The harvest was never the shortage.

In 2025, 645 million people did not have enough to eat — 7.8% of a world of 8.27 billion. The calories to cover them were already grown. Most were lost, fed to livestock, or thrown away.

The 645 million

Each square · 5 million

Ember squares are still short. Moss squares clear the calorie line. At the start of 2025, every square is ember.

One day of the harvest

kcal / person

Lost before the shop329 kcal
Locked in animal feed1,484 kcal
Thrown away279 kcal
Eaten2,381 kcal
Saved, stays put488 kcal
Saved, reaches the short163 kcal

The entire hunger gap is 69 kcal per person per day — about 1.3% of this bar. The bar stays the same length. Levers only change which band the calories sit in.

The result

million still short of calories

The calorie gap closes. Freed food is 9.5× the shortfall, and the share aimed at hungry people covers all 645 million. That is not a claim that hunger ends. It is a claim that the calories were already here.

Food freed, worldwide: 9.5×; the size of the whole gap
Of that, pointed at them: 25%; 163 kcal per person / day

Move the leaks

Waste halved, a quarter of farm-to-shop loss stopped, 15% of edible feed moved to people, and a quarter of what that frees reaches the shortfall.

Stop shop-and-home waste50%Today 19% of food in shops and homes is wasted. The UN target is to cut that in half.Stop loss between farm and shop25%About 13% disappears after harvest and before it is sold.Serve people the grain15%Crops fed to animals return about 12 calories of meat and dairy for every 100. Capped at 40% — animals on grass are outside this count.Point the savings at the shortfall25%Saved food shows up where it was saved, mostly not where the hunger is. This is the share that actually reaches someone who is short.

What this does not solve

Calories are not a meal someone can buy. This page does not move trucks, end a war, or raise a wage. Those are why people are hungry inside a surplus. It also does not touch the 2.10 billion who are moderately or severely food insecure — a wider line than caloric hunger, covering diet quality and the fear of running out.

The gap used here is 69 kcal per person per day if spread across everyone, from an assumed 880 kcal shortfall for each undernourished person. Halve that assumption and the surplus is twice as large against the gap. Double it and “The result” still clears the line, because a quarter of what those three cuts free is more than 160 kcal per person per day.

How this is counted

Hunger and the 7.8% rate are the 2025 point estimates in FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026. Population here is just 645 million ÷ 0.078, so 8.27 billion — the headcount implied by that rate. Food insecurity of 2.1 billion (25.8%) is the same report.

Consumer waste of 19% is the UNEP Food Waste Index 2024. The 13% lost from post-harvest up to, but not including, retail is FAO’s supply-chain loss figure. Food supply is rounded to 2,940 kcal per person per day from recent FAO food-balance averages. Loss in the bar is 2,940 × 0.13 / 0.87, because that 13% is upstream of the supply figure.

Feed follows Cassidy, West, Gerber and Foley, Environmental Research Letters, 2013: 36% of crop calories are used as animal feed and about 12% of those calories come back as meat, dairy and eggs. Shifting feed and biofuel crops onto plates could raise available food calories by up to 70%. This model takes only the feed portion. If 36% of crops are feed, 12% of that returns, and roughly half of crop calories are eaten directly, the feed lock is about 59% of today’s food supply — the 0.594 factor. The slider never moves the whole pool.

People lifted equals the official 645 million times the share of the calorie gap covered by freed calories × the “point it” share. It is a ceiling on calories, not a forecast.

Rate check: 7.8% of 8.27 billion is 645 million.