FOOD: Malnutrition Curbs Development in Latin America, Caribbean

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Apr 25 2002 (IPS) - The growth of agricultural production in Latin America and the Caribbean is “weak and unstable,” and 211 million people in the region live in poverty, the director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Jacques Diouf, said at the UN agency’s regional conference in Havana.

If major inroads are not made against malnutrition, it will be impossible to make progress on other fronts in the fight against poverty, such as health and education, Diouf said Wednesday at the official opening of the plenary session of the Apr 22-26 27th Regional Conference for Latin America and the Caribbean.

The poverty level remains high and the same proportion of the population is malnourished as 20 years ago, said the UN official. In 1999, 44 percent of the population in the region was poor, and 18.5 percent was living in extreme poverty, he noted.

The regional conferences are held every two years. This week’s gathering is preparatory to the “World Food Summit, five years later”, to take place in Rome Jun 10-13.

Diouf lamented that more than five years after the 1996 World Food Summit, the number of undernourished people in Latin America and the Caribbean has not been reduced at the rate needed to meet the target of cutting the total of 800 million hungry people worldwide in half by 2015.

At the current rate, he warned, there will still be 45 million chronically malnourished people in the region by that year – far above the target of 29 million.

After the conference’s Technical Committee met for two days, ministers and deputy ministers from 33 countries in the region came together for the rest of the week, along with representatives of the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the United Nations Fund for Population Activities and the World Health Organisation.

U.S. State Department representative Seth Winnick and the papal nuncio in Cuba, Luis Robles, are participating as observers.

Diouf stressed the need to study necessary modifications to the traditional approach to rural development which has been based on the economic reforms adopted in the past 20 years by the majority of Latin American and Caribbean nations.

The structural reforms have put a majority of agricultural and forestry producers in the region in a difficult situation, limiting their competitiveness and jeopardising their survival in markets in which the predominant factor is competitive yields, he said.

At the last world food summit, FAO set four priorities for action in Latin America and the Caribbean: food security, international agricultural trade, sustainable management of natural resources and rural development.

In order to improve production and guarantee equal and stable access to food, FAO has reinforced its Special Programme on Food Security, through which it provides support to countries with food deficits.

Diouf said it was necessary to strengthen the political will, through alliances for food security and rural development between all segments of society – the government, the private sector and civil society.

Private and public sector funds are also needed for agricultural and rural development, in order to revert the downward trend in the official development aid provided by industrialised countries, which plunged 43 percent over the past decade.

During the first two days of the conference, the Technical Committee discussed questions like the balance between food security and the sustainable management of natural resources in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Committee members warned that although the region had an abundance of natural resources, 20 percent of the surface area was affected by the process of desertification. They also observed that the advances achieved by the economic reforms have not translated into a reduction of poverty.

A total of 55 million Latin Americans suffer from malnutrition, which especially affects the inhabitants of rural areas, despite the fact that small-scale farming accounts for 80 percent of agricultural production in Latin America.

According to the experts, the main obstacle to food security in the region is the lack of buying power of the poor.

The Technical Committee also pointed to drug trafficking as one of the causes of food insecurity and the depletion of natural resources in several countries in the region.

The experts recommended strengthening technical cooperation between countries in the region through the use of existing capacities, the exchange of experiences, and the development of skills training programmes by both the public and private sectors.

They also said that in order to curb the depletion of natural resources caused by intensive farming in vulnerable areas, comprehensive development strategies and alternative means of survival must be designed.

In addition, the Committee underlined the need to favour social investment and the development of human capital.

Representatives of more than 40 non-governmental organisations, meeting in the Second Regional Consultation of Non-Governmental and Civil Society Organisations (NGO/CSO) held in Havana in the runup to the conference, concluded that the rise in hunger was not a consequence of low food production levels but of the unequal distribution of resources and income.