Climate Action 2014-2015

MITIGATION AND ADAPTATION
HUNGER-FREE LATIN
AMERICA AND THE
CARIBBEAN
By Raúl Benítez, Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative
for Latin America and the Caribbean, Food and Agriculture Organization of
the United Nations (FAO)
Latin America and the Caribbean is the region that has shown the greatest global progress in
the fight against hunger. As a whole, it has already reached the core Millennium Development
Goal (MDG) hunger target by a comfortable margin and is very close to meeting the more
ambitious World Food Summit (WFS) target. Much of the region’s success has resulted from
rapid hunger reduction in Latin America; while the Caribbean has seen slower progress in
fighting undernourishment, it has also contributed to the regional advance.
According to the State of Food
Insecurity in the World 2014, published
by FAO, the prevalence of hunger
in the Latin America and Caribbean
region has declined to 6.1 per cent,
little more than one-third of the
burden in the early 1990s. This
exemplary improvement is the result
of government-led efforts combining
support for production with social
protection, but its success relies on
the fact that national initiatives have
been supported by a much wider
commitment. Over the last decade the
region has played an outstanding role
worldwide, leading the implementation
of a political approach to combat
hunger. Latin American and Caribbean
societies have decided to end hunger,
parliaments are granting resources and
constitutional status to the right to
food and the region became the first
to commit – nearly 10 years ago – to
the goal of zero hunger by adopting
the Hunger-Free Latin America and
the Caribbean Initiative 2025. This
Initiative, reaffirmed by the region’s
leaders at recent summits of the
"Improvement relies on the
fact that national initiatives
have been supported by a
much wider commitment."
Community of Latin America and the
Caribbean States (CELAC), has served
as a template for similar commitments
in Africa and is the best example of the
priority that food security and hunger
eradication occupies in the region’s
political and social agenda.
Coordination between all actors
involved at national level, including
non-governmental social sectors, the
private sector, civil society, producer
organisations and all government
ministries involved in the fight against
hunger and malnutrition, has been
key to the success of the policies that
countries have enacted to reduce hunger
and malnutrition. These include social
policies to improve food access – the
region’s Achilles’ heel in terms of food
insecurity – such as conditional cash
transfer programmes, which 21 countries
already have in place, supporting
over 120 million people. Support
for family farming is also among the
main policies backed by the region’s
governments, and in recent years they
have begun supplying their school
feeding programmes by using the public
budget to purchase products from family
farms, ensuring better nutrition to
schoolchildren while also boosting local
development and agricultural production.
This is just one example of the type of
innovative win-win scenarios that are the
backbone of regional food security.
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