Hunger Grips Latin America as Pandemic Persists

HUNGER GRIPS LATIN AMERICA. As a result of the pandemic, the number of people going hungry in Latin American and Caribbean nations will rise from 4.3 million to 16 million, according to the UN World Food Programme—likely the steepest rise in the world.

Moreover, these figures don’t account for half the working population living outside the formal economy. Also, they don’t account for Hurricane Eta’s recent devastation in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Belize. Or the added destruction forecasters expect from incoming Hurricane Iota.

This alarming trend reverses the growth in Latin America’s middle class since the turn of the century. The poverty rate decreased from 27% to 12% due to a 2000-2014 boom in commodity prices. But after that boom ended, many in the middle class began to sink back into poverty and hunger.

By the end of 2019, most Latin American governments lacked the finances to relieve that hunger. Discontent over food insecurity, corruption, and crime rose. Moreover, 39 percent expressed dissatisfaction with their nation’s democratic processes, according to Latin American Public Opinion Project. And 23 percent supported executive coups, if such coups gave leaders power to solve those issues.

Hundreds of thousands joined mass protests in Colombia. Similar mass protests in Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala and Puerto Rico persisted for weeks, months, even years. Crowds in Peru forced that nation’s Congress to dissolve. Argentina sank into a deep recession. And socialist Venezuela plunged into a far deeper depression.

Then the pandemic lockdowns sharply reduced incomes and further crippled the region. Formerly middle-class families have little left over after paying for housing and utilities. As a result, many have given up their former meat and milk diets and subsist on bread, noodles, or tortillas. At times they mix in beans. But increasingly, they have to skip meals altogether.

The worst recession in a century

Beyond the dwindling middle class, millions of workers labor in an informal economy. They sell from street carts or clean homes or do a variety of odd jobs. But lacking formal employment, most cannot apply for assistance programs when jobs are suspended due to lockdowns. They too, are scraping for food, as the region sinks into its worst recession in a century, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Yet Latin America does not lack for food. Its fertile valleys and plains produce enough grain, fruit and protein to export around the world. But its impoverished people can afford only meager portions. The malnutrition that plagued the region decades ago has returned with cruel severity.

Now Venezuela, for one, is nearing the brink of famine. What will happen when more famines strike, as Jesus prophesied in Matthew 24:7-8? People will need both miracles and mainstays like World Vision to sustain them.

In May, World Vision started a $350 million campaign to work with pastors to reach communities with a total population of 72 million people. That includes 36 million children. Moreover, all these impoverished children are vulnerable to being pulled into slave labour. This campaign would use the pastors to help with aid and skills to lift people out of poverty. So let us pray that they find Jesus and that He delivers them from this evil.

Find out how to help in World Vision’s report Out of Time: COVID-19 Aftershocks