Development & Aid, Environment, Tierramerica

50 Million Hungry in Western Hemisphere

SANTIAGO, May 6 2001 (IPS) - The countries with greatest nutritional deficits in Latin America and the Caribbean are Haiti, Nicaragua, Honduras and Brazil.

Ten percent of the Latin American and Caribbean population – or 50 million people – suffers from hunger and malnutrition. They are the center of the fight – though most are probably unaware of the fact – for food security in the region.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned in mid-April that a new political commitment is needed from the global community if nations are to meet the goal of cutting the number of hungry people in half by 2015. In 1996, the total population that did not have enough food was calculated at 800 million.

Progress made in the five years since the World Food Summit has been minimal. In its report on ''The State of Food Insecurity in the World'' for the year 2000, the FAO calculated that developing countries were home to 791 million people with poor nutrition levels in the 1996-1998 period.

According to the UN agency's projections, that total will be reduced to 576 million in 2015 and to 400 million in 2030. For Latin America and the Caribbean, estimates indicated there were 55 million undernourished people during the 1996-1998 period, but that sum should decrease to 45 million in 2015 and 32 million in 2030. These numbers are far from the 50-percent cut the international community established as a goal five years ago.

The FAO report explains that ''the depth of hunger, or food deficit, is measured by comparing the average amount of dietary energy that undernourished people get from the foods they eat with the minimum amount of dietary energy they need to maintain body weight and undertake light activity.''

''Knowing the number of kilocalories (k-cals) missing from the diets of undernourished people helps round out the picture of food deprivation in a country. On average, the 826 million chronically hungry people worldwide lack 100-400 kilocalories per day, '' the FAO study says.

It is with these criteria that FAO experts establish the average caloric deficits for these hungry populations, expressed in k-cals per day. The Rome-based agency cites the case of Pedro Quispe, a peasant farmer from Bolivia's Lake Titicaca region who walks an hour to work and back every day and whose diet normally consists of corn, potatoes, onions, lard, salt, rice, carrot, quinoa (a grain) and fish, though he is only consumes the latter two or three times a week.

Based on the magnitude of his physical efforts, both at work and at home, Quispe would need to eat 2,800 k-cals each day to maintain his body weight and maximize his health, but his normal diet provides him with just 75 percent of that total. In other words, he is enduring a daily deficit of 700 k-cals.

The greatest average caloric deficit in the region is found in Haiti, where the typical undernourished person is 460 k-cals short. Next are Nicaragua (300 k-cals), Honduras (270), and Brazil, Dominican Republic and Guatemala, each with a 250 k-cal deficit per person.

According to the FAO data from the 1996-1998 period, next in line are Peru, (250 k-cal deficit), Bolivia, Guyana, Panama, and Trinidad and Tobago (230 k-cals each), and Colombia and Paraguay (220 each).

With a daily average deficit of 210 k-cals among their hungry populations are Cuba, Mexico and Venezuela, followed by El Salvador and Jamaica (200) and Suriname (190).

The region's countries with smaller average caloric deficits for the undernourished are Costa Rica and Ecuador (160 k-cals), Chile and Uruguay (150), and Argentina, where the average deficit is estimated at 140 k-cals per day.

There are no Latin American pictures of starvation with crowds of skeleton-thin people, like the ones the international media display from some parts of sub-Saharan Africa, but that does not mean the problem here is not serious, stresses the FAO.

Chronic hunger is not always evident because the human body compensates by a slowing the metabolism in adults and stunting growth in children. ''In addition to increasing susceptibility to disease, chronic hunger means that children may be listless and unable to concentrate in school, mothers may give birth to underweight babies and adults may lack the energy to fulfill their potential,'' says the UN agency's report.

The FAO is implementing a series of mixed-strategy food assistance programs in Latin America and the Caribbean intended to boost agricultural production and improve food distribution. The initiatives also seek to support export capacity in order to provide revenue to import foods not produced within the country.

One of the main goals of these programs is to reinforce the contribution made by peasant farmers, who throughout most of the region supply an important portion of the vegetables consumed by the population.

Developing capabilities specific to the situation of these small farmers is essential, says the FAO, which highlights the example of a group of Nicaraguans who combined their resources, with each one investing 40 dollars, to build a series of metal silos so they could protect their harvested corn from humidity and pests.