Food Security in Nepal & the Global Hunger Index Explained

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is an annual, peer-reviewed measure of hunger published jointly by the German aid agency Welthungerhilfe and the Irish agency Concern Worldwide. It scores countries on a 100-point scale, where 0 means no hunger and higher values mean worse hunger, using four indicators: undernourishment, child stunting, child wasting and child mortality. Scores are grouped into severity bands: low (below 9.9), moderate (10.0-19.9), serious (20.0-34.9), alarming (35.0-49.9) and extremely alarming (50 and above).

In the 2025 Global Hunger Index, Nepal recorded a score of 14.8, ranking 72nd out of the 123 countries with enough data to compute a score. This places Nepal firmly in the "moderate" hunger category and makes it the second-best performer in South Asia after Sri Lanka. In the previous 2024 edition Nepal had scored 14.7 and ranked 68th of 127 countries, so the small rank change between years mainly reflects a different set of ranked countries rather than a sudden worsening of hunger.

GHI scores are only strictly comparable across the specific reference years the report itself publishes (2000, 2008, 2016 and the current year), because the underlying methodology and data are revised over time. For that reason, this page uses the values from the latest 2025 report for historical comparisons, and treats single-year rank movements as indicative rather than precise.

Nepal's long-run progress on hunger is one of the clearer success stories in South Asia. According to the 2025 GHI report's comparable time series, Nepal's score fell from 37.0 in 2000 (bordering the "alarming" band) to 28.5 in 2008 and 20.6 in 2016 (both "serious"), before reaching 14.8 in the 2025 edition. That is roughly a 60 percent reduction in the index value across a single generation.

The steepest gains came before 2016, a period that coincided with rising agricultural output, expanded health and nutrition programmes, large-scale labour migration and the remittances it generated, and a fall in absolute poverty. Progress has slowed since 2016, however. Analysts point to the aftermath of the 2015 earthquake, the COVID-19 pandemic, global food- and fuel-price shocks after 2022, and Nepal's rising dependence on food imports as factors that have made further improvement harder.

The remaining hunger burden is now concentrated less in outright calorie shortage and more in child undernutrition, especially stunting. In other words, Nepal has largely solved the problem of people not having enough to eat on average, but not yet the harder problem of children not getting a diverse, nutritious enough diet in the critical first 1,000 days of life.

Behind Nepal's headline score sit four component indicators, each tracking a different dimension of hunger. Prevalence of undernourishment measures the share of the total population whose regular food intake is too low to meet dietary energy needs. Child stunting (low height-for-age) and child wasting (low weight-for-height) capture chronic and acute undernutrition among children under five, while child mortality reflects the under-five death rate, a partial consequence of undernutrition.

The 2025 report shows dramatic improvement on three of the four measures since 2000. Undernourishment fell from about 23.7 percent of the population in 2000-2002 to roughly 5.3 percent in 2022-2024. Child stunting dropped from about 55.9 percent of under-fives in 2000 to about 26.0 percent by 2024. Under-five mortality fell from roughly 7.9 percent to under 3 percent over the same period, a major public-health achievement.

Child wasting is the laggard. It has hovered around 7 to 12 percent for two decades and stood near 7.0 percent in the latest data, still above internationally accepted thresholds. Child stunting, though far lower than in 2000, also remains above the 20 percent level that the World Health Organization considers a public-health concern, meaning roughly one in four Nepali children is still too short for their age. These two child-nutrition indicators are why Nepal's score has stopped falling quickly.

Undernourishment (a supply-side estimate of calorie shortfall) is not the same as food insecurity as households actually experience it. The FAO's Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), based on direct survey questions, gives a fuller picture. On this measure, roughly one-third of Nepalis have faced moderate or severe food insecurity in recent years, with World Bank/FAO estimates putting the share around 36 percent in 2023, meaning they have had to skip meals, eat less, or worry about running out of food at some point in the year.

The World Food Programme (WFP) has estimated that around 4.3 million people, roughly 15 percent of the population, were food insecure in 2023, and its 2024 household survey found food-consumption adequacy had slightly deteriorated because of higher food prices and slow post-pandemic recovery. Around 23 percent of the population cannot afford a nutritionally adequate diet, according to WFP's Fill the Nutrient Gap analysis.

These figures are best read as a range rather than a single number, because they come from different methods (calorie models, experience surveys and cost-of-diet analysis) and different reference years. What they consistently show is that a large minority of Nepalis remain vulnerable to shocks even though average calorie sufficiency has improved.

The FAO defines food security as a condition in which all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs for an active and healthy life. This concept rests on four pillars, and a country can be strong on one while failing on another.

Availability is about whether enough food physically exists in a place, through domestic production, imports and stocks. Nepal produces a national surplus of major cereals like rice, maize and wheat in the Terai and lower hills, but high-mountain districts are structurally food-deficit. Access is about whether households can actually obtain that food, which depends on income, prices, roads and markets; poor rural households and remote districts often cannot, even when food exists elsewhere in the country.

Utilization concerns whether the food translates into good nutrition, which depends on dietary diversity, clean water, sanitation, feeding practices and health care; this is where Nepal's persistent child stunting and wasting show up. Stability is the cross-cutting fourth pillar, meaning the other three must hold over time and not collapse under earthquakes, floods, landslides, price spikes or trade disruptions. Nepal's exposure to climate shocks and its growing reliance on food imports make stability a particular concern.

Nepal's food security varies enormously across its three ecological belts, the Terai (plains), the Hills, and the high Mountains, which run east-west across the country. The Terai, often called Nepal's granary, has the most productive farmland, the best road and market access, and the lowest rates of food insecurity. The Hills are mixed, while the high-mountain districts face the toughest conditions: short growing seasons, steep and fragile land, difficult transport, and dependence on food carried in from distant Terai markets at high cost.

Surveys consistently show this gradient. Food-insecure households are markedly more common in mountain areas than in the Terai, and the share of people with insufficient calorie intake is substantially higher in the hills and mountains than on the plains. Out of Nepal's high-mountain districts, a large majority run a food deficit and must import staples to get through the year.

By province, Karnali is the most food-insecure part of the country, combining remoteness, poverty, thin road networks and harsh terrain; only a minority of Karnali households are fully food secure and severe food insecurity is concentrated there. Sudurpashchim (Far-Western) and parts of Madhesh also lag on nutrition indicators. This geography is central to Nepal's remaining hunger challenge: national averages have improved, but the poorest, most remote communities have improved least, which is why the 2025 GHI report for Nepal was launched in Karnali Province.

Nepal's GHI performance is closely tied to its wider agricultural economy. Agriculture still employs a large share of the workforce and shapes rural incomes, yet productivity is low, landholdings are small and fragmented, and the country has shifted from being a net food exporter toward being a net food importer. That import dependence links domestic food prices to global markets and exchange rates, weakening the stability pillar.

Policy responses include Nepal's constitutional recognition of the right to food and food sovereignty, the Right to Food and Food Sovereignty Act, and long-running nutrition programmes targeting the first 1,000 days of a child's life. Nepal is among a small number of countries with dedicated right-to-food legislation, which the GHI report has highlighted as a positive model.

For readers tracking Nepal, the practical takeaways are consistent across sources: hunger has fallen dramatically since 2000; the remaining problem is undernutrition (especially child stunting) rather than mass calorie shortage; and the burden is heavily concentrated in the mountains and in Karnali. Continued progress depends less on producing more calories nationally and more on improving access, dietary quality and resilience in the places that have been left furthest behind.