Nearly four million people in food insecurity in Honduras, says FAO

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Some 3.9 million people are food insecure in Honduras due to the covid-19 pandemic and the effects of tropical storms Eta and Iota, said Wednesday the FAO representative in the country, Dennis Latimer, in an interview with Efe.

“The forecasts for Honduras are showing us that almost a million additional people to those who were before the pandemic (are) in a degree of food insecurity,” stressed the diplomat of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

Read also: Check out our coverage on Honduras

He added that before the covid-19 crisis, caused by the SARS-CoV2, which has “worsened” the world’s economy, some 2.9 million people in Honduras were in a food insecurity crisis.

“The forecasts for Honduras are showing us that almost a million additional people to those who were before the pandemic (are) in a degree of food insecurity,” stressed the diplomat of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

He added that before the covid-19 crisis, caused by the SARS-CoV2, which has “worsened” the world’s economy, some 2.9 million people in Honduras were in a food insecurity crisis.

“Almost 33 percent of the Honduran population is in some degree of food insecurity, either severe or moderate, that is, that family that has to decrease the amount of food it consumes or stop eating for a while to make food yield,” the senior official said.

The pandemic has created “certain uncertainties in all aspects, not only in food security but also in economic, health and social aspects,” he said.

LACK OF INCOME

Latimer pointed out the importance of Honduras taking “certain precautionary measures” to guarantee the food supply to the people affected first by covid-19 and then by storms Eta and Iota, which hit Central America last November.

He stressed that the country “did not stop producing food”, despite the pandemic, but “the problem” is that a large part of the population of Honduras, with 9.5 million inhabitants, lost their jobs, most of them informal.

“The majority of the Honduran population works in the informal sector, and these are the ones who have lost their jobs and their income and now have less access to safe, healthy, and nutritious food,” he explained.

According to private enterprises in Honduras, eight out of ten Hondurans have income problems, so they live in “precariousness”, which affects their food security.

MALNUTRITION VERSUS OVERWEIGHT

The FAO representative stated that the lack of food in Honduras, where historically there have been problems of food insecurity, affects thousands of children who before the pandemic received “school feeding” in schools, which have been closed since March 2020 due to the coronavirus.

“We have to get our act together and look at alternative ways of getting this food to parents, teachers, and the children who need it most,” he said.

Malnutrition in children under 5 years of age affects 5.6% of children in Honduras, a country that since 2017 had managed to drop “by 3 percentage points,” he added.

Latimer stressed that the range from zero to five years old is key to facilitating the physical and intellectual development of children who do not yet attend school and do not have access to school feeding programs.

“We are seeing indicators of child malnutrition that, instead of improving, is getting worse,” emphasized the representative of the UN agency, who said that it is “cheaper” to buy junk food than nutritious products, which leads to serious health problems around the world.

The lack of access to nutritious and quality food has increased overweight in Honduras, which puts at risk the health of hundreds of people who are vulnerable to chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs), including diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease, he said.

The FAO official urged Honduras to guarantee “social protection” for the most vulnerable and work “regionally and sub regionally” to promote solidarity programs but stressed that the most important thing is to reactivate the economy.