FAO Regional Conference discusses fight against hunger and rural development

FAO's biannual Conference (26-30 April 2004) begins in Guatemala

 

Guatemala City, 22 April 2004 - The FAO Regional Conference for Latin America and the Caribbean (26-30 April 2004) will discuss the progress made in the fight against hunger in the countries of the region.

The latest figures show that South America improved its food security, reducing the number of undernourished from 41.5 million people to 32.9 million during the 1990's. The situation in the Caribbean region, remained stable in 7.9 million people suffering undernourishment. However, in Central America negative results where recorded because by the end of the decade the figure of undernourished people raised from 5 million to 7.5 million.

The President of Guatemala, Oscar Berger and by FAO Director General Jacques Diouf will address the Conference on 28 April 2004. Representatives and senior government officials from the 33 countries in the region are expected to attend.

Region improves but poverty persists in rural areas

World hunger is increasing once more despite the reduction achieved during the first half of the 1990s, according to FAO's recently published State of Food Insecurity 2003.

Latin America and the Caribbean, along with Asia and the Pacific, were the only two regions that managed to reduce the absolute number of undernourished people during the last decade.

The reduction in the region amounted to five and a half million people, but progress was not uniform across all sub-regions.

Least progress was made in Central America where by the end of the 1990s there were two and a half million more hungry people as compared to the beginning of the same decade and increasing the percentage of undernourished from 17 to 21 percent. However, Costa Rica, Honduras and Nicaragua improved their situation in the same period.

In South America the average number of undernourished people fell to 10 percent of the population, while in some countries, such as Bolivia, the percentage reached 22 percent of the population which places it near the Central American average.

The Latin American countries with the lowest levels of undernourishment - less than 5 per cent of their population- include Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador and Chile.

At the opposite end of the scale, Haiti heads the list of countries with extremely high level of undernourishment - some 49 percent of their population is undernourished. This is followed by Nicaragua (29%), Panamá (26%), The Dominican Republic and Guatemala with 25 percent.

FAO figures indicate that while the Latin American region as whole made significant progress fighting hunger - which accounts for six of the 19 countries that achieved a reduction in the number of undernourished during the 1990s - many countries have reversed earlier reduction trends. In Colombia, for example, the number of undernourished had been in decline for the first half of the decade but began to rise in the second half.

Poverty persist in rural areas

Regarding levels of poverty, overall the region improved, but rural areas remained poor. About half of the region's rural poor (40 million people) are small-scale farmers and 33 percent of the indigenous communities (26 million people) and 16 percent of the landless poor have no access to income-generating resources.

Looking back over the 1990s, the figures paint a grim picture in several countries: some 81 percent of Bolivia's farmers were living below the poverty line; in Nicaragua this figure was closer to 77 percent of the rural poor; and in Peru the number was 76 percent.

Food security: the engine of development

FAO has urged all 33 Latin American countries participating in the Regional Conference to make an effort to reduce the levels of undernourishment, to ensure that improving food security becomes a principle strategy in advancing rural development and reaching the objectives of the World Food Summit to halve global hunger levels by 2015.

During the debates the Regional Conference will decide the main thrust of the work to be carried out by the Organization's regional office during 2004 and 2005.

"FAO believes that food security - and by this we mean both physical and economic access for all to the food needed to live a healthy and active life - is essential for economic growth and long-lasting, sustainable development," said Gustavo Gordillo de Anda, FAO's Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean.

"The benefits of a holistic approach to food security include economic growth, the preservation of the environment, human development and a dynamic and sustainable change which will lead to an improvement in quality of life and encourage better social, economic and environmental stability," he added.