CNN
—
Violent weather exacerbated by climate change fueled hunger and food insecurity across Latin America and the Caribbean in 2023, according to a new United Nations report.
Extreme weather drove up crop prices in multiple countries in the region in 2023, the report, which was written by several UN agencies including the World Food Program (WFP), says.
Hot weather and drought, intensified by the El Niño weather phenomenon, raised the price of corn in Argentina, Mexico, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, while heavy rain in Ecuador caused a 32 to 54 percent increase in wholesale prices in the same year.
Though the report credits social safety nets with a measurable decrease in undernourishment throughout Latin America, it notes that the region’s poorest and most vulnerable populations are still more likely to suffer from food insecurity due to climate change – especially rural people.
“The shocks are getting much more extreme,” said Lola Castro, the WFP’s regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean. “This is what’s creating larger food insecurity and under-nutrition.”
Quoting a 2020 study, the report states that 36% of 439 small farms surveyed in rural Honduras and Guatemala experienced “episodic food insecurity due to extreme weather events.”
“In more rural areas they…don’t have a lot of resources to be able to weather a poor harvest,” said Ivy Blackmore, a researcher affiliated with the University of Missouri who studied nutrition and agriculture among Indigenous farming communities in Ecuador.
“You don’t generate as much income. There’s not as much nutritious food around, so they sell what they can, and then they purchase the cheapest thing that’ll fill them up,” she added.
In the communities she studied, erosion from prolonged rain led farmers to plant on virgin grassland nearby.
“They might have a couple of good harvests. Then the erosion continues, and they dig up more,” Blackmore said. “There’s extreme erosion going on because they’re just having to sustain themselves in the short term without being able to address these long-term consequences.”
A push for drought resistant crops
As extreme weather increases food prices, some consumers gravitate toward cheaper, but less nutritious, ultra-processed foods. This is a particularly dangerous trend in Latin America, the UN report says, where “the cost of healthy diets is the highest in the world” and both childhood and adult obesity have risen markedly since 2000.
One solution may lie in the region’s traditional foods, such as quinoa, and tuberous root vegetables like mashua and melloco, among others. In addition to being healthier, traditional produce may also be able to resist the worst shocks of climate change.
“Many Andean cereals are heavily drought resistant,” Castro pointed out. “We’re working with smallholder farmers in very different areas with indigenous populations in Latin America and the Caribbean to bring back those foods to the table.”
In some cases, those foods may already be on the table. Traditional terrace farming in the Andes “is amazingly resilient,” said Carlos Andres Gallego-Riofrío, a research assistant professor at the University of Vermont. “It retains the moisture, it retains the fertility of the soil.”
Caliata, one of the farming communities he studied in central Ecuador, experiences low rates of chronic disease despite being “only 14 kilometers from the city.”
“They could buy Coca-Cola,” Gallego-Riofrío said. “They could buy whatever they want in the store, like any super processed food. Still, we barely see that in their diets.” Most of the food eaten in Caliata is grown by the families there, with plenty of tubers, beans, barley, and fruit rather than packaged foods bought elsewhere. The most popular meat is guinea pig, used for both culinary and medicinal purposes.
“In the Andean traditional systems, there’s so much to learn,” Gallego-Riofrío concluded. “There’s so much that can be transferred to other communities and we would see way better yields in terms of ecosystem and human health outcomes.”