Rising food prices are quietly stealing the future from millions of children around the world, a new report from World Vision warns. The Christian relief organization's fifth annual Price Shocks survey, released last week, found that in many nations, families can no longer afford the basic nutritious foods their children need to grow and thrive.

Researchers compared the cost of a basket of ten basic foods — including rice, flour, eggs, chicken, and milk — with average local wages in 62 countries. The findings were stark. In the United States and other wealthy nations, an hour's wages covered a day of simple, nutritious food. In the hardest-hit countries, the same basket took days or even weeks of labor to buy. A worker in Ukraine needed more than twelve hours of pay, while an adult in Sudan had to work for nineteen days, according to the Christian Post.

The human cost is staggering. Some 35.5 million children worldwide suffered acute malnutrition in 2025, nearly 10 million of them in severe form. Malnutrition can stunt a child's physical and mental growth, weaken the immune system, and raise the risk of death — damage that can last a lifetime, the report warns.

Families are coping in painful ways: buying less food, turning to cheaper items with less nutritional value, borrowing money, or simply going hungry. Margaret Schuler, World Vision's senior vice president of international programs, said she has met mothers in crisis-hit communities who must decide every day which meal to skip and which of their children will eat.

The findings were released on World Food Day, an annual occasion to raise awareness of global hunger. World Vision is urging governments, businesses, and donors to make affordable, healthy food for children a priority — calling for wider school meal programs, investment in local food production, and rapid aid to people displaced or battered by conflict.

The crisis is deepening fastest where war and drought collide. In Sudan, war and drought are ravaging Darfur and Kordofan, and the global food-crisis monitor known as the IPC has warned of some of the worst acute food insecurity ever recorded in the country. Last May, close to 19.5 million Sudanese — over 40 percent of the population — faced high levels of acute food insecurity, with 135,000 people at the monitor's worst category, meaning starvation, extreme malnutrition, and deaths from disease or hunger.

In Afghanistan, malnutrition has reached record levels, with more than a third of the population going severely hungry, the United Nations warned earlier this month. The U.N. estimates that 3.4 million Afghans are living in famine conditions, out of 15.9 million facing acute food insecurity, and projects that more than four million Afghan children will need malnutrition treatment next year. "We still have a window to act, but it is closing fast," said John Aylieff, who leads the World Food Program's operation in Afghanistan.

The U.N. has pointed to a dysfunctional economy and barriers to foreign aid agencies as factors destabilizing Afghanistan, compounding the misery of families already facing a bitter winter ahead.