The U.N. World Food Program warns that upward of at least 14 million people could go hungry in Latin America as the coronavirus pandemic rages on, shuttering people in their homes, drying up work and crippling the economy.
A family peers from the window of their home as they wait to receive boxes of free food, during a lockdown to curb the spread of the new coronavirus, in Bogota, Colombia, Monday, May 4, 2020. The U.N. World Food Program is warning that upward of at least 14 million people could go hungry in Latin America as the coronavirus pandemic rages on, shuttering people in their homes, drying up work and crippling the economy.
“We are entering a very complicated stage,” said Miguel Barreto, the WFP’s regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean. “It is what we are calling a hunger pandemic.” The number of people going hungry is likely to be higher than the U.N. projection, which only takes into account numbers in the 11 countries where the organization operates. The estimate does not include, for example, Venezuela, where one in every three people faced hunger last year, according to the food agency’s 2019 study.
In Haiti, hunger could more than double, from 700,000 to 1.6 million. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants living in the Andes as well as those in Central American countries reeling from a severe drought are also expected to see levels multiply. “We could enter another lost decade,” said Alicia Bárcena, chief of the U.N.’s regional economic branch, referring to a previous downturn during the 1980s that took Latin America 25 years in order to recover 1979 per-capita income levels.
Alimenta la Solidaridad, a charity that operates 214 soup kitchens across Venezuela, has seen demand increase since a nationwide quarantine went into effect in mid-March. The group usually serves 14,500 meals to children daily; now an additional 5,300 boys and girls are on a waiting list hoping to get food, but supplies are limited.Across the region, nearly 30 million more people are expected to find themselves in “situations of poverty” and another 16 million among the extreme poor, the U.N.
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