UN FOOD FOR CHILDREN EXTENDED.

The United Nations World Food Program said it was extending until February an emergency program set up in May to feed thousands of Guatemalan children and their families left starving by drought and rising rural unemployment, reports Reuters (Sept. 12, 2002):

Zoraida Mesa, WFP head

for Latin America and the Caribbean, said she wanted to ensure child malnutrition did not return to last year's peak, when emaciated children poured into rural clinics during a food crisis that sent international alarm bells ringing. Child malnutrition, especially along the country's bone-dry eastern borders with Honduras and El Salvador, soared following successive years of reduced rainfall and low prices for coffee, the mainstay of Guatemala's rural economy. The agency estimates the program, which distributes special food to malnourished children through clinics across the country and also makes sure their families get enough to eat, has so far saved 7,000 infants from starving to death;

The WFP has distributed more than 3,127 metric tons of food to children and their families through the program, which was originally due to finish at the end of August. Mesa said that while the agency had taken the edge off the crisis and that rainfall had been more favorable this year, many in the poorest communities were still in dire need. Guatemalan Agriculture Minister Edin Barrientos said that while rain was more plentiful, the worst hit border areas, which are among the driest places in Central America, were still receiving much less rainfall than normal;

Much of Guatemala's peasant population scrapes a living from tiny rented cornfields and relies on temporary farm labor to survive when food runs out. The mountainous country of 12 million, wracked by a 1960-1996 civil war, has Latin America's highest level of chronic child malnutrition. Barrientos said acute malnutrition, measured by comparing height to weight, affects as many as 120,000 Guatemalan children;

Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua have also suffered food shortages and seen levels of malnourishment rise during the last year, although to a lesser extent. Mesa said the WFP was now monitoring Nicaragua more closely as levels of child hunger neared emergency levels due almost entirely to the low price of coffee, on which the region's poorest country is particularly reliant.

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Copyright 2002