Bogotá- Latin America and the Caribbean is at a decisive juncture in its history. Thanks to its advancements in social, economic, and production-based terms, the region is on its way to development. In the coming years the region can repeat the mistakes that first world countries made, or it can adopt a route of its own that takes it to a fully sustainable development, both in human and environmental terms. And this distinct path begins with the total eradication of hunger.

The good news is that the region is fully conscious of this, and at the start of 2015, the governments from all countries – gathered in the community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) – took on the formal commitment to end hunger by 2025, by way of the Plan for Food Security, Nutrition, and Eradication of Hunger, which has garnered the principal policies and successful experiences from the countries across the region in order to create a roadmap towards achieving zero hunger.

This commitment represents an even more demanding goal that the one adopted by the international community by way of the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which have marked the year 2030 as the deadline to attaining a world free from hunger.

Yet this greater ambition from Latin America and the Caribbean is fully justified: this is the world region that has obtained the greatest advances in the fight against hunger, given that more than 30 million people have already overcome undernourishment in the region in the last 25 years. What is more, it was the only region in the world to achieve the two international goals on hunger, both that of the Millennium Development Goals and the World Food Summit, having reduced both the proportion and total number of undernourished people to less than half of the levels recorded in 1990.

Twenty-five years ago, 14.7 percent of Latin America and the Caribbean’s population lived in hunger, with more than 66 million women, men, boys, and girls living without sufficient daily food to lead a healthy and active life. Nowadays, this percentage has been reduced to only 5.5 percent, but 34.3 million hungry Latin American and Caribbean nationals remain.

CELAC’s Plan on Food Security, Nutrition, and the Eradication of Hunger directly focuses on this objective and on guaranteeing nutritional wellbeing for all those population groups in vulnerable situations.

In the particular case of Colombia, the most vulnerable populations are those living in secluded rural areas, which have witnessed more intensively the effects of the armed conflict that has been facing the country for more than 50 years. 

As a result of this conflict, these rural communities have had their food production compromised and have endured the destruction of their crops, the mobility restrictions imposed on them by the different armed actors, the forced displacement primarily towards urban areas, and the harm caused to the environment. This has had a negative impact on their food security and the effects tend to persist thereafter, given that the recovery of crops, infrastructure, and social capital can take several years. 

After three years of peace dialogues between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP guerrilla, many observers agree that the signing of a peace agreement could be reached during the first half of 2016. Building and consolidating peace following the signing of the agreement will require great efforts and leadership by the government at the national and local levels, as well as by civil society and the international community.  

FAO cooperates with the Colombian government, and offers all of its available toolsets to move towards the recovery of farmland and to propel forward the processes of rural development and peacebuilding.

In this setting, the Voluntary Guidelines on Good Governance of Land, Fisheries and Forestry Tenure –  in the Context of National Food Security – perform an important role, as does similarly the Organization’s ample experience in the management of programmes in the field and in working with vulnerable rural communities. 

The human right to food and the right to guaranteeing food and nutritional security for the entire population, including communities in conflict-afflicted areas and communities reintegrating themselves to civilian life, must be at the forefront of public policies for the consolidation of peace and for the eradication of rural poverty in the affected territories. Those programmes combatting chronic malnutrition in children and school nutrition programmes will have to bear special emphasis.

This would be the basis for confronting the many difficulties affecting the lives of the poor, rural populations in Colombia, such as the access to land and the productivity of family farming, given that there can neither be peace without food security, nor food security without peace. 

Adapted from: http://www.larepublica.co/un-nuevo-camino-al-desarrollo_343586