By Eric Green
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- A week-long United Nations conference opened April 26 in Guatemala on exploring ways to continue the progress made in reducing the number of people who suffer from hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Officials from 33 countries in the region were expected at the conference in Guatemala City, sponsored by the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization. The event is one of several U.N.-sponsored regional conferences being held around the world in the next two months to meet the U.N. mandate to cut the number of hungry people on Earth to about 400 million by 2015.

The latest estimates indicate that 798 million people in the developing world were undernourished as of 2001, representing a decrease of 19 million people from the early 1990s.

The U.N. said the number of undernourished people in South America dropped from 41.5 million to 32.9 million during the 1990s. Meanwhile, the situation in the Caribbean remained stable during that same period, with 7.9 million people suffering from malnutrition. However, in Central America, the number of malnourished people increased from 5 million to 7.5 million people during the 1990s.

The Latin America-Caribbean region, and the Asia-Pacific region, were the only two regions worldwide that managed to reduce the total number of undernourished people during the 1990s, the U.N. said. The Latin American countries with the lowest levels of undernourishment -- less than 5 percent of their population -- include Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, and Chile.

By contrast, Haiti heads the list of countries with an extremely high level of undernourishment -- around one-half of its population lacks sufficient food to lead healthy lives. This is followed by Nicaragua at 29 percent of the population lacking sufficient food, Panama at 26 percent, and the Dominican Republic and Guatemala at 25 percent, according to the U.N.

For its part, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is involved in programs to help alleviate food shortages in Latin America. USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios has affirmed his agency's commitment to help the region overcome food shortages, while also focusing on helping the countries to stabilize their economies.

Natsios said USAID closely monitors weather conditions and crop production in the region, and collaborates with non-governmental organizations and host governments to track the agricultural and nutritional situation at the local level.

The United Nations says that "food security" -- meaning what it describes as the ability of all people to have "access to the food needed to live a healthy and active life" -- is essential for "economic growth and long-lasting, sustainable development."

The existence of hunger "in a world of plenty is not just a moral outrage; it is also short-sighted from an economic viewpoint," the U.N. says. The organization adds that "hungry people make poor workers, are bad learners (if they go to school at all), are prone to sickness, and die young," and that the "productivity of individuals and the growth of entire nations are severely compromised by widespread hunger. Hence, it is in the self-interest of every country to eradicate hunger."

Meanwhile, President Bush's niece, Lauren Bush, has become involved in a U.N. program to encourage students to participate in the fight against global hunger.

Lauren Bush participated in an April 20 ceremony at U.N. headquarters in New York for the launching of a web site, designed to give students up-to-date information on global hunger and suggested initiatives, such as letter-writing appeals or fundraising events.

The web site is run by Friends of the World Food Program (WFP), which in 2003 distributed food to more than 100 million people worldwide.

WFP calls the global hunger issue a "silent emergency," with statistics showing that, on average, somewhere in the world a child dies every five seconds from hunger.

Lauren Bush said that her interest in the issue of global hunger stems from a recent three-day trip with WFP workers to Guatemala. She said she plans to make future trips to Africa to further spotlight the problem.

Bush also encouraged students to join WFP's "19-cents-a-day" plan, so-called because it represents the average cost of feeding a child in school in developing countries. With that money, she said, "we can change a child's life for an entire school year."

More information about the new WFP web site is available at: http://www.waronhunger.org/main/index.php3.