The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Cepal), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Food Program (WFP) said the number of hungry people in Latin America increased by 13.2 million between 2019 and 2021 the caribbean
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The three organizations presented the report entitled “Towards Sustainable Food and Nutrition Security in Latin America and the Caribbean in Response to the World Food Crisis” in Santiago de Chile today.
The document confirms that “the number of people in the region suffering from hunger increased by 13.2 million to 56.5 million,” while citing the rise in prices of basic commodities due to the global crisis as one of the main causes indicates.
Publication of the ECLAC-FAO-WFP Special Report “Towards Sustainable Food and Nutrition Security in Latin America and the Caribbean in Response to the World Food Crisis” https://t.co/TuTul8Edf0
— ECLAC (@cepal_onu)
December 6, 2022
Similarly, United Nations agencies have indicated that 62.5 million people were food insecure last year, for a total of 267.7 million, or 40 percent of Latin America’s population.
In this sense, FAO regional representative Mario Lubetkin pointed out that “the high dependency on import of fertilizers and the volatility in food prices have negative and inevitable impacts on the livelihoods, mainly of the rural population with access to a healthy diet.
For his part, ECLAC Executive Secretary José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs pointed out that “a reduction in yields and harvests of key food security products due to reduced fertilization would contribute to the deleterious effects of food inflation on the most vulnerable population”.
For her part, WFP regional director Lola Castro emphasized that in a scenario where “multidimensional poverty is increasingly linked to food and nutrition insecurity (…), social protection systems, including school meals, play a fundamental role in alleviating people’s poverty and vulnerability “.