Summary
From the article:
The share of people who are hungry has been decreasing faster in South America than anywhere else in the world. It is down by one-third since 2020, according to a report published on July 21st by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Just 3.5% of people in the region consume insufficient calories, the lowest level recorded. Eliminating hunger by 2030 is one of the UN’s “sustainable-development” goals. “If there is a region in the world that can potentially achieve that, it’s South America,” says Máximo Torero, the FAO’s chief economist.
The continent has been here before. Hunger plummeted in the 2000s as a commodity boom lifted economic growth, allowing left-wing leaders to splurge on social programmes. In Venezuela Hugo Chávez created state-subsidised supermarkets. Argentina’s Néstor and Cristina Kirchner funded comedores populares (soup kitchens). Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva expanded credit for small-scale family farmers. The splurging worked, but when commodity prices fell in 2014, triggering recessions across the region, food insecurity shot up and stayed there. The pandemic made things worse. As unemployment surged it dragged swathes of the middle class into poverty and hunger.
Yet most countries have recovered. Brazil led the way. Lula, as the president is commonly known, made food security a priority when he returned to office in 2023. By 2025 Brazil had made it off the UN’s Hunger Map, which tracks countries where more than 2.5% of the population suffers from chronic hunger. Chile and oil-rich Guyana were also removed. Argentina is almost there at under 3%. Colombia and Paraguay are approaching at 4%, while Peru and crisis-battered Venezuela are making inroads near 5%. Even Ecuador and Bolivia have improved a tad, to 11% and 20% respectively. Only Suriname is moving in the wrong direction.
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Serious challenges remain. The biggest is climate change. With rising temperatures, plant pests and crop failures have become more common. The coming year looks especially fraught. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a US government agency, says the coming cycle of the El Niño weather pattern will be “very strong”. That is the highest of the five categories used to rank the phenomenon, used for only the third time since 1950. “It’s going to aggravate every food problem,” says Carolina Trivelli, a former government minister in Peru.