Hunger largely disappears in once poverty-stricken Caribbean nation

Back in 1970, most people in the Dominican Republic were malnourished. It was a desperately poor country, like its neighbor, Haiti. But today, only about 2% of Dominicans are malnourished. “Undernourishment has become rare enough in the Dominican Republic that the country has officially left the Food and Agriculture Organization’s ‘Hunger Map,’ which tracks the prevalence of undernourishment around the world. According to government figures, the share of the population that is undernourished fell from 21.3 percent in 2006 to less than 2.5 percent in 2025,” reports Human Progress.

Most Dominicans were “chronically undernourished around 1970. According to a comprehensive national nutritional status survey conducted by the Caribbean Food and Nutrition Institute in 1969—which analyzed middle- and low-income groups across the country—the majority of the population examined was found to be chronically undernourished….the vast majority of people examined had effectively been chronically undernourished almost from birth. Out of the thousands of individuals whose vitamin, mineral, and protein levels were clinically assessed via blood and urine analyses, only 2 percent returned uniformly acceptable healthy values. Over half (51 percent) of all children under 15 years old were found to be anemic due to severe nutritional deficits.”

Dominican President Luis Abinader says “that the fight against hunger has been developed through two lines of action: increasing the availability of food and improving household incomes. Between 2004 and 2024, the rate of per capita food production grew by 122.3%, while between 2015 and 2025 the real income per capita of households increased by 43.7%.”

In the Dominican Republic’s neighbor, Haiti, hunger remains common. “About 51% to 54% (or roughly half) of the Haitian population faces acute food insecurity, though not all of them are clinically malnourished.”

Around 1970, many journalists and academics predicted that world hunger would rise by now. But world hunger has fallen instead.

“The share of the world’s population that was undernourished fell to 7.8 percent in 2025, down from 8.1 percent in 2024 and 8.6 percent in 2022. The decline marks the third consecutive year that global hunger has fallen, a welcome recovery after progress against hunger stalled during the 2010s amid conflict and economic stagnation, particularly in Africa, and then partially reversed during the COVID-19 pandemic as incomes fell and food prices rose. In Asia and Latin America, the rate of undernourishment has now fallen to historic lows,” reports The Doomslayer.

The United Nations noted earlier this year that

Global hunger declined for a third consecutive year in 2025…7.8 per cent of the global population, or roughly 645 million people, faced hunger in 2025.

This is down from 8.1 per cent in 2024 and 8.6 per cent in 2022, or nearly 14 million fewer people than in 2024 and 43 million fewer compared to 2022.

The fact that less than a tenth of the world’s population is undernourished is very much at odds with what I was told would happen when I was a child. Back then, the media claimed that world hunger would increase due to overpopulation, resulting in famines that would kill hundreds of millions of people. In his 1968 best-selling book The Population Bomb, biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted that rapid population growth would outpace global food supplies, leading to catastrophic, irreversible worldwide famines in the 1970s and 1980s that would kill hundreds of millions of people. That did not happen, and the only famines that killed more than a million people were in Communist countries like Ethiopia.

But that did not prevent journalists from adoring Paul Ehrlich, despite his utterly wrong predictions. He was on the Tonight Show more than 20 times. Even after his predictions proved false, Ehrlich received numerous prestigious honors, such as the MacArthur Fellowship and Crafoord Prize in 1990, the Tyler Prize in 1998, and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in 2013. Progressive academics loved Paul Ehrlich’s warnings of doom, even though they soon proved inaccurate.

Poverty has fallen in at least three quarters of the world since 2021.

Child poverty is at its lowest level in human history.

Poverty has declined rapidly in the world’s most mountainous country, Bhutan.

Poverty has declined in Latin America, except in countries ruled by socialist dictatorships.

Global life expectancy and income are at an all-time high.

Back in 1950, at least half of the world’s people (and most of the world’s children) lived in extreme poverty. That is not remotely true today.