-actor low-level violence, leading to decreased assessments of food security impacts from crime in countries like Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia, as well as from multi-actor civil wars in Myanmar and parts of East Africa. While this methodological improvement provides more precise measurements, these regions continue to face food security challenges from conflict, even if the calculated impacts are now more nuanced.
Storage capacity presents a varied picture, with several countries experiencing reductions in food reserves. However, only Haiti, South Sudan, Equatorial Guinea, and North Korea see these storage reductions directly reflected in FSI calculations, suggesting that most countries retain sufficient buffer capacity or alternative mechanisms to maintain food access despite reduced reserves.
Future Developments
We continue to enhance our FSI methodology and expand its analytical capabilities. Our immediate priorities include developing subnational resolution updates that will provide more granular insights into crop production and related food security patterns within countries. This development will be particularly valuable for large countries with diverse regional conditions and will help identify specific areas where interventions might be most effective.
Our analysis does not include Gaza, where famine is confirmed by the UN. We are exploring options to incorporate Gaza and the West Bank, recognizing the need for specialized methodological approaches given the unique circumstances.
Our research team is also examining the long-term sustainability of food production systems, particularly focusing on regions where food production heavily depends on irrigation that exceeds natural recharge rates. This analysis aims to highlight how unsustainable water use might affect food security not only in producing regions but also in countries that import food produced using such water resources. This forward-looking approach will help identify emerging vulnerabilities before they manifest as acute food security crises.
Additionally, we continue to refine our seasonal forecasting capabilities and improve the integration of climate data with crop modeling and trade analysis. These improvements will enhance our ability to provide early warning of developing food security challenges and support more proactive response planning.
Key Insights
Food insecurity in Q2 2025 remains fundamentally driven by the inability of countries to meet food demand through either domestic production or trade. The mixed patterns observed across regions suggest that while some areas show gradual improvements, others continue to face ongoing challenges, particularly in Central America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia. Countries experiencing storage reductions alongside demand shortfalls represent areas requiring continued attention and support.
Conflict continues to be a major driver of food insecurity, though our refined methodology assumes that the impact of organized, sustained conflicts (such as those in Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, and Sudan) creates more significant food security challenges than diffuse, multi-actor violence.
The cascading effects of production anomalies through global trade networks highlight the interconnected nature of food systems and the importance of maintaining robust trade relationships and supply chain resilience. Countries with limited economic capacity to compete in global markets or offset production issues with imports continue to face the greatest vulnerabilities to food insecurity.
Our FSI complements existing approaches such as the FAO Global Information and Early Warning System (GIEWS) and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), providing valuable insights where traditional data collection faces challenges. For more information about our methodology or to discuss how our data might support your organization's work, please contact us.