Graphic by Yujin Kim ’23
Covid-19 is not the only pandemic that Latin America is facing. Latin America’s nutrition crisis has grown increasingly worse over the past year, and unfortunately, Covid has not helped the situation. In just the past year, the number of people without access to adequate food has reached 59.7 million people across Latin American countries. The first step to aiding this situation is raising awareness. Other countries should know the struggle that Latin America is currently facing and proactively work to provide aid to help support both the people and the government.
Hunger has been a prevalent issue since 2014, and the number of people who are living with hunger in Latin American countries rose by 30% or 13.8 million people. By 2020, the population who had ran out of food or had to go a day or more without eating had reached 14% or 92.8 million people. Covid has caused many people lose their jobs, making it very difficult for people to buy food. Poverty frequently stems from widespread food insecurity, namely the limited access to healthy foods.
However, for many families, the issue is a of lack of resources, but rather their inaccessible costs. Latin America is the leading exporter of many foods, such as agriculture and fish. The inflation brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic has increased the costs of these goods — leading many families without a reliable source of sustenance. Furthermore, women were much more likely than men to experience food insecurity. Almost 41.8% women in Latin America experience issues with food insecurity as opposed to 32.2% of men.
On the other end of food instability, many people are experiencing limited access to nutritious, healthy foods. Without having access to these nutrients, there are issues with health because of the lack of nutrition. “We continue losing the battle against all forms of malnutrition, and we are far from being able to guarantee healthy nutrition for the whole population,” said Dr. Carissa F. Etienne, Director of Pan-American Health Organization. Almost 1 in 3 people in Latin America are continually forced to not only reduce the amount of food they ate, but also the quality of the food. In order to find a solution to this widespread issue of hunger, there must be more accessible and healthy foods.
The UN is urging countries to change their agri-food systems to make them more accessible and sustainable in order to provide nutritious, healthy, and affordable foods for everyone. In order to solve the food crisis in Latin America, other countries should help by provoiding necessary aid through raise awareness and providing useful resources.
Raising awareness will help prevent this situation in the future while bringing international coverage to an issue that has been burgeoning for years. Another way to prevent this issue in the future is by making healthy foods more accessible. It is unfair for only non-nutritious foods to be affordable for families. Everyone should have a right to food that is beneficial to them.
Other countries have a duty to help out Latin America in their time of need. Since many other countries have stability in their food, allowing them to aid Latin America which is suffering from this issue. It is unfair for countries, like the United States, to allow Latin America to face such extreme hunger while they have the resources to help. Countries can help by pooling resources and setting up systems to provide healthy but affordable food in Latin America. Hunger-Free Latin America and the Caribbean Initiative “is a commitment from the countries and organizations of the region, supported by the Food and Agricultural Organization from the United Nations (FAO), to contribute to create the conditions that will allow eradicating hunger permanently by 2025.” Initiatives like this will help to mitigate the hunger crisis in Latin America.
To protect people and make sure that families and children are not going hungry, it is essential for industrialized countries to help out. Making it known that this is an issue opens doors for countries to provide aid.
If countries work together and further initiatives like the aforementioned, great progress could be made to end hunger in Latin America and make sure that not only do people have food on their plates.
