Hunger in Latin America accompanies lack of social security

SANTIAGO - The 53 million people suffering hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean would be helped by stronger government policies backing agriculture, including for small individual farmers, the regional office of the FAO said Wednesday.

The 53 million includes 15 million children under age 5 who are suffering from chronic malnutrition in the region, particularly in Guatemala, Bolivia, Honduras, Peru and Ecuador.

“These are countries that also lack resources for social security,” said Jose Graziano, regional director of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

In those countries child malnutrition affects 30-55 percent of all children and “is the basis for future inequalities,” Graziano said.

His comments came as part of the release of the 2009 edition of the UN State of World Food Insecurity Report, which found the current global economic crisis has triggered a spike in world hunger to its highest level in four decades.

Some 1.02 billion people are undernourished - more than any time since 1970, the Rome-based FAO and World Food Programme (WFP) said in their report.

The number of hungry people, which represents around one sixth of humanity, has increased by 100 million over the last year, the two UN food agencies estimate.

Nearly all the world’s undernourished live in developing countries: 642 million people in Asia and the Pacific region; 265 million in Sub-Saharan Africa; 53 million in Latin America and the Caribbean; 42 million in the Near East and North Africa.

Some 15 million people suffer from hunger in developed countries, the report said.

The impact of the food crisis in Latin America in recent years, however, was not uniform across countries. Brazil, Cuba and Chile, for example, have consolidated important progress in the fight against hunger, the FAO official added.

The shortages, believed to be partly caused by the abandonment of agricultural promotion policies, coexist alongside a great availability of foodstuffs, mainly in Mexico and elsewhere in South America.

Indeed, Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico are believed to have at least a 50-percent surplus in terms of the minimum nutrients that people need for adequate nourishment. Even in these countries, however, children’s malnutrition stands at seven to 15.5 percent. Chile is the only exception, with 2.1 percent.

Indigenous peoples, who have held protests in Panama, Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile in recent weeks, suffer hunger at a rate up to seven times greater than non-indigenous communities, Graziano said.

According to the report, problems are based in the small capacity for agricultural production in some countries and in difficult access to the available foodstuffs in others.

Most Latin American nations including Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Venezuela are net importers of cereal.

Local authorities should be looking to promote agriculture, particularly at the family level, Graziano said.

“Producing foodstuffs is easier than people think,” he noted.