Written by By Rosa Narvaez, CNN
A record number of people worldwide were driven below the poverty line in 2017, with the majority of the world’s remaining poor living in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to a new report by the UN World Food Programme.
In 2018, just over 800 million people, or 8.7% of the world’s population, had no access to sufficient food, the agency said.
The number of such people hit a record high last year as conflict in South Sudan, Syria and Yemen drove those facing hunger out of their homes and forced their children to miss school and engage in all-day scavenging for food.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, the number of people living in extreme poverty increased from 119 million in 2016 to 127 million in 2017. In those countries, an estimated 43 million people were driven out of poverty due to hunger in the last year.
Although the region faced its own near-record-high poverty rate in 2017, the region has made significant progress since 1990, when nearly 200 million people — 54% of the population — were in poverty, said the report, World Food Situation and Prospects: Early Outlook for 2019, released Thursday.
“The one area of vulnerability in Latin America and the Caribbean is the growing insecurity linked to a food crisis,” World Food Programme Deputy Executive Director Josette Sheeran said.
“The stability of the region in general has resulted in an improvement in food security that has been driven by an increase in productivity and diversification of agriculture.”
The last time hunger in the region was higher was in 2004, when the number of people affected by hunger reached 134 million, the report said.
A crisis was triggered by months of fighting in the war-torn country of South Sudan in 2017. A mix of cattle raids, inter-communal violence and reports of malnutrition drove an estimated 2.3 million people from their homes and more than a million children to miss school during the school year, the agency said.
Read more: Now, South Sudan is fighting hunger
The number of hunger-related deaths in South Sudan, the latest country to be pulled into the global spotlight on the issue, has risen to more than 30,000, said the report.
As countries emerge from conflict, other factors have increased hunger worldwide, including environmental degradation, increased migration, and climate-related disasters, the UN agency said.
Countries such as Italy, South Sudan, Haiti and Lesotho saw an increase in malnutrition in children younger than 5 years old in 2017, and 37 states in Africa had experienced an increase in acute malnutrition in 2017, the report said.
As in other regions, the number of people suffering from hunger is still too high for the region, the agency said. In 2017, about 90% of those affected with food insecurity lived in low-income countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The global economic recovery is not producing the impact on food consumption needed to alleviate hunger, Sheeran said.
“There is so much economic growth in the world. It has to be linked to the increasing consumption of food in the economy and also the local economy in our region,” she said.
“And of course, this is based on social guarantees. So, the economic growth is not in the right place in communities where many of our hungry people are living.”