Giovanna Ferullo M. | Panama City, (BLAZETRENDS).- The World Food Program (WFP) suffers a funding cut that will affect some 2.5 million people who are in acute food insecurity in Latin America and the Caribbean, the director told BLAZETRENDS regional organization, the Spanish Lola Castro.
Acute food insecurity occurs when a person’s inability to consume enough food puts their lives or livelihoods in immediate danger.
The global economic crisis has led to the largest donors of this program to the United Nations.
That they are “the United States, Canada and other countries, are reducing the resources that they allocate both for humanitarian aid and for development aid.”
These cuts “greatly affect” the WFP’s work plans to serve 9.9 million people who are in a situation of acute food insecurity in the 13 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean where it has a presence.
“Right now we are going to have to cut 2.5 million people” out of the 9.9 million in a situation of acute food insecurity that WFP reaches directly, he added.
The funding cut translates into practice in which the people affected will not be able to be assisted by the program.
Through social transfers, projects to prevent the climate crisis, the delivery of nutritious food to children and pregnant women, “especially in countries like Haiti but not only” there.
“These people can end up in lines very close to what can be called a catastrophe or even famine,” Castro said.
That he warned that it will cost “much more to recover these people” than “to invest in advance so that these people do not deteriorate.”
Of the total of 9.9 million people in a situation of acute food insecurity identified by the WFP in 13 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, 4.9 million are in Haiti, said the regional director of the organization.
The big problem of food insecurity
Food insecurity, which means that a person cannot eat an adequate, varied and nutritious diet three times a day, is “a big problem” in Latin America and the Caribbean.
In the 13 countries where the WFP is present “we have 40 million people in food insecurity.”
A situation that is a direct consequence of the “great social inequality” that exists in the region and the climate crisis, “which is permanent and worsens every year.”
“Social inequality means that people cannot buy their basic diet and that is hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean”, which also has one of the most expensive basic diets in the world, with a price of “around 4 dollars per person per day”, when in the rest of the world “it is from 3 to 2.9 dollars”.
The most affected by food insecurity are the indigenous and Afro-descendant populations, generally remote and without access to adequate social services.
“And then we have all of these affected almost always, recurrently, by these climatic crises: the droughts in Central America, the hurricanes in the Caribbean and in Central America, and the floods in South America.
These people have a lot more trouble recovering and that’s why we have to work a lot more in areas of early action,” he added.