LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition 2023: Statistics and Trends

1.1 PREVALENCE OF UNDERNOURISHMENT

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation’s (FAO) prevalence of undernourishment (PoU) indicator is derived from official country data on food supply, food consumption and dietary energy needs in the population, considering such demographic characteristics as age, sex and levels of physical activity.¹ Designed to capture a chronic state of energy deprivation, it does not reflect the short-lived effects of temporary crises or a temporarily inadequate intake of essential nutrients. FAO strives always to improve the accuracy of the PoU estimates by taking into account new information; 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 (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, 2019). ¹ In this report, as hunger is measured based on the prevalence of undernourishment, hunger and undernourishment are used as synonyms.

In 2022, hunger in the world, as defined by the PoU indicator, remained at levels higher than those registered prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the global prevalence between 8.7 and 9.8 percent. Considering the mid-point of this range, 9.2 percent of the world population was undernourished in 2022, which is 1.3 percentage points higher than in 2019.

By contrast, in Latin America and the Caribbean, the prevalence of hunger was significatively lower than the world estimate, affecting 6.5 percent of the population in 2022 (TABLE 1).² Although a decrease of 0.5 percentage point compared to 2021 was observed, it was still 0.9 percentage point above the level in 2019 (FIGURE 1). ² The regional prevalence of undernourishment for 2022 has been estimated at between 5.8 and 7.7 percent.

The number of people affected by hunger in the region is estimated to be between 38.5 million and 51 million. Considering the mid-range of this estimate, 43.2 million people suffered from hunger in 2022, which represents a reduction of 2.4 million compared to the previous year. However, in 2022 there were still 7.2 million more people suffering from hunger than before the pandemic in 2019 (FIGURE 1).

The prevalence of hunger in the region decreased from 2021 to 2022 but remained far above pre-pandemic levels and considerably higher compared to 2015, the year the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda was launched. The percentage of the population suffering from undernourishment rose from 5.6 to 6.5 percent between 2019 and 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and reached 7 percent in 2021. However, an encouraging turnaround in this trend was observed in 2022, with the prevalence of hunger falling to 6.5 percent.

At the subregional level, different trends were observed. In South America, the prevalence of hunger in 2022 was 6.1 percent, which represents a reduction of 0.9 percentage point compared to the previous year. This decrease is associated with better performance of the labour market and social protection policies implemented by the countries of the region, together with an increase in the price of energy inputs that benefited the exporting countries of South America (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, 2023). Despite this reduction, the prevalence of hunger is still 1.2 percentage points above the 2019 level. In the subregion, the prevalence of hunger in the years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic had increased significatively, rising from 3.6 percent in 2014 to 4.9 percent in 2019, a situation that worsened with the start of the pandemic in 2020 (FIGURE 2).

On the other hand, the Mesoamerica subregion showed a different trend compared to the rest of the region. Before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the prevalence of hunger in the subregion had been decreasing; specifically, it fell by 2 percentage points to 4.8 percent in 2020 compared to 2014. However, it rose to 5.0 percent in 2021 and then increased slightly to 5.1 percent in 2022 (FIGURE 2).

Finally, in the Caribbean, countries were affected by the rise in food prices due to their high dependence on food imports. Furthermore, key economic sectors, such as tourism, have also been affected since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has decreased the purchasing power of households (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, 2023). Thus, between 2021 and 2022, the prevalence of hunger in the Caribbean increased by 1.6 percentage points, reaching a prevalence of 16.3 percent in 2022. In addition, as seen in FIGURE 2, the prevalence of hunger in the subregion has been on the rise since 2014. Between 2014 and 2022, it increased by 3.3 percentage points, and showed the highest increase, of 2.1 percentage points, between 2019 and 2022.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, undernourishment affected 43.2 million people in 2022, of which 26.8 million live in South America, 9.1 million in Mesoamerica and 7.2 million in the Caribbean (TABLE 2). As can be seen in FIGURE 3, hunger showed a significant increase in the region in 2016, which then worsened in 2020 with the start of the pandemic. Although the number of people suffering from hunger in the region decreased by 2.4 million in 2022 compared to the previous year, there were still 7.2 million more undernourished people than in 2019.

In South America, the number of people suffering from hunger decreased by 3.5 million in 2022 compared to the previous year. However, the subregion still registered an additional 6 million undernourished people compared to 2019. It should be noted that, in 2022, South America accounted for 62 percent of undernourished people in the region, up from 47 percent in 2014.

In Mesoamerica, 9.1 million people were affected by hunger in 2022, representing 21 percent of undernourished people in the region, down from 36 percent in 2014. Between 2014 and 2019 the number of hungry people in the subregion decreased by 2.3 million, but in the period from 2019 to 2022 there were no significant variations in the prevalence of this condition.

Finally, in the Caribbean, a total of 7.2 million people faced hunger in 2022, representing nearly 17 percent of the regional total. The number of undernourished people also increased by 700 000 from 2021, and by one million compared to 2019.

Latin America and the Caribbean presents considerable differences in terms of the prevalence of undernourishment at the national level (three-year averages) (FIGURE 4).³ During the 2020–2022 period, in the Caribbean subregion, Haiti had a prevalence of undernourishment of 45 percent, representing a total of 5.1 million people. At the opposite end of the scale in the subregion are Barbados and Cuba, with a prevalence of hunger below 2.5 percent, and Dominica, the Dominican Republic, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, with a prevalence of 6.7, 6.3, and 3.1 percent, respectively. ³ See Tables 17 and 18 in Annex I.

In Mesoamerica, Honduras showed the highest prevalence of undernourishment, with 18.7 percent of the population facing hunger in the period 2020–2022, followed by Nicaragua (17.8 percent) and Guatemala (13.3 percent), which in absolute terms represented 1.9 million, 1.2 million and 2.3 million hungry people, respectively. By contrast, countries like Mexico (less than 2.5 percent), Costa Rica (3 percent) and Belize (4.9 percent) had the lowest prevalence of undernourishment.

In South America, the Plurinational State of Bolivia had the highest prevalence of hunger (19.4 percent), followed by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (17.9 percent) and Ecuador (13.9 percent), representing 2.3 million, 5.1 million and 2.5 million people, respectively. Among the countries with the lowest prevalence of undernourishment in the subregion were Brazil (4.7 percent), Argentina (3.2 percent), Chile (2.5 percent), and Guyana and Uruguay (both below 2.5 percent).

When analysing the trend in the prevalence of hunger in recent years, different realities can be observed in the countries of the region. On the one hand, between the trienniums 2013–2015 and 2020–2022 some countries, such as the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and Ecuador, showed increases of 14.2 and 5.3 percentage points, respectively. As energy commodities exporters, the increase in these two countries could be explained due to the important drop in energy commodities prices starting in 2014 that affected their economies (Fajardo-Ronquillo, 2020). Haiti is another country that showed an important increase of 6.3 percentage points in the prevalence of undernourishment. On the other hand, in the same period, 12 countries in the region reduced the prevalence of hunger, seven of which are in Mesoamerica. In fact, Honduras was the only country in the Mesoamerica subregion that had a higher prevalence of undernourishment in 2020–2022 compared to 2013–2015 (FIGURE 4).

In the 2020–2022 triennium, compared to the 2017–2019 period prior to the pandemic, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela showed a decrease in hunger of 4.8 percentage points, and in Guyana and Mexico the prevalence of hunger fell to below 2.5 percent. However, in the same period, hunger in the Plurinational State of Bolivia increased by 5.6 percentage points, while in Honduras and Haiti it rose by 4.6 and 2.8 percentage points, respectively (ANNEX I, Tables 17 and 18).