By tackling hunger and inequality, Latin America will be at the forefront of world food and agriculture

Latin America and the Caribbean must face the growing rates of hunger and inequality, a fight that would bring other benefits such as placing the region “at the forefront of world food and agriculture,” the director general of the Organization of Nations said Wednesday. United Nations for Food and Agriculture (FAO), Qu Dongyu, at the VII Summit of Heads of State and Government of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC)*.

In response to the multiple global crises plaguing the planet, Qu stated that “multilateral institutions have to innovate.” During the meeting, the head of FAO signed several letters of intent to carry out projects linked to the region.

Qu also highlighted that the integration promoted by CELAC will be a key piece to advance in the priority areas of work in the region such as:

• Expand the food supply in the Caribbean, where healthy diets are expensive
• Investing in water infrastructure and food production initiatives in Central America, where drought and emigration are persistent trends
• Improve the exchange of food between the countries of the Andean region
• Promote a broad regional infrastructure program for the production, storage and transportation of food that facilitates intraregional trade and exports.

Although he understood it as “natural” to prioritize the protection of national economies, he stressed the need to understand that “we are all together on this small planet” and that “the measures taken in one country affect all the others,” he said, recalling the importance of international collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In his inaugural speech, the President of Argentina, Alberto Fernández, appealed for regional unity and recalled that Latin America is “the most unequal continent in the world”, for which he called for “undertaking a process that leads us to equality”.

Avoid going back a decade in reducing poverty and hunger

The region was one of those that obtained the best results in terms of reducing hunger and poverty in the last decade up to 2015. However, despite being the largest net exporter of food in the world, between 2019 and 2021 it saw an increase in 30% the number of people suffering from hunger, reaching 56.5 million.

This situation could represent a setback of a decade or more in the effort to reduce poverty and hunger in the regionand hinder efforts to reduce inequalities as set out in Sustainable Development Goal number 10, Qu Dongyu said.

The head of the FAO called for urgent collective action that serves to focus on the social and economic consequences of the pandemic, on the increase in food insecurity and on the increase in the prices of basic foods, as well as on the persistence of poverty and the increase in inequalities that especially affects rural populations, women, youth and the most vulnerable.

“The best way to do this, regionally and globally, is to transform agri-food systems to make them more efficient, more inclusive, more resilient and sustainable,” he said.

*CELAC is an intergovernmental mechanism that supports regional integration programs and is made up of 33 countries in the region that have some 600 million people.