By: Staff Writer
January 28, 2025
A new United Nations Report, showed that for the second consecutive year, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is the only region that showed a decrease in the prevalence of undernourishment and in moderate and severe food insecurity.
The LAC Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition 2024, also focuses on the potential impact that climate variability and extremes could have on food security and nutrition. These threats, such as drought, flooding and storms are major drivers exacerbating food security and nutrition challenges, impacting the four dimensions of food security (availability, access, utilization and stability), as well as contributing to other underlying causes of malnutrition.
The report also said that factors, “such as conflicts, economic slowdowns and downturns combined with well-established underlying factors —such as the lack of access to and unaffordability of healthy diets, unhealthy food environments and high and persistent inequality— further worsen the negative effects on food security and nutrition. A diverse portfolio of policies and actions will be required to accelerate the transformation of agrifood systems. It will also require a comprehensive, intersectional, rights-based and systemic approach that considers people’s livelihoods, promotes access to and affordability of healthy diets and strengthens the resilience of agrifood systems.”
The report urgently calls for accelerated action to build resilience within agrifood systems to safeguard the region’s progress towards eliminating hunger and malnutrition while ensuring its sustainability.
The report also said that the LAC is the region with the second-highest exposure to extreme climate events globally after Asia. In the region, 74 percent of countries have a high exposure to these events, which means they occur with a high frequency, and 52 percent are vulnerable to these effects.
It added: “Climate variability and extremes reduce agricultural productivity, disrupt food supply chains, increase food prices and affect food environments. They also make healthy diets less affordable and accessible, particularly for populations in vulnerable conditions, while also changing the dietary habits of the affected population. Urgent action is needed to accelerate and scale up efforts to strengthen resilience in response to climate variability and extremes to transform agrifood systems and meet SDG Targets 2.1 and 2.2. Strengthening resilience in agrifood systems is critical to prevent setbacks in food security and nutrition and to avoid worsening the nutritional situation in the region.”