What's New

The global poverty landscape is increasingly shaped by conflict, climate shocks, displacement, and market disruptions—forces that are concentrating extreme poverty in the most fragile settings. At the same time, humanitarian and development financing is under pressure, heightening the need for  scalable and cost-effective approaches to poverty reduction. Graduation models—multifaceted interventions designed to help extremely poor households to “graduate” from poverty—are emerging as a particularly promising response in this context.

The FAO Food Price Index declined marginally in December, with prices reaching 2.3 percent below December 2024. Overall prices for 2025 remained 4.3 percent higher than 2024, however.

Understanding how food demand responds to income and price changes is essential for anticipating global food needs and expected consumption patterns, and for designing effective food policies. Two key parameters for this are the income elasticity of demand—the percent change in consumption in response to a percent change in people’s income; and the price elasticity of demand—the percent change in consumption in response to a percent food price change. These are essential inputs in a wide range of economic models.

This blog post is part of a special series based on the October 2025 Commodity Markets Outlook, a flagship report published by the World Bank. This series features concise summaries of commodity-specific sections extracted from the report. Explore the full report here.

Food security conditions in the Gaza Strip have improved since August when the IPC Famine Review Committee confirmed the existence of famine conditions. Despite this improvement, however, 1.6 million people—most of Gaza’s population—still face unacceptably high levels of acute food insecurity, according to the IPC’s latest alert.