Terence Epule Epule

1 Introduction Achieving global food security remains one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st Century. Recent data show modest progress in reducing world hunger, with the prevalence of undernourishment declining to 8.2% globally in 2024, down from 8.5% in 2023 and 8.7% in 2022. This improvement is driven primarily by advances in Asia and Latin America, but contrasts sharply with rising hunger in Africa, where the prevalence surpassed 20% in 2024, affecting about 307 million people.

Results Visual inspection of trend fitting for wheat yield demonstrates that the fitted trend closely follows the underlying time-series data pattern (Fig. 9). Locally weighted regression models provide accurate trend fitting for both regional and national wheat yield time series.

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