UN sees “paradox” in “hard core” of hungry people in Latin America

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) believes that it is a complete “paradox” that Latin America and the Caribbean, being one of the largest producers and exporters of food in the world, drags a “hard core” of 7% of hungry people in the region.

The subregional coordinator for Mesoamerica and representative of the FAO in Panama and Costa Rica, the Brazilian Adoniram Sanches, stated in an interview with EFE that the “paradox” of this matter is “How can you not find a solution for that hard core of hunger?”.

The mathematics to describe this is simple, he indicated: “The 33 countries of the region, including the Central American countries, feed more than 1.5 billion people in the world and (only) we have 630 million inhabitants, and we carry approximately 7% of hungry people”.

This problem, he announced, will be discussed and analyzed at the Regional Conference for Latin America and the Caribbean that will take place from March 18 to 22 in Guyana.

He recalled, however, that in the last two decades progress had been made and progress had been made in the percentage reduction in the prevalence of hunger in this area of ​​the world.

“We came from 10%, we reached 5.3%, and we were encouraged until 2014, hoping to drop below 3% in 2020 and be considered a hunger-free region“, he explained, specifying that in round numbers there are almost 43 million people who suffer from hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Regarding the situation in Central America, Sanches stated that there is a “very interesting trajectory because Panama, for example, in the same pandemic presented a reduction trajectory from 7% to 5.7% in 2022.”

He added that for its part Costa Rica stabilized, while El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras experienced “an increase in the pandemic from 12% to 13%, and 14%”, but now it returns to those same percentages of hungry people where it had remained.

Sanches explained that something that worries them are the policies against food insecurity, which is why the FAO, as a specialized agency of the United Nations for food and agriculture issues, “always convenes every two years (as in the case this month of Guyana ) to Ministers of Agriculture, and increasingly to Ministers of Social Development and Ministers of the Environment, to discuss responses to these problems.”

The situation in Mesoamerica and the region

According to data from a FAO report with other organizations such as Unicef ​​or the World Food Program (WFP) on a Regional Panorama of Food Security in Latin America and the Caribbean for 2023.

“In Mesoamerica, the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity reached 34.5% in 2022, which represented an increase of 0.4 percentage points, or 1.3 million additional people, compared to 2021″, notes the report.

In Mesoamerica, in Guatemala and Honduras, more than half of the population was moderately or severely food insecure in the period 2020-2022. Belize and El Salvador follow them with a prevalence greater than 45%, while Mexico and Costa Rica showed lower rates, with 27.6% and 16.2%, respectively.

This report concludes that Latin America and the Caribbean “is not on track to achieve SDG 2 (the Sustainable Development Goal that aims for a world free of hunger by 2030) or the targets set by the World Health Assembly, related to hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition“, since despite the decrease in the prevalence of hunger and food insecurity compared to 2021, “Numbers continue to exceed pre-pandemic levels and global estimates”.

The subregional coordinator of the FAO highlighted another aspect linked to food insecurity that has to do with what he considers to be a production model in agriculture that clashes “with the environment”, which, he stated, must evolve towards technological innovation, since being an exporter in the region has put “pressure on natural resources.”

He highlighted in this sense that with “six decades of producing and exporting a brutal liability appears: soil degradation, deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions”.

“In the region as a whole, 57% of emissions come from agricultural activity, we are talking about deforestation, livestock, livestock expansion, and agricultural grain production itself.”he added.