By: Staff Writer
December 2, 2022
A United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) report said that with the deterioration in welfare levels since 2015 and got worse under the COVID-19 pandemic of 2019-2021, leading to the UN agency calling for more investment in education as a way out of these doldrums.
The “Social Panorama of Latin America and the Caribbean: Transforming education as a basis for sustainable development,” report also said: “Although the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to come to an end, the region has not been able to make headway in recovering from its social impacts and regain the levels of social indicators registered in 2019, before the pandemic. Meanwhile, the region is still exposed to an unstable global geopolitical and economic scenario marked by a combination of successive crises, especially the war in Ukraine.”
With the war in the Ukraine putting pressure on wheat prices and more importantly oil prices, causing a ripple effect on other commodities and sectors, concerns about the least among us will continue to grow if the situation is not grasped firmly in hand.
The report also said: “The lowest income quintiles are more intensely affected by high inflation, especially in the food component of the consumption basket, and the most vulnerable middle-income strata are also suffering these impacts. These factors are in addition to other ongoing risks, such as the increased frequency of disasters and the impacts of the climate emergency…”
It continued, “Of particular concern is the increase in food and nutritional insecurity amid rising food prices. According to data from FAO and others (2022), in 2021 hunger affected 56.5m people in the region (49.4 million in Latin America and 7.2m in the Caribbean). Rising food prices are expected to increase malnutrition, with increases in undernutrition, overweight and obesity.
“In 2020, 21 percent of the population of Latin America (117.3 million) and over 50 percent of the population of the Caribbean (13.9m) could not afford to maintain a healthy diet. This number may be expected to have increased in the current conditions, with particular effects on children and adolescents, given the serious impact that malnutrition has on their comprehensive development and exercise of rights.”
The number of people estimated to be facing moderate to severe levels of food insecurity in the English-speaking Caribbean has risen by an alarming 46 percent this year. Nearly 4.1m people or 57 percent of the Caribbean population now face food insecurity, according to a recent survey conducted by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).
The report also said that this “silent crisis” has shown that education systems were unprepared to face these changes, exacerbating the educational inequalities that existed prior to the pandemic.
Countries made major efforts to establish home-based forms of educational continuity using remote means, but infrastructure and digital equipment suffered from weaknesses and inequalities and the skills were lacking to transform teaching methods and to maintain the educational link with the entire student population.