By Caribbean Medical News Staff
St. Vincent and the Grenadines is among six Caribbean countries to have attained the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on hunger and feature promising indicators with regards to food security and nutrition.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report titled “Panorama of Food Insecurity in Latin America and the Caribbean 2015,” notes that St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, Guyana, Suriname, Cuba and the Dominican Republic have achieved the feat.
The report noted that Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has made a huge step towards the total eradication of hunger by reducing both the percentage and total number of undernourished people to less than half.
The region also met the goal of the World Food Summit (WFS), having reduced the total number of undernourished people to 34.3 million.
The report says that although the Caribbean’s progress has been slow, this has been largely due to the instability of the socioeconomic situation and climate in Haiti, which accounts for 75 per cent of the undernourished population in the Caribbean.
FAO’s Regional Representative, Raul Benitez says the region’s success story is based on the positive macroeconomic situation during the past two decades and the solid and continued political commitment of the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean with the eradication of hunger.
The FAO report notes that regional progress is mainly due to the success of the Southern Cone countries, and adds that the commitment to hunger can be seen throughout the region: seventeen countries achieved the hunger goal of the MDGs while eleven countries reached the WFS target.
Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves will be traveling to Rome this week to collect the prize on behalf of the country.
