Ecuador faces an acute hunger crisis affecting 2.6 million people

Rising food prices, violence, forced displacement and climate events are deepening food insecurity in the country, while international organizations warn of the risk of even greater deterioration.

Ecuador is going through a crisis that is being driven by rising food prices, by falling household incomes, and by violence, insecurity and climate events.

According to data from the 2025-2026 humanitarian report, backed by the United Nations and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), 2.6 million people, almost one in six in the country, face critical levels of acute hunger.

What is the IPC classification for Ecuador?

The UN-backed classification sets out five phases of food insecurity and places the South American country mainly between Phase 3 (Crisis) and Phase 4 (Emergency).

The IPC indicates that in Phase 3, families must cut back on what they eat, sell their assets or go into debt to survive. Phase 4 involves life-threatening hunger, where signs of acute malnutrition appear and survival strategies are exhausted.

Phase 5, for its part, is the catastrophe or famine phase and represents a situation of death from starvation; while it is not yet being reported on a massive scale in Ecuador, there is a risk of escalating toward it if no action is taken to curb food insecurity.

A combination of factors

The IPC explains that what is happening in the South American country is a combination of mutually reinforcing factors. On the one hand, the country is marked by violence and displacement: Ecuador currently has one of the highest homicide rates in the world, with 50.9 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2025, compared with 7.7 in 2018. This violence is responsible for the fact that between 2022 and 2024, 316,000 people were forced to flee and abandon their crops, their land and their jobs in order to survive. 

On the other hand, it is experiencing rising food prices and poverty levels. Many Ecuadorian households spend more than 70% of their income on food alone, and even so they cannot cover their needs.

At the same time, Ecuador is affected by extreme weather, with phenomena such as El Niño causing floods that destroy crops, roads and livelihoods, especially in rural areas. The 2026 rainy season has already affected more than 100,000 people across the country.

On top of that, there is a crisis in basic services such as access to water or adequate sanitation in rural areas. Without clean water, the risk of disease transmission increases and food preparation becomes more difficult.

The UN maintains that food insecurity is not just “having little food,” but a problem that affects child nutrition and brain development, the ability of families to work and study, the stability of entire communities and the future of the country.

Along these lines, to prevent the situation from worsening, they insist that it is essential to monitor various risk factors that affect the availability of and access to food. In terms of production and climate, it is necessary to monitor the reduction of
planted areas of seasonal and perennial crops, as well as the behavior of the El Niño and La Niña phenomena and their effects on rainfall and soil moisture for the 2024-2025 cycle.

It is also necessary to monitor the availability and rising prices of essential inputs such as fertilizers and fuels, as well as fluctuations in international prices of agricultural products.

From an economic and social perspective, monitoring should focus on changes in the prices of the basic food basket, especially in the most vulnerable areas, and on labor market dynamics, keeping watch for job losses or wage cuts in both the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors.

In addition, the report insists, it is imperative to analyze how levels of violence and crime affect the local economy, restrict the population’s safe access to food and are the main drivers of internal displacement.

The document states that to address the food insecurity situation in Ecuador, the authorities must provide an immediate and coordinated response in the provinces classified in Phase 3, in order to mitigate gaps in food consumption and prevent further deterioration of the population’s nutritional status.

To this end, the report suggests managing and coordinating programs that allow for an immediate response, improving not only access to food but also the livelihoods of those in crisis and emergency situations.