MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Alberto Fernández stresses food security has taken a turn for the worse

Fernández criticized a western world that “concentrates income in a few and distributes poverty to millions”

Argentine President Alberto Fernández Wednesday denounced that projections regarding an improvement in the world's food situation after the COVID-19 pandemic was over had failed to materialize.

During his speech at the World Summit on Food Security in New York, Fernández underlined that “when the COVID-19 crisis found us, the first FAO reports said that, immediately afterward, the hunger situation would improve; however, all the data indicate that after the year 2021 poverty and hunger increased in the world.”

Attending the event were Prime Ministers Pedro Sánchez of Spain, Justin Trudeau of Canada; Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, together with Presidents Gustavo Petro of Colombia and Guillermo Lasso of Ecuador, in addition to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, among other leaders.

Fernández also said at the Intercontinental New York Barclay Hotel, that in order to talk about food security it was necessary to analyze a model that “concentrates income in a few and distributes poverty to millions of inhabitants of this world. If we do not consider this, we will be talking about other things, but we will not be talking about the real causes that determine what we have to live with.”

The Summit aimed to find tools to address the food security crisis resulting from the war in Ukraine and its ensuing logistical problems and grain shortages worldwide.

Meanwhile, an FAO report released Wednesday showed that Chileans were the South Americans least affected by food insecurity between 2019 and 2021 (17.4% of the population), followed by Uruguay's 23%, while Argentina had fallen from 19.2% in 2014 and 2016 to 37%.

Peru went from 37.2% to 50.5%, Paraguay from 8.3% to 25.3%, Ecuador from 20.7% to 36.8% and Brazil from 18.3% to 28.9%, the document also noted.