Latin America a world leader in fight against hunger.
| Autor | Marris, Johanna |
Latin America has become a world leader in the fight against hunger by successfully halving its undernourished population in the last 20 years. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the proportion of undernourished people in Latin America and the Caribbean fell from 14.7% in 1990-92 to 5.5% in 2014-16. This compares with 10.9% of the global population suffering from undernourishment. The absolute number of people suffering from hunger has also fallen, from 66 million to 34.3 million (NotiSur, March 17, 1992, and July 30, 1992).
This makes Latin America one of the few regions to meet the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for halving undernourishment in member countries between 1990 and 2015. Poverty also fell across the region during the same period, from 44% of the total population to 28%, with variation across subregions. The FAO defines undernourishment as the inability "to acquire enough food to meet the daily minimum dietary energy requirements, over a period of one year." It defines hunger as chronic undernourishment (NotiSur, Nov. 15, 2002, and May 30, 2014).
Behind the success
What has been the key to Latin America's success? How have many countries in the region managed to reduce undernourishment more dramatically than their global counterparts?
In the FAO's 2015 Food Security Report published at the end of January, Raul Benitez, regional representative for Latin America and the Caribbean at the FAO, attributed the region's success to a high level of political commitment combined with macroeconomic growth over the last decade.
These levels of political commitment have been demonstrated by numerous region-wide initiatives to fight hunger, by the fact that all countries in the region are uniting to support many of them, and by the ambitious nature of their aims. In 2005, all countries in the region supported the Hunger-Free Latin America and the Caribbean Initiative, which went beyond the MDGs by aiming for the complete eradication of hunger from Latin America and the Caribbean by 2025.
Within this framework, the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean (PFH) was formed in 2009 and now consists of fronts from 17 countries recognized by their national legislatures and encompasses politicians from across the spectrum. According to the FAO, which lends technical support to the PFH, they "promote the establishment of institutional frameworks for the...
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