LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition 2022: Statistics and Trends

1.1. SDG INDICATOR 2.1.1. PREVALENCE OF UNDERNOURISHMENT

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) prevalence of undernourishment (PoU) indicator is derived from country data on food supply, food consumption and energy needs, taking into consideration demographic characteristics such as age, sex, and levels of physical activity. Designed to capture a state of energy deprivation lasting over a year, it does not reflect short-lived effects of temporary crises or inadequate intake of essential nutrients. FAO strives always to improve the accuracy of the PoU estimates by taking into account new information, and the entire historical series is updated for each report. For this reason, only the current series of estimates should be used, including for values in past years.

World hunger is on the rise (Table 1). FAO estimates place the global prevalence of hunger between 8.9 and 10.5 percent in 2021. Considering the middle point of this projected range, 9.8 percent of the population was undernourished in 2021. In other words, roughly one out of ten of the world’s inhabitants regularly go to bed hungry. Undernourishment in Latin America and the Caribbean now sits between 7.5 and 9.7 percent. Considering the middle point, in 2021 hunger affected 8.6 percent of the region’s population, the highest since 2006.

Hunger in the region had been growing steadily even before the COVID-19 pandemic. The prevalence of hunger increased by 22.5 percent in the world between 2015 and 2021 – 1.8 percentage points – while the prevalence rose in Latin America and the Caribbean by 48.3 percent in the same period – 2.8 percentage points (Table 1). Since 2014, when it was at its lowest rate, hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean has been increasing at a faster pace, in particular between 2019 and 2021, getting closer to the world’s average (Figure 1).

Among the subregions of Latin America and the Caribbean, as shown in Figure 2, undernourishment increased the most in South America (2.5 percentage points) between 2019 and 2021, reaching a prevalence of 7.9 percent, the lowest in the region, followed closely by Mesoamerica (8.4 percent). Undernourishment did not grow as much in Mesoamerica and the Caribbean, but the latter still shows the highest prevalence of undernourishment in Latin America and the Caribbean (16.4 percent).

Undernourishment varies within each subregion and country (Figure 3). Most of the people affected by hunger in the Caribbean are in Haiti. In the period between 2019 and 2021, nearly half its population (47.2 percent) – around 5.4 million people – were undernourished. By comparison, the prevalence of undernourishment on the other end of the spectrum was around 7 percent in Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago.

In Mesoamerica, Nicaragua was the country with the highest prevalence of undernourishment (18.6 percent) in the 2019–2021 period, followed by Guatemala (16 percent), and Honduras (15.3 percent). Which amounts to almost 5 million hungry people in these three smaller countries (1.2, 2.9, and 1.5, respectively). In Mexico, the largest country of the subregion, the prevalence of undernourishment was 6.1 percent (7.8 million people).

In South America, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela had the highest prevalence of undernourishment (22.9 percent), which in absolute numbers equals 6.5 million people, followed by Ecuador with 15.4 percent (2.7 million), and the Plurinational State of Bolivia with 13.9 percent (1.6 million). In Colombia, Paraguay, Peru, and Suriname the prevalence is over 8 percent. It is worth noting that populous Brazil has one of the lowest rates in the region (4.1 percent), but the highest number of undernourished people (8.6 million).

A look at hunger trends in the region’s countries in Figure 3 shows hunger notably increased, by 18.4 percentage points, in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, or 5 million more hungry people between the 2013–2015 and 2019–2021 periods. And in those periods hunger increased by 6.7 percentage points in Ecuador (1.3 million), by 4.6 percentage points in Haiti, and by 1.6 percentage points in Brazil (3.4 million more people).

Comparing the latest hunger data (2019–2021 period) with the three-year-period before the COVID-19 pandemic, 2017–2019, shows that the countries in which undernourishment grew the most were Ecuador (3.8 percentage points), Honduras (2.2 percentage points), and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (2.1 percentage points). In Colombia, the prevalence of undernourishment increased by 2 percentage points (1.1 million more people).

In 2021, 768 million people suffered hunger in the world, taking the middle of the projected range between 702 and 828 million people. This means 150 million more hungry people than in 2019 (+ 24 percent) before the COVID-19 pandemic. In Latin America and the Caribbean 56.5 million people suffered from hunger in 2021, 13.2 million more (+30.5 percent) than before the pandemic in 2019. The majority of hungry people in Latin America and the Caribbean (34 million) live in South America (Table 2).

In South America undernourishment increased by 47.2 percent between 2019 and 2021, or 11 million more people, and by 118 percent between 2015 and 2021, doubling the number of hungry people (from 17.2 million to 34.2 million). Between 2019 and 2021 Mesoamerica’s undernourishment upturn was not as sharp as South America’s: an increase of +11.8 percent (1.6 million people more, totalling 15.2 million). Lastly, in 2021, 7.2 million people were living in hunger in the Caribbean, 600 000 more than in 2019 (Table 2).