NEW YORK, United States – Since 1975, adult obesity in Latin America and the Caribbean region has tripled, while one in four are going hungry, according to figures published by the United Nations recently.
And the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Pan American Health Organization / World Health Organization (PAHO / WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Food Programme (WFP), have called for countries in the region to develop urgent actions to address the increase in malnutrition.
The report, Panorama of Food and Nutritional Security 2019, highlights the need to promote healthier food environments through taxes and incentives that favour healthy food, social protection systems, school feeding programs and the regulation of food advertising and marketing. The agencies also stress the importance of improving food labeling with frontal nutritional warning systems, ensuring the safety and quality of food sold on the street, and reformulating the composition of certain products to ensure their nutritional contribution.
According to the report, the most significant increase in adult obesity in the region was observed in the Caribbean, where the percentage quadrupled, rising from 6% in 1975 to 25%, an increase in absolute terms from 760,000 to 6.6 million people.
“The explosive increase in obesity –which affects 24 per cent of the regional population, about 105 million people, almost double the global level of 13.2 per cent– not only has huge economic costs, but also threatens the lives of hundreds of thousands,” said the FAO’s Regional Representative, Julio Berdegué.
According to Panorama, every year 600,000 people die in Latin America and the Caribbean due to diseases related to poor diets, such as diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular diseases. Inadequate diets are associated with more deaths than any other risk factor, something that threatens our future generations, since the rates of both childhood and adolescent obesity have tripled between 1990 and 2016.
“We must act now to reverse this trend and prevent children from suffering the consequences of poor diets on their health and their future quality of life,” said PAHO/WHO Director Carissa F. Etienne.
“To achieve this, we need the commitment of the whole society and public policies that regulate unhealthy food products, create environments conducive to physical activity and promote healthy eating at school and at the family table.”
The publication highlights that the region is worse than the rest of the world in the majority of malnutrition indicators related to excessive calorie intake: overweight has doubled since the 1970s, and today affects 59.5 per cent of adults in the region, 262 million people, while globally the rate is 20 percentage points lower: 39.1 per cent.
In contrast, the region has lower undernourishment rates than the world (6.5 per cent for the region versus 10.8 worldwide), stunting (9 per cent versus 21.9), and much lower rates of wasting (1.3 per cent, versus 7.3 for the world). However, the agencies warn of the worrying increase in hunger, which has grown again by 4.5 million people since 2014 – an increase of 11 per cent – reaching 42.5 million in 2018, its highest point of the last decade.
The Panorama makes a detailed analysis of how the food environment of the region has changed, understood as the space of interaction between people and the physical, economic, political and socio-cultural conditions that influence the way they acquire, prepare and consume food.
Sales of ultra-processed food products are the fastest growing in Latin America and they increase the population’s exposure to excessive amounts of sugar, sodium and fat. Between 2000 and 2013, the consumption of ultra-processed products grew by more than 25%, and fast food consumption grew almost 40%.
“In Latin America and the Caribbean, too many children eat too little healthy food and too much processed food,” said Bernt Aasen, UNICEF Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean. “Almost 1 in 5 children under 5 are malnourished or overweight, which prevents them from growing well. It is everyone’s task to ensure healthy food is available and affordable for all families, especially the most vulnerable.”
The expansion of supermarket chains and the preponderance of large food processing industries is another major change in the regional food environment, one which has made ultra-processed products available everywhere, and at lower prices than nutritious food. Poor people have been hardest hit by these changes, since for this population group it is often easier and cheaper to access unhealthy rather than healthy food.
“If we expand social protection programmes in our region, we would better face the double burden that hunger and obesity represent for communities and families,” said WFP Regional Director Miguel Barreto. “These are the two faces of malnutrition.”
Social protection programmes today cover more than 200 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean, including 85 million schoolchildren who receive breakfast, snacks or lunch.

By Luis Felipe López-Calva
The UN Climate Action Summit 2019, which took place in the days leading up to the 74th UN General Assembly, delivered new pathways and practical actions for governments and private sector to intensify climate action.
Among these, it recognized that the path towards protecting our planet requires a fundamental change in terms of how households, and the society as a whole, produce and consume electricity.
