Estimates by the United Nations’ World Food Programme, as well as media reports, indicate that this region is experiencing a serious hunger crisis and that the situation will soon worsen.
More and more people in Latin America and the Caribbean are suffering from hunger or cannot afford to eat a balanced diet that provides them with all the nourishment needed to keep them healthy despite the region itself having a diverse and fertile breadbasket able to feed its whole population.
According to a FAO report, the worst level of food insecurity is occurring in Venezuela followed by Haiti, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. Those countries are especially vulnerable to the additional economic turmoil sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic. The UN estimates that Venezuela has the fourth-worst food crisis in the world behind civil war-torn Yemen, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. To express this in numbers, about 9.3 million Venezuelans, i.e. one-third of the population, are suffering from famine and 13% of Venezuelan children under the age of five are stunted while another 30% are anemic. Meanwhile, in Guatemala, the government has also reported an increase of acute malnutrition among children aged five and under.
Furthermore, Chile, whose economic situation is perceived to be Latin America’s success story, is also facing serious economic setbacks and the poorest section of its population has been forced to limit its dietary intake. Some Chileans are finding their circumstances to be so dire that they are comparing it to those experienced during the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s.
The UN estimates that over 83 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean will face extreme poverty by the end of this year. Meanwhile, the World Food Programme predicts that about 16 million will suffer due to food insecurity whereas, before the pandemic, this figure stood at 4.3 million representing a massive 270% surge.
This data is not surprising bearing in mind that Latin America and the Caribbean are heading for the worst recession in a century, with the region’s GDP predicted to contract by 9.1% this year with unemployment rates forecasted to be 13,5% according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Moreover, countries such as Venezuela and Argentina are facing galloping inflation. It is also worth mentioning that these are only the official numbers and do not account for the many people in Latin America and the Caribbean who before the pandemic worked in the informal economy, for instance selling fruit or homemade food on the street. The ECLAC now predicts that, because of COVID-19 lockdowns, another 28 million of the region’s inhabitants will enter into extreme poverty.
In the face of this hunger crisis, some Latin American governments such as Brazil have decided to introduce a stimulus package in the form of an emergency basic income program to diminish high levels of extreme poverty. But the program will end in December with no prospect of it being extended due to the post-COVID economic setback. The Chilean government has also taken steps to curb the crisis by implementing a US$11.7 billion stimulus package, equivalent to 4.7% of GDP. However, other much weaker Latin American nations such as Guatemala, Haiti, and Venezuela are simply completely unable to introduce any anti-crisis strategy.
