By roughly March 2023 (one year after the March 19, 2022 episode), multiple UN agencies were describing the global food situation as an ongoing humanitarian emergency involving hundreds of millions of people with insufficient caloric intake.

Key evidence:

• The World Food Programme (WFP) and FAO issued a joint "Hunger Hotspots" warning on 21 September 2022, stating that “the world faces its largest food crisis in modern history” and that 345 million people across 82 countries were facing acute food insecurity, up from 282 million at the end of 2021. Acute food insecurity at these levels explicitly involves people unable to meet minimum food requirements and at risk of starvation without assistance. (wfp.org)
• The 2023 Global Report on Food Crises found that in 2022, about 258 million people in 58 countries were in IPC Phase 3 or worse (crisis, emergency, or catastrophe), the highest figure in the report’s history. IPC Phase 3+ is defined as food consumption gaps and acute malnutrition severe enough to threaten lives and livelihoods—i.e., large-scale humanitarian crisis conditions. (fsinplatform.org)
• The FAO/UN “State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023” report estimated that 691–783 million people faced chronic hunger in 2022 (midpoint ~735 million), about 122 million more than in 2019, and that about 2.4 billion people experienced moderate or severe food insecurity, with roughly 900 million severely food insecure. These categories represent people who cannot reliably obtain enough food for an active, healthy life—i.e., widespread underconsumption of calories. (fao.org)

Interpretation:

• Friedberg’s normalized prediction was that within a year the global food-supply situation would be a humanitarian disaster with “hundreds of millions” starving / lacking sufficient calories.
• By late 2022 and into 2023, authoritative metrics show:
  • Hundreds of millions of people in acute food insecurity (≈258–345 million depending on the metric and cutoff). (fsinplatform.org)
  • Many hundreds of millions more in chronic hunger and severe food insecurity (total clearly in the “hundreds of millions” range).
  • UN agencies explicitly characterizing this as the largest global food crisis in modern history, i.e., a humanitarian disaster. (wfp.org)

It is true that global hunger was already very high before March 2022 and some indicators plateaued between 2021 and 2022 rather than exploding further, so the incremental deterioration in that exact 12‑month window was less dramatic than some feared. (nutritionconnect.org) However, the core factual claim—that within about a year the world would be in a humanitarian food crisis involving hundreds of millions of people lacking adequate calories—matches how UN agencies were describing conditions by late 2022/early 2023.

Given this, the prediction is best scored as right on its main substantive point, with the caveat that it somewhat overstated how much worse things would get relative to an already severe baseline.