DEVELOPMENT-LATAM: Little Stands in the Way of Advancing Hunger

By Dario Montero Reprint | | Print |

Darío Montero*

MONTEVIDEO, Jan 16 2003 (IPS) - Hunger is becoming public enemy number one in Latin America and the Caribbean, even though the region is one of the world’s leading food producers.

The "Zero Hunger" plan of the new Brazilian government and a limited amount of international aid are among the few weapons planned for fighting this scourge in 2003.

Failed local policies, international economic crises, the industrialised North’s blocking of farm exports from the developing South, and a rash of natural disasters have submerged 65 percent of the region’s 516 million inhabitants in poverty, 38 percent of whom live in indigence and 11 percent are malnourished.

But these data, contained in the reports prepared for the World Food Summit in Rome in June, do not cover the advance of hunger in 2002 in Central America, which was thrashed by hurricanes, earthquakes, drought and corruption, and in Argentina, where economic collapse began in late 2001.

In addition to the countries facing acute situations are those where hunger is a chronic problem. In Haiti, 62 percent of the population is undernourished, in Colombia and Peru, one in four people is hungry, and in Mexico, 40 percent of inhabitants suffered some degree of malnutrition in childhood.

Latin America and the Caribbean, which this year marked a half- decade of low growth – with a 0.1-percent decline in combined gross domestic product (GDP), high inflation, 9.1 percent unemployment and 50 percent of active workers holding unstable jobs – is not the primary target of international aid, as are the African continent and Afghanistan.

Nor are then many plans to combat hunger emerging from the governments in the region, with the exception of the Zero Hunger initiative of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, aimed at ensuring that the nutritional needs of all Brazilians are met.

Lula, who took office Jan 1, has laid out a proposal that is innovative for Latin America because it not only seeks to overcome hunger, but also to establish sustainable programmes for creating jobs and fomenting economic production to benefit those who suffer hunger most, Uruguayan sociologist Gustavo Leal told IPS.

The Lula administration won a commitment to Zero Hunger from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which is financing the effort. This arrangement is feeding hopes that the experience might be repeated in other countries, said Leal, of the non- governmental organisation, El Abrojo, which specialises in helping street children.

The aim of Zero Hunger is to achieve coverage of three meals a day within the next four years for the 22 million people official figures indicate are affected by hunger today. The independent Brazilian Food Security Forum says the true total is twice that figure, representing 26 percent of Brazil’s population of 170 million.

The initiative entails 21 lines of action that combine structural policies, like agrarian reform, and extending social security to informal workers, with other locally specific approaches, such as the distribution of vouchers that can be exchanged for food and expanding school lunch services.

José Graziano da Silva, one of the plan’s promoters, says a priority is to stimulate food production in Brazil and increase the market in a way that benefits family farming.

Initially, however, the project calls for importing food from Brazil’s partner countries in Mercosur (Southern Common Market), Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, driving the reactivation of the bloc that Lula is seeking as part of his international policies.

Zero Hunger, the brainchild of Lula and his leftist Workers Party (PT), is inspired on the programme launched in the United States during the crisis of the 1930s that also provided vouchers to help the poor and worked to boost agricultural production.

Sociologist Leal underscored the step forward that the Brazilian project could represent for the region if it is successful, noting that it is an alternative to the traditional "compensatory" approach of failed policies that continue to be implemented.

And it would serve as a response to the warning of the World Food Programme (WFP) in mid-2002 that there were 72 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean living in extreme poverty and suffering the effects of undernourishment, and that the situation would worsen in 2003.

The threat of hunger hovers over more than 200 million people in the region, as they are vulnerable to the predicted continuation of economic deterioration and the recurrence of natural disasters.

Central America’s hungry population grew two percentage points to 19 percent of the total population over the last decade, and two points in the Caribbean, to 28 percent of the population, according to reports presented at this year’s World Food Summit.

More than 200 Central American children have died in the last 18 months as a result of the lack of food. Shortages affect upwards of eight million people in the poorest areas of the isthmus.

Latin America and the Caribbean hold 25 percent of the world’s cultivable land, 23 percent of livestock and 30 percent of freshwater reserves, according to experts from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

These resources, through sustainable development, could provide enough food for the region’s entire population and provide income and inputs to develop other economic sectors, according to FAO.

Argentina, for example, produces enough food for 300 million people, eight times the population of that country. However, hunger is a chronic problem in the poorest communities, and since the economic crisis erupted in December 2001 it has extended to the other social strata.

The National Statistics and Census Institute (INDEC) reports that more than 52 percent of the 37 million Argentines are poor, and 26 percent are indigent, in other words they lack the income to ensure the minimum calorie intake.

The most dramatic panorama is found among the child population. INDEC figures for 2001 show that 11,000 children die in Argentina each year and that 6,000 of those deaths are preventable because they are related to malnutrition and diarrhoea.

The situation is comparable to the consequences of "a war or a natural disaster," even though Argentina has not suffered either, said sociologist Pablo Vinocur, a consultant with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The provinces hardest hit by food shortages are in the north: Misiones, where 42 children died of hunger last year, and Tucumán, where the number of children suffering acute malnutrition increased four-fold from May to October 2002.

Physician Matías Laín, a volunteer on the Fundación Alma’s paediatric programme, told IPS he was shocked when he reached Tucumán and found malnourished children, brought by their parents on horseback from as far away as 30 km, for medical attention. Many were on the verge of death, said Laín.

The profound crisis in Argentina has sharply impacted neighbouring Uruguay, which is also a major food producer, but today confronts severe food shortage problems among the child population, 60 percent of whom live in poverty.

The number of community soup kitchens, run by non-governmental groups and churches, with some assistance from the state and from international aid agencies, has quadrupled in Uruguay over the last six years.

Leal points out that this country once had a reputation as a regional leader in terms of social welfare.

The WFP, meanwhile, has focused its Latin American efforts on El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, providing food assistance for 1.5 million children and adults through nutritional recovery programmes and meals through schools and the workplace.

Beginning in March, the WFP says it will expand aid to another 690,000 hungry people in Central America who have borne the brunt of the recent series of droughts and of the impacts of the sharp decline in international prices for coffee, one of the subregion’s leading exports.

* IPS correspondents Marcela Valente (Argentina) and Néfer Muñoz (Costa Rica) contributed to this report.