The United Nations Food and Agriculture Agency (FAO) said it should not rule out “the possibility of a food crisis” in Latin America and the Caribbean due to the war in Ukraine and the pandemic. Because of this, he urged states to take the appropriate decisions to avoid it.
Julio Berdegué, delegate of this agency for Latin America and the Caribbean, opened this Monday the work of the 37th regional conference of the FAO, noting that 267 million people, 40 percent of the region’s population, face conditions of moderate or unsafe eating “Frightening and morally unacceptable numbers.”
Although the Covid-19 pandemic has put another 60 million people in this condition (to add to the current 267 million), the health crisis cannot be solely attributed to increasing hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean since 2015.
There is hunger in the region not because there is a lack of food or because the farmers are doing their homework, but “because there is too much inequality and poverty”.
In the worst moments of the pandemic, the expert stressed, the agri-food systems of Latin America and the Caribbean had “performed the feat” of maintaining food supplies.
“The region plays an irreplaceable role in global food security. It produces food to meet the calorie needs of around 1.3 billion people, that is one in six people on earth. (But) to sustain its contribution 28 years from now, Latin America and the Caribbean must be able to feed another 300 million people. It is an enormous task on the shoulders of 22 million farmers, ranchers, fishermen and fish farmers, the vast majority of whom are small and medium-sized family producers.”
While hunger isn’t the only thing plaguing the region, there is also what he called “the pandemic of malnutrition,” expressed in terms of obesity, which occurs in one in four adults and one in 13 children under the age of five who are overweight.
“Eating healthy is much more expensive than eating poorly in Latin America, and especially in the Caribbean,” Berdegué told representatives of the region’s nations during the forum, which took place in Quito, Ecuador and could be followed virtually.
The situation on the fields in the region is complex: 82 percent of those who work in agriculture and fisheries do so under informal conditions; Rural women live in “unacceptable conditions of exclusion” and without effective rights; Indigenous peoples and Afro descendants continue to suffer discrimination and exclusion, making them the worst social indicators; Young people find few development opportunities in the countryside, leading them to migrate, creating rural societies in aging conditions that put them at risk.
In order to maintain the validity and dynamism of the Latin American and Caribbean agri-food systems, the FAO representative stressed, three priorities must be met, which have already been identified in the strategy of the regional office of this United Nations organization for the coming years.
These are: to specify sustainable agri-food systems that provide healthy nutrition for all populations, to promote prosperous and inclusive rural societies, and to promote sustainable and resilient agriculture.