Hunger and rural poverty in Central America. Lessons learned from SPFS programs

Abstract

Two of the main indicators of Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG2: “Zero Hunger”) are undernourishment (measures the adequacy of per–capita energy consumption) and chronic child undernutrition (measures stunting). The reality in Central America for these vari-ables is worrisome: except in Costa Rica, the data are well above the average for Latin America and the Caribbean (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO; 2018).
The main problem is not related to food availability, since the per capita supply in all the countries of the isthmus exceeds the nutritional requirements, in caloric terms, estimated in the Basic Food Baskets (BFB) that determine the extreme poverty lines (Carrazón and Gallardo; 2018). The causes of hunger must be sought, mainly, on the side of access to food.
And economic access to food is determined by the price of food and, above all, by the monetary income to acquire it. Therefore, although hunger and poverty are not the same thing, they are always linked: there is a strong correlation between the two.
As with hunger, poverty in Central America is also much higher than the average for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), except in Costa Rica and Panama. And for both hunger and poverty, the situation worsens in rural areas, even in these two more developed countries.
The majority of the population no longer lives in rural areas, either in Central Amer-ica or in LAC as a whole. But the majority of the poor are still in the countryside. In Central America, 36% of the inhabitants reside in rural areas, but these same areas are home to 46% of all those suffering from poverty (Carrazón and Gallardo, 2018).
To understand the rural situation in the isthmus, it should be noted that the ma-jority of these rural poor are small–scale producers, whose farm management is based on family labor. This is the so–called family agriculture (Baumeister; 2004; Berdegué and Schejtman; 2007), made up of two million families (12.4 million people (Baumeister; 2010).
In this context of hunger and rural poverty, what can be done through international cooperation in Central America?
Within the framework of the 1996 World Food Summit, FAO launched the Special Programs for Food Security (SPFS) in more than 70 countries. The premise on which they were based, according to FAO itself, was that the productivity of small farmers in developing countries could be signifi-cantly increased through the introduction of some relatively simple, inexpensive and sustainable technological changes.
In Central America, for 15 years (1999–2014), the four poorest countries (Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador) developed SPFS programs with technical support from FAO and funding from the respective Ministries of Agriculture and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID).
This article summarizes the main achieve-ments documented by the protagonists of the programs in different evaluations (FAO–SPFS; 2014), but ordered with an-other logic, by levels of action: i) micro lev-el: families, organizations, communities; ii) meso level: municipalities, sustainable territories; iii) macro level: public policy dialogue and management.
It is, therefore, a descriptive document of the actions of a broad program (in time and space of execution) of international coop-eration, based on the literature generated by the projects themselves. It is not intended to provide a detailed causal analysis of poverty in the isthmus, nor its evolution in relation to society itself or the productive structure. The novel contribution of this article is reflected in the aforementioned descriptive logic of the achievements, and in the defense of the use of all possible conceptual tools: Food Security and Rural Development are not separate academic concepts, they are realities and aspirations that should be worked on simultaneously in Central America.
The broad level of impact of the SPFS programs allowed them to follow the same path of conceptual changes that were manifested in Central America in the same years, and the evolution of the programs was a reflection of the evolution of Food Security and Rural Development in the field of development cooperation in the isthmus. The SPFS programs were not external observers, but learned to read the context, to adapt, and were able to influence other cooperation programs and the formulation of public policies.
This paper presents three main conclusions in the opinion of the authors, not the pro-ject executors. The first conclusion refers to the instruments of cooperation, to the design of the projects. The SPFS were par-adoxical: they were conceived as “pilots” but achieved their greatest contributions outside the field activities that were later intended to be scalable.
The second reflection is of interest to donor agencies, in the sense that external support for public policy dialogue, regardless of the topic, requires two fundamental ele-ments that are not always easy to provide simultaneously: time and flexibility.
And the third conclusion could be of more interest to government decision–makers, to public policy makers who want to address rural poverty in Central America: it is not so much a debate on the approach or concept to be worked on (Food Security versus Rural Development?; Is the fight against hunger a priority with respect to poverty reduction?), but a debate on how to use all the available instruments and analyses simultaneously.