FAO: hunger grows in Latin America and may increase further with new waves of coronavirus

One in ten people live with hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean, a number that increased during the COVID-19 pandemic and may grow even further with waves linked to new variants of the virus and low levels of vaccination, the FAO said. .

In an interview with Reuters, the agency’s representative in Paraguay, Jorge Meza, said that one of the organization’s biggest concerns for next year is the unpredictable context of the pandemic and its consequences on the undernourishment of the population.

“In Latin America and the Caribbean we have an estimated 60 million undernourished, hungry people. The growth from 2019 to 2020 was 14% more or less in a year, it grew half of what it grew since 2014″ Meza said in the afternoon at his Asunción office.

“And the main concern we have is the issue of the waves associated with the levels of vaccination and the efficiency of vaccination that can further reduce income and the possibility of access to food, increasing hunger”He added.

Latin America and the Caribbean, a region that concentrates around 10% of the world’s population and one of the most unequal on the planet, registers close to 20% of global COVID-19 cases. 80% of the population lives in urban centers, which facilitates the spread of the virus.

There have been at least 272.3 million infections and 5.6 million deaths reported worldwide from the coronavirus to date.

The latest FAO data indicates that Haiti has the highest level of undernourishment in the region with 46%, while Venezuela registers the highest in South America with 27.4% compared to a previous moving average of 22.2% in 2016-2018.

Argentina reached 3.9%, with a sustained increase in the last six years until 2020, while in Bolivia, the percentage of people who go hungry is 12.6%, a mark considered high for a country with an important agricultural vocation, according to Meza.

Another of FAO’s concerns is food insecurity, which affects almost 42% of women in the region, compared to 32.2% of men, a gap that has increased significantly since 2019 and especially affects women in the region. rural sector.

“The gap will always be there and the more acute the economic situation, it will widen, especially if the prediction is that next 2022 we will have a situation that will once again question our economic system, with lower income and greater crisis economical“Meza stressed.