Despite important efforts, we are still not moving slowly in terms of investments in clean energy. According to the International Energy Agency, in 2018 alone global energy-related CO2 emissions rose 1.7 per cent to a historic high, driven by higher energy demand.
While LAC is a region whose contribution to global carbon emission from energy generation has been relatively low (contributing to less than eight per cent of total emissions worldwide), it has contributed significantly to the solution by moving firmly into more renewable sources of energy.
Energy needs to be transformed in order to be useful. Primary sources of energy – those found in nature such as coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear fuels, the sun, wind or rivers – need to be transformed into electricity (a so-called secondary source) to be used by industry, households, services and transportation, among other things.
Additionally, electricity cannot yet be stored at a large scale: it is either used or lost. The process of electricity generation produces a series of effects that inevitably have an impact on people and the environment, albeit some more than others.
That is, social and environmental impacts differ if electricity is generated by burning coal, inundating a valley, or building a wind farm, with effects varying from greenhouse gas emissions, displacement of local populations, and disturbances to local ecosystems (i.e. wind farms threaten flying wildlife).
The goal in energy planning is to balance benefits and costs, aiming ideally to find mechanism that internalize the environmental impact (either through markets or through regulation, both of which require effective governance: clear, stable and credibly enforced rules).
So, how does LAC fare in terms of its energy use? According to a widely used index, the “energy intensity indicator”, LAC is the most efficient region in the world when it comes to energy use.
This index captures the amount of energy needed to generate one dollar of product or service. LAC is also becoming more efficient over time, with the index falling in past years, suggesting that the region is doing relatively more with less energy.
To a large extent due to the presence of large hydroelectric power generators, 52 per cent of LAC’s energy came from renewable sources (by 2013). This is almost three times higher than the global average of 22 per cent and has been increasing steadily over the past two decades
This involves clearly many challenges ahead. Among the most pressing is related precisely to the impact of climate change on renewable energy generation: hydropower may be a highly efficient renewable energy system, but it is becoming less reliable due to changing weather patterns.
This has been exacerbated by the effect of the El Niño and La Niña phenomena, which strongly influence rain levels in the region. In parts of South America, these lead to reduced rains and to droughts that hinder the capacity to generate electricity from hydro sources, resulting in a need to increase the generation of electricity based on fossil fuels to be able to meet growing demands.
In other parts of the region, namely the deepest southern end of the continent, these phenomena produce extreme increases in rain, resulting in an unprecedented increase of water levels that affect families and lead to high vulnerability for the populations.
It is also crucial to understand the distributional impacts of continuing the transition towards renewable sources of energy in LAC. Energy transitions will have unequal distribution of their costs and benefits, particularly for communities that depend on traditional energy infrastructure for their livelihoods.
Rising fuel prices can also trigger protests, as we have seen in various countries in the region including Brazil, Mexico, and most recently Ecuador (although, in this case, the rise in price was not explicitly due to a transition to renewable sources but it was clearly related to “pricing the carbon right”, by the phasing out of fuel subsidies).
Inclusiveness and affordability, as well as a comprehensive understanding of winners, losers, and potential instruments for compensation and mitigation, will be critical components for a sustainable transition.
So, what is the future of energy in LAC? While hydropower will continue to be the largest energy source in the region for a while, exploiting its complementarities with other renewable energy sources will be key to ensure sustainability.
This change is facilitated by the fact that technological advances have allowed for a reduction in cost and improvement in efficiency of using these renewable sources (solar and wind, for example). Countries addressing diversification efforts are working to create the enabling policy and regulatory environments for other renewable sources – such as wind and solar – to flourish.
For example, recent auctions in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and Peru have helped to accelerate the deployment of thousands of megawatts of wind and solar energy in the region. Opportunities for investments are vast.
Promoting the use of clean energy in efficient ways is a critical objective in our fight against climate change. LAC has been at the forefront in the use of renewable sources, being a relatively low carbon emitter.
However, there are challenges ahead, with the regional demand for energy expected to keep growing as countries develop and poverty levels fall. Investments and changes in the policy environment will be needed to continue to transition towards sustainable renewable sources of energy. As Nick Stern stated recently: If we get it right, clean energy – and climate action in general – is the inclusive growth story of the 21st Century.
(Luis Felipe López-Calva is UN Assistant Secretary-General and UNDP Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean.)

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