Latin American nations have made “remarkable progress” in combating hunger and food insecurity by 2023 and are on track to reduce the prevalence of malnutrition to less than 5 percent of their population by the end of the decade, a UN agency report said Wednesday.
While the region has historically shown disparities by country and area, a global report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) highlighted the “encouraging” improvement recorded in South America, where food insecurity rates fell from 10.4% in 2022 to 7.2% last year.
The percentage implies that 14 million people in South America will no longer be classified as food insecure in 2023, given favorable conditions of agricultural financing, grain production and industrial capacity, and despite extreme weather events generated by global warming.
“Latin America and the Caribbean is the only region that made progress in 2023 compared to 2022 towards achieving the Global Sustainable Development Goals,” said the report on hunger presented by FAO and which had the collaboration of four other United Nations agencies, including UNICEF.
The assessment on world hunger revealed that the recovery in Latin America after the stages of deterioration due to COVID continued for the second consecutive year in 2023, with a drop in the general prevalence of malnutrition from 6.9% of the population in 2021 to 6.2%, a decline that benefited 4.3 million people, according to the report.
The agency said that while progress is optimistic for the region, the PoU index, which measures malnutrition rates in populations, is still well above pre-pandemic levels.
The prevalence of moderate to severe food insecurity in Latin America decreased from 29.6% in 2022 to 25.1% in 2023, equivalent to 18.7 million fewer people facing this scenario, although Caribbean and Central American nations saw little progress or remained unchanged.
“When considering these results, it is also important to take into account the deteriorating food insecurity situation in countries affected by humanitarian crises,” the document said.
The most alarming figures in the Caribbean come from Haiti, where gang-fuelled conflicts and forced displacement have worsened the hunger crisis, leaving 5 million people, or almost half the population, facing acute food insecurity.
Of that group, some 1.8 million Haitians suffered food emergencies – the level short of the catastrophe levels seen in territories such as the Gaza Strip – between March and June of last year, according to estimates provided by FAO.
At the global level, the report noted that hunger and food insecurity trends are still not heading in the right direction to meet UN goals for 2030, as billions of people in the world still do not have access to safe, adequate and nutritious food.
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