By: José Félix Lafaurie Rivera
@jflafaurie
As if the first place among world cocaine producers were not enough, we are already on another podium, shared in Latin America with Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras and the Dominican Republic: that of the countries where more than a million people face acute food insecurity.
According to the annual report of the Global Network against Food Crises, 1.3 million Colombians and 2.9 million immigrants do not have access to minimum acceptable food, something that is not new, since the UN World Food Program , in February 2024, noted that there are 13 million people with moderate or severe food insecurity, and 1.6 million in the latter condition.
Why does Colombia, which could be the world‘s pantry, not even manage to feed its inhabitants? Ours is a country of simplifications, in which it can be stated that food should be grown on livestock lands, as if meat and milk were not, and the latter were not decisive in the fight against hunger; the country with 300,000 hectares of coca, but in which, according to FENALCE, in 2022 there were only 270,000 hectares of corn in the most productive semester.
It is the country that has spent decades in the ideologized debate of the causes, avoiding that of the solutions, which do not wait, because it is pure and simple hunger of millions of people, and if we want to achieve a Great National Agreement, then one against Hunger It would be a great advance.
The structural solution is to remove the countryside from abandonment to multiply the food supply, but in the meantime, this National Agreement is imposed that brings together all the links in the chains with the greatest impact on the basic basket, with a public policy that makes it possible. .
I am going to talk about what I know: farmers produce more than 7,000 million liters of milk annually, but the industry buys less than 50% and during 2023 it imported more than 72,000 tons. For these reasons, and due to climate phenomena, in 2023 the price for livestock farmers, mostly small, fell, without the same happening with the consumer price in the neighborhood store. As a result, consumption also fell, but not in the strata that do not look at the price, but in those that are part of the hunger.
We have proposed institutionalizing milk in ICBF and Public Force purchases, in which progress has been made, in addition to government-livestock-industry alliances, to produce low-price milk for popular sectors and, more recently, to substitute imports by spraying local milk market, and the Price Stabilization Fund administered by FEDEGÁN, has just approved $4,000 million to alleviate the dairy crisis.
Only public policy can make a National Agreement against Hunger possible, with the dairy chain and with those that can reduce food insecurity, because hunger, outside of the cinema…, is never a game.
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