[gjm11]

> Hunger worldwide has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so.

That doesn't appear to be true. E.g., following links from the WHO page you cite gets me to https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/39d... ...

where Figure 1 shows hunger consistently decreasing from the start of the graph in 2005 to somewhere around 2014, at which point it plateaus for a while and then starts increasing somewhere around 2019-2020.

My recollection is that by 2005 where that graph begins, hunger had been consistently decreasing for quite some time, but a bit of googling hasn't found anything that quite answers that question. I did find https://www.jstor.org/stable/40572886 (looking at data from 1930 to 1990) whose publicly-accessible abstract says that "the proportion undernourished has been in decline since the 1960s and that the absolute number has also declined in recent years".

So I think the truth is not "hunger has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so" but something more like "10 years ago, hunger had been improving for about half a century; the improvement stalled for about 5 years and over about the last five years it has been getting worse".

(Which is still bad news, as far as the present state of things is concerned, but a rather different sort of bad news.)