By Peter Richards
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, Aug 18, CMC – Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)countries have been able to reduce hunger among its population last year, even as it increased significantly from 2019 to 2021 and the world has gone back 15 years, with hunger levels comparable to those of 2008-2009.
“The good news, if we can have a good news, is that Latin America and the Caribbean is the only one region to reduce hunger in the report that we presented during G20 and last year in the report that we presented in July in the United Nation in New York,” Mario Lubetkin, the Assistant Director General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) told the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) in an exclusive interview.
The “State of Food Security and Nutrition (SOFI) in the World,” which is an annual flagship report jointly prepared by FAO, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), UNICEF, the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Health Organization (WHO), showed that the percentage of hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean had risen from 5.6 per cent in 2019 to 6.9 per cent in 2021, but that there is a progressive reduction, reaching 6.2 per cent last year.
Lubetkin said that this means that during the last two consecutive years, 4.3 million people have been recorded to stop suffering from hunger, mainly thanks to a recovery in South America.
(Details in Full News section)
CMC/2024