{"id":2484,"date":"2016-03-29T09:52:28","date_gmt":"2016-03-29T17:52:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/?p=2484&lang=en"},"modified":"2016-03-29T09:52:28","modified_gmt":"2016-03-29T17:52:28","slug":"why-do-we-take-up-the-fight-against-hunger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/economy\/food-security\/why-do-we-take-up-the-fight-against-hunger\/?lang=en","title":{"rendered":"Why Do We Take Up the Fight Against Hunger?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By: Dr. Carmen Ben\u00edtez<\/p>\n

Coordinator of the medical program, Pop Wuj \/ Timmy Global Health \/ Todos Juntos (All Together)<\/p>\n

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Guatemala is a place of dualities: with great wealth, but also with a great quantity of people who must survive in poverty. Historically, hunger has been a problem that has affected generations of Guatemalans following the Spanish invasion 500 years ago. But hunger is not only a feeling but an aggregate of collective social-cultural traumas that have oppressed integral human development within Guatemala.<\/p>\n

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The stereotype of the Guatemalan physique is to be \u201cshort, fat, clever in conversation but not very intelligent.\u201d Now, is this normal? No, it is a representation of what oppression of the cruelest and most dehumanizing kind has made of Guatemalans, an oppression of chronic hunger. The Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean (ECLAC) calculates that in 2012, 70.3% of Guatemala\u2019s population lived in poverty (at an average of $900.00 per year) and, of this population, 13.3% lived in extreme<\/em> poverty (at about $400.00 per year) (Virginia, 2015).<\/p>\n

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Multidimensional poverty comprises and identifies multiple deprivations at both familial and individual levels in the areas of health, education, and standard of living (Feres & Mancero, 2001). The Ministry of Health and the Secretary of Food and Nutritional Security (la Secretaria de Seguridad Alimentaria y Nutricional [SESAN]) confirmed that, in 2015, 49.8% of Guatemalan children suffered from chronic malnutrition (low height for their age), and between 1.3 to 3.6% suffered from acute malnutrition (low weight for their height). The ministry of health offers programs for the latter (acute malnutrition), but it has not invested in the first problem, the creator of much of the stagnation in social and human development. That is, ours remains a system that depends upon treatment, not prevention.<\/p>\n

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Perhaps we can satisfy hunger, but in a context where the population has been limited to the procurement of healthy, functional food for real nutrition, we have seen ourselves obligated to sate ourselves with a cheap, incomplete diet. What\u2019s more, this diet is totally manipulated by the industry that has damaged the nutritional ideal for the growth and normal development of an infant. Therefore, poverty prevents eight of ten indigenous children from obtaining the nutrients necessary for cognitive and psychomotor development. This leaves them with short stature, which in turn puts their lives in danger, causing an increase in the risk of falling ill and\/or becoming infected more easily during their first 1,000 days. Even more tragically, these first 1,000 days are crucial for the absorption of micronutrients necessary for normal brain development (zinc, phosphorus, iodine, etc.) (Duskin, Papalia, & Wendkos, 2009). Added to this is the fact that the first five years of life are the period during which the most neural connections are created and brain elasticity is most evident.<\/p>\n

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So what are the long-term effects of chronic malnutrition?<\/p>\n