Oficina Regional de la FAO para América Latina y el Caribe

Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs in order to lead an active and healthy life. Each country shall adopt a strategy in accordance to their resources and capacities so as to meet their objectives and cooperate to provide solutions for the global problems of food security.

Many countries of the Latin American and Caribbean Region have made important advances in reaching the First of the Millennium Development Goals, which looks upon reducing by half the number of hungry by 2015. Nonetheless, the countries with the highest rates of malnutrition in the region, such as Bolivia, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua and Paraguay, shall have to make big efforts, not only in terms of growth but also in terms of income distribution, in order to improve the livelihood of the hungry.

Besides the continuous support given to Member Countries in their fight against hunger, mainly through technical projects, FAO RLC has undertaken the implementation of the Initiative “Latin America and the Caribbean without Hunger (ALSCH)”, launched initially for Guatemala and Brazil.

The ALSCH Initiative is an effort of countries committed with the urgent need to defeat hunger, of agencies that acknowledge the huge price of extreme poverty and its consequences, of companies that assume their social responsibility and of people who trust on the possibility of solving this problem for ever. The FAO Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean has undertaken the challenge of pressing forward this initiative, operating from its Head Office in Santiago, Chile. The Initiative relies on the support of the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation, as well as on the support of the governments of the Region, materialized in a 10 country Working group that follows-up on the Initiative.

Give a high profile to the problem of hunger and the right to food in the national, regional and sub-regional agendas, as well as in the agenda of international agencies and responsible enterprises. The right to food should be a State policy, and the society must be informed about its importance and support its accomplishment.
Capacity building in the countries to carry out public policies and programmes to eradicate hunger and guarantee the right to food.
Supervise the state of Food and Nutrition Security (FNS) of the countries involved in the framework of the MDG until 2015, and further on up to the final victory over hunger in the Region.