`OUR LIVES ARE ABOUT FEAR'
Pandemic-driven hunger is stalking the poor, making the world even more unequal
Up a narrow hillside populated by thin, snarling dogs and the grief-stricken mourners of the coronavirus pandemic, another plague has befallen the slum where five-year-old Milinka and eight-year-old Luis Miguel sleep in one room with their parents. Hunger.
Worsening inequality, as poorer people and nations lose years of gains in the battle against hunger and poverty, is likely to be one of the lasting legacies of the pandemic. New data released by the United Nations illustrates the unequal impact as measured by access to a basic human necessity: Food. Global hunger shot up by an estimated 118 million people worldwide in 2020, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, jumping to 768 million people — the most since 2006. The number of people living with food insecurity — or those forced to compromise on food quantity or quality — surged by 318 million, to 2.38 billion.
In North America and Europe, formal employment, social safety nets and the widespread availability of remote work cushioned the blow. In those parts of the world, the percentage of people living with food insecurity edged up from 7.7 per cent to 8.8 per cent. But the developing world, home to billions of informal workers and gaps in government assistance, fared far worse.
Asia and Africa are home to the majority of people in the world who are food insecure. But the region hit hardest by the coronavirus — Latin America and the Caribbean — saw the biggest one-year spike in food insecurity: a jump of nine percentage points, to 40.9 per cent. Here and elsewhere in the developing world, a still-chronic shortage of vaccines, as fresh waves of the virus send caseloads soaring, is now projected to worsen access to food this year.
“The developed world had the advantage of being formal economies, where if you do a lockdown, people have access to unemployment insurance or social aid,” said Máximo Torero Cullen, chief economist of the UN food agency. “That didn't happen in much of the developing world. You saw a middle class move into poverty and the poor move into severe food insecurity.”
Few countries witnessed a bigger surge than Peru. Once a global success story — it capitalized on the commodities boom to halve poverty and malnutrition over the past two decades — the coronavirus-plagued South American nation is now a study in deepening inequality. New national data shows a spike in poverty from 20 per cent to 30 per cent in just one year.
The economy is rebounding now, the acclaimed cevicherías of Lima's moneyed Miraflores district filling up again with well-heeled diners sipping pisco sours. But the plight of the poor is getting worse.
In Goshen City, the slum named for the biblical land the Jews fled in Exodus, Milinka and Luis Miguel's father, a motorcycle taxi driver, and mother, a toy factory worker who lost her job in the pandemic, saw their income collapse last year. They're now surviving on about $9 a day. Most of that goes to cover water, electricity, gas and cellular data so their children can tune in to virtual classes. They lunch at a “communal pot” — a makeshift food station of the sort now popping up across poor quarters of the capital where destitute neighbours are pooling and sharing meagre rations.
The parents give their children food off their own plates. Still, that often means a dinner of only bread and water. In March, Milinka stopped playing with her Hello Kitty doll on the dirt floor; she spent long spells sitting languidly in a corner with a mouth infection. Luis Miguel lost interest in the pickup soccer he played on a muddy field near a sheer cliff.
“We thought they were just depressed, but we took them to the clinic and found out they have anemia,” said their mother, Marimar Avila, 27.
“The doctor told me to feed them more. But with what money? With what food? We don't have the virus, but the pandemic is killing us.”
The pandemic spike in hunger, the largest in at least 20 years, is dealing another setback to a fight the world was once winning. After years of gains, efforts against food insecurity began running into head winds in the mid-2010s amid economic stagnation, global conflicts and climate change-driven droughts and floods. The pandemic has made the challenge still more difficult.
The world's worst food crises remain where they have long been: In conflict zones and fragile states from Ethiopia to Haiti. But Latin America — a largely middle-income region with some of the most COVID -ravaged nations on Earth — suffered the biggest relative increase in food insecurity, underscoring the power of the pandemic to send nations careening down the ladder of development after decades spent climbing up.
In Peru, a country with the world's highest COVID death rate per capita, poverty and childhood malnutrition were cut in half over the past two decades. University enrolment soared. So great was its progress that experts predicted it would end the decade as a high-income nation.
That goal has receded as the pandemic has generated a host of negative indicators, including jumps in maternal mortality at childbirth, HIV deaths and university dropout rates, that are set to reverberate for years.
“Many of the people facing a lack of access to food are the same ones who started having a better quality of life, some, even in the middle class, who had achieved a good status in life, maybe even a car,” said America Arias, Peru director of the charity Action Against Hunger. “During the pandemic, they lost all their income. It became a question of survival.”
Across town from the slum where Milinka and Luis Miguel live, Lima's San Martin de Porres district stands as a comparative promised land. An aspirational, working-class neighbourhood, it boasted one of the first shopping malls beyond Lima's fashionable neighbourhoods. It has a McDonald's. Even a Popeyes.
Now, the pandemic's socioeconomic victims are gathering at its soup kitchen, where the daily diners are topping 100 — up from about 60 before the pandemic.
On a recent afternoon, Juan Tarazona, 57, arrived with plastic containers to take home soup and stew for him and his wife. His 30-year-old company — a smallscale manufacturer of kitchen stoves — “basically died in the pandemic,” he said.
“Do you know what it's like to spend your whole life working, building a company, and then, to end up here?” Tarazona asked, his voice breaking as he fought back tears. “What am I going to do now? My savings are gone. How am I going to rebuild?'
Beatriz Muñoz, a 45-year-old caregiver for the elderly who was fired during the pandemic without severance, picked up food for her daughter, who is battling a brain tumour. The rush of COVID patients has made access to hospitals and doctors impossible. As a result, cancer deaths have shot up.
Muñoz said her daughter hasn't been able to see a doctor in over 10 months.
“Our lives are about fear now,” she said. “Fear of if we'll eat. Fear of how long it will be before she can see a doctor again.”
The doctor told me to feed them more. But with what money? With what food? We don't have the virus, but the pandemic is killing us.
A jump in global food prices — they rose in May at their fastest monthly rate in more than a decade, due to weather issues and surging demand in China — has made it harder for Avila to feed her children. As Avila walked back up the hill carrying eggs, rice and potatoes, a neighbour, Isabel Quispe, 49, waved down a foreign journalist.
“Please, help,” she said. “We need food.”
Quispe cooks for her neighbours at a communal pot, typically with donated food. The day before, their stocks were dry, so one neighbour bought potatoes and onions.
Quispe has five households in the neighbourhood to feed — about 18 people.
“We don't have enough,” she pleaded.
Her 19-year-old son had to drop out of university last year. He was studying computer programming. Her husband, a carpenter, was laid off; he left Lima for the countryside to look for work on a road crew.
He had yet to send money home, and she still couldn't afford her son's books or tuition. Peru's university dropout rate jumped last year to 16.2 per cent, up from 12.6 per cent in 2019.
“They say the economy is getting better, and maybe that's true for ... Miraflores,” Quispe said. “But we're going hungry, and nobody's coming to help.”