While folk throughout the world had long contributed to efforts to alleviate hunger in the developing world, there has recently been a rapid increase in the numbers involved in tackling domestic hunger even within the economically advanced nations of the Global North. This had happened much earlier in North America than it did in Europe. In the US, the Reagan administration scaled back welfare the early 1980s, leading to a vast increase of charity sector efforts to help Americans unable to buy enough to eat. According to a 1992 survey of 1000 randomly selected US voters, 77% of Americans had contributed to efforts to feed the hungry, either by volunteering for various hunger relief agencies such as food banks and soup kitchens, or by donating cash or food. Europe, with its more generous welfare system, had little awareness of domestic hunger until the food price inflation that began in late 2006, and especially as austerity-imposed welfare cuts began to take effect in 2010. Various surveys reported that upwards of 10% of Europes population had begun to suffer from food insecurity. Especially since 2011, there has been a substantial increase in grass roots efforts to help the hungry by means of food banks, within both the UK and continental Europe. By July 2012, the 2012 US drought had already caused a rapid increase in the price of grain and soy, with a knock on effect on the price of meat.
Food insecure is when food intake of one or more household members was reduced and their eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year because the household lacked money and other resources for food. Food security statistics is measured by using survey data, based on household responses to items about whether the household was able to obtain enough food to meet their needs. World statistics
The United Nations publish an annual report on the state of food security and nutrition across the world. Led by the FAO, the 2020 report was joint authored by four other UN agencies: the WFP, IFAD, WHO and UNICEF. Compared to older reports, the 2020 version revised down the numbers of people suffering from severe hunger, though this applied to figures for each year going back to 2000, so the trend for hunger to have increased since 2014 was still evident. The FAOs yearly report provides a statistical overview on the prevalence of hunger around the world, and is widely considered the main global reference for tracking hunger. No simple set of statistics can ever fully capture the multi dimensional nature of hunger however. Reasons include that the FAOs key metric for hunger, "undernourishment", is defined solely in terms of dietary energy availability – disregarding micro-nutrients such as vitamins or minerals.