Interview: Indigenous, Afro-Caribbean communities key to reducing poverty in LatAm: FAO expert

Indigenous people are the key to the fight against hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean as they are often neglected by national development strategies, an expert of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said Tuesday.

"There is a neglect of communities who have been disturbed. It may seem troublesome but we must discuss this matter openly," John Deep Ford, the FAO's coordinator for the Caribbean, told Xinhua in an interview.

Haiti, Guatemala and Bolivia are three countries in Latin America and the Caribbean with the highest level of poor people and most of the poor people are indigenous or Afro-Caribbean, who have few opportunities to break the cycle of poverty, Ford said on the sidelines of a four-day regional conference of the UN agency that started on Monday.

Take Haiti for example, Ford said, the country contains 6 million of the 7 million poorest people in the Caribbean and the vast majority of them are of African descent.

Ford warned that the current level of poverty makes Latin America and the Caribbean one of the most unequal regions in the world.

"If we do not commit to reducing inequality, we will not pull people out of poverty. If we do not make this commitment and accept the neglect that had taken place, consciously or not, we will not pull people out of poverty," he said.

According to the United Nations, Latin America and the Caribbean was the first region in the world to meet the hunger reduction goals set by the Millennium Development Goals.

Statistics show a total of 31.7 million people in the region have been taken out of hunger since 1990.

However, the world body has also said the region is still facing huge challenges, including having about 34 million hunger-stricken people, of whom 27 million live in extreme poverty.

For decades, he explained, countries in the region had implemented policies to reduce poverty but those measures had not received support needed at the government level.

The expert said Haiti mirrors the plight of poorer indigenous communities in Central America.

"We must recognize that these two communities (indigenous and Afro-Caribbean) are critical to reducing the number of people in poverty," he said.

"We must be committed to inclusive development. If we focus on inclusion and innovation, we can together break the cycle of poverty which marks this region," he noted.

Food security and other key topics of agriculture top the agenda of the FAO's ongoing meeting attended by agriculture, environment and social development ministers from 33 countries in the region. Endi