The state of food insecurity in the world (SOFI) was created to track progress towards ending this profound obstacle to human rights, quality of life and dignity. It was spurred by the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, where leaders of 186 countries pledged to reduce by half the number of hungry people in the world by 2015. In this second edition we introduce a new tool for measuring the severity of want: the depth of hunger. This is a measure of the per person food deficit of the undernourished population within each country. Measured in kilocalories, it aims to assess just how empty people's plates are each day. Most of the countries with the most extreme depth of hunger (more than 300 kilocalories per person per day) are located in Africa; others are found in the Near East (Afghanistan), the Caribbean (Haiti) and Asia (Bangladesh, Democratic People's Republic of Korea and Mongolia). Many of these countries face extraordinary obstacles such as conflict or recurrent natural disasters. They require special attention to lift them out of their current state of deep poverty and dire food insecurity. SOFI 2000 also updates the estimate of the number of undernourished people.