By: Staff Writer
November 17, 2023
The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) said in a recent report that the high cost of food is linked to the growing amount of inequality in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region.
Lola Castro, Regional Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), said that “it is necessary to keep people at the centre of all solutions to food insecurity and malnutrition, particularly in the current context of climate emergency. In support of regional governments, we are promoting actions that protect the most vulnerable people and transform food systems to make them more resilient, as well as accompanying efforts through holistic public policies to promote healthy and affordable diets”.
The report, the “Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition 2023,” also said: “Latin America and the Caribbean not only registers high levels of inequality, it also records the highest cost of a healthy diet. This indicator, calculated by FAO, identifies the least-cost healthy diet available at each given time and place that meets recommendations from food-based dietary guidelines (FBDGs). Across the region in 2020, 131 million people could not afford a healthy diet. The unaffordability of healthy diets strongly affects the nutrition and health of the most vulnerable populations, including children and women. Inequality in access to nutritious food is associated with hunger, stunting in children under 5 years, and anaemia in women aged 15 to 49 years.”
The report states that 6.5 percent of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean suffers from hunger. Although this figure represents a slight improvement of 0.5 percentage points over the previous measurement, the prevalence of hunger in the region is still 0.9 percentage points above the 2019 records prior to the outbreak of COVID-19.
The scenario is different in the Caribbean. In this subregion, 7.2 million people experienced hunger in 2022, with a prevalence of 16.3%. Compared to 2021, this number increased by 700,000. Between 2019 and 2022, the increase was one million people, with the highest prevalence in Haiti.
In the region, the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity, of overweight in children under 5 years of age and of adult obesity are higher than the global averages. Additionally, the region has the costliest healthy diet compared to other regions of the world. Diet quality is a critical link between food security and nutrition because poor diet quality can lead to different forms of malnutrition, including undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, overweight and obesity.
“The hunger figures in our region continue to be worrying. We see how we are moving further and further away from meeting the 2030 agenda, and we have not yet managed to improve the figures before the crisis unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our region has persistent challenges such as inequality, poverty, and climate change, which have reversed progress in the fight against hunger for at least 13 years. This scenario obliges us to work together and act as soon as possible,” said Mario Lubetkin, FAO Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean.