Many people in Latin America see migration as “the only option they have” after enduring successive crises of climate change, Covid and soaring food prices, the program manager told AFP. world food for the region.
“It’s hemispheric migration,” UN chief Lola Castro said in an interview in Brussels.
“People are transiting all over the continent… to the border with the United States and Mexico, everywhere is affected by migration, and governments are telling us ‘What do we do with all these masses of people passing through?'”
The pressures, particularly food insecurity, prompted Castro to plead that Latin America “is not forgotten” when its leaders meet with their EU counterparts at a joint summit in Brussels on 17 and July 18.
Haiti is of particular concern to the World Food Program, primarily due to runaway gangs, Castro said.
“The situation has deteriorated tremendously,” she said, adding that “there are 200 gangs and they have taken over the city of Port-au-Prince,” Haiti’s capital.
The danger they pose is preventing Haitians from going to work or school or bringing food to market, she said.
It’s “really like a population taken hostage”, she says.
– Funding cuts –
Nearly half of Haiti’s population, 4.9 million people, need food assistance, but WFP is only able to reach about 2.5 million of them.
But “due to budget cuts around the world, we’re not going to be able to get to one (million) of that 2.5 million,” Castro said, calling it “very dramatic.”
Funding for WFP operations in Haiti is $122 million short for this year, she explained.
While Russia’s war in Ukraine posed food supply problems in many regions, in Africa and the Middle East in particular, food insecurity was rising inexorably in Latin America, despite its agricultural production capacity, a Castro said.
While in previous years, the WFP assisted three million people suffering from severe food insecurity in Latin American and Caribbean countries, “now we never go below 10 to 30 million”.
“Migration right now is the only option people have,” she said.
“They’re going, north, and what we’re seeing is a huge increase.”
With the EU-Latin America summit – the first in a decade – Europe is seeking to strengthen dialogue and advance a free trade agreement agreed in principle with Mercosur countries, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.
The European Union is also keen to source rare earths and metals from Latin America as it weans itself off from dependence on China.
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