“Famines are still a major global problem. From 2020 to 2023 alone, they caused over a million deaths.

Yet the long-term trend shows significant progress. In the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s, it was common for famines to kill over 10 million people per decade. This was true as recently as the 1960s, when China’s Great Leap Forward became the deadliest famine in history.

But as you can see in the chart, that number has dropped sharply, to about one to two million per decade.

This improvement is even more striking given that the world’s population has grown substantially.”

From Our World in Data.