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NICARAGUA: Sandinistas Wage a New War - Against Hunger
By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Mar 29 (IPS) - With the support of international cooperation, the
Nicaraguan government is preparing to launch an all-out offensive against
hunger, as part of an ambitious plan to help the rural poor achieve food
sufficiency.
Of the country's 5.4 million people, 46 percent - or 2.4 million - were
living below the official poverty line in 2005. Of that 2.5 million, 1.7
million lived in rural areas, according to the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP).
Orlando Núñez, director of the Zero Hunger Programme to be launched in May
by the government of Sandinista President Daniel Ortega, said the initial
cost would be 50 million dollars.
The money will partly come from public funds that would have gone towards
servicing the foreign debt but were freed up by the recent Inter-American
Development Bank (IDB) decision to cancel Nicaragua's debt.
The programme will also be financed by money from donor countries, United
Nations agencies like the World Food Programme (WFP), and the World Bank.
The Zero Hunger Programme will be added to other efforts by this
impoverished Central American country to meet the eight Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by the international community in 2000,
and especially the first goal: to halve the proportion of people suffering
from extreme poverty and hunger by 2015, from 1990 levels.
The UNDP estimates that 15 percent of the population of Nicaragua is
living in extreme poverty.
The programme will first be put into operation in rural communities along
the Pacific coast in western Nicaragua and in the most isolated Caribbean
coastal regions in the east, where the highest rates of poverty and
malnutrition are found, Nuñez told IPS.
The Zero Hunger Programme was inspired by the Fome Zero flagship programme
of the leftist government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil.
More than 500 non-governmental organisations working in rural areas will
participate, in coordination with the governmental Council on Food
Security and Sovereignty, which will implement the programme.
Nuñez said the aim is to gradually reduce the poverty that affects an
estimated 68 percent of the rural population, while promoting family food
sufficiency by providing assistance in production, education and health to
15,000 families in the first year.
The number of families will be increased over the next five years, until
reaching a total of 100,000 beneficiaries.
The programme will get underway in May with the distribution of assistance
packages to poor rural families in the form of seeds, grains and farm
animals like pigs, cows, chickens and ducks, which will provide them with
a source of food and of surplus production for sale in the markets.
"The idea is to give the families a foundation on which to start, by
supplying large and small livestock, seeds and biodigesters that produce
fuel from organic waste, and also to provide them with technical
assistance and training," said Núñez.
He said the Zero Hunger Programme will also take aim at malnutrition
through special maternal-infant health measures to be put into effect by
the Health Ministry.
But Nuñez underscored that the new initiative is just one component of a
more ambitious social strategy espoused by the government of the leftwing
Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which took office in January.
The authorities also have the support of the WFP, that has been providing
assistance to Nicaragua for several years, with funds from donor countries
like Japan, which announced a donation of one million dollars to fight
hunger in Nicaragua.
The WFP will continue carrying out its nutritional support plan for
400,000 school children and pregnant and nursing women.
In February, World Bank Vice President for Latin America and the Caribbean
Pamela Cox promised Ortega 50 million dollars a year in soft credit for
the fight against poverty in Nicaragua.
The government's new food security programme will include the creation of
agricultural cooperatives and a network for the sale of low-cost basic
products.
The network will also incorporate small shops in the country's towns and
cities as well as the 70 centres that have been established in rural areas
to sell fertiliser from Venezuela.
"This is a strategy that has worked well in Venezuela, and that we are
going to begin to implement here through production cooperatives," said
Núñez. He explained that through the supply network, the government plans
to distribute one million butane gas cylinders for cooking, acquired at
preferential prices from Venezuela, to curb the deforestation caused by
the cutting of trees for cooking fuel.
"The project is designed to be comprehensive and integral," because it
does not consist solely of helping poor communities achieve food
sufficiency, but also of providing them with training and input so they
can support themselves and generate income, while protecting the
environment at the same time, said Núñez.
A 2004 Health Ministry report stated that half of the Nicaraguan
population consumed less than the 2,200 calories a day that the World
Health Organisation (WHO) estimates is necessary for adults to lead
productive lives.
The report prompted the resident coordinator of the U.N. system in
Nicaragua,
Alfredo Missair, to urge the authorities to give urgent attention to the
problem of malnutrition. He also announced a project to reduce hunger in
50 municipalities.
Víctor León, a project officer with the Food and Agriculture Organisation
(FAO), told IPS that 27 percent of the population of Nicaragua is
undernourished.
That figure, revealed in a FAO study published in October, represents the
highest proportion in Central America. In Guatemala, 24 percent of the
population is undernourished; in Honduras 22 percent; in Panama 26
percent; in El Salvador 11 percent, and in Costa Rica four percent.
The Health Ministry's national height census for 2004 found that 30
percent of Nicaraguan children under nine already suffer from irreversible
delays in growth, said León.
He added that this means that one-third of the country's children have
already lost certain physical and mental capacities, which will put them
at a disadvantage when it comes to entering the labour market.
Nevertheless, the FAO official pointed to a slight improvement, because
the proportion of the population that is undernourished dropped from 30
percent in 2000 to 27 percent in 2006.
But he considered it unlikely that Nicaragua will achieve the first MDG,
because to do so, it would have to reduce the proportion of people in
extreme poverty to 9.7 percent by 2015.
(END/2007)
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