With the panel on “Hunger in the World: Food Security Post-Pandemic”, the third and last day of the XIV International Congress on Human Rights, which has as its central theme the Protection of Human Rights in War and Post-Pandemic Scenarios, was opened by participants from three countries: Brazil, Bolivia and Mozambique.
Mediated by the Doctor in Education from the Federal University of São Carlos (SP), Paulo Sérgio Gomes, who is also a professor in the Master’s in Judicial Provision and Human Rights (UFT/ESMAT), the panel included the participation of Egidio Paulo Guame (Mozambique), Cláudia Pilar Aranibar (Bolivia) and Newton Narciso Gomes Júnior.
The three guests talked about the worsening food shortages in their countries and around the world with the Covid-19 pandemic, the levels of social inequality that grew with the global health crisis, and the reflections of this after its most severe period.
For Egidio Paulo Guambe, who has a PhD in Police Science from the University of Bordeaux (France), in Mozambique, a country that has cyclical crises due to disasters, governmental instability, and lives a serious conflict in the extreme north of the country, the pandemic has aggravated the food insecurity of the population that is forced to make forced displacements generated by several situations.
Acute crisis
“Mozambique has experienced acute food insecurity for a long time. The situation that moves people into the emergency phase is due to a combination of conflict, the declining economy exacerbated by political instability, extreme weather events, and the impacts of the pandemic. People are forcibly pushed into urban areas, which are not prepared to receive the growing demand. Fundamental rights are being violated all the time. Guarantees do not prevail and the State is not prepared to deal with these issues, with the population suffering the consequences of conflict dynamics, food prices, and the magnitude of the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, an ideal scenario to collapse the food system,” he said.
Social inequality
Claudia Pilar, a doctoral student in the Rural Development Program at UAM (Mexico), explained how the pandemic started in her country and how the richest people caused food shortages, which increased social inequality.
“The Covid-19 pandemic coincided with a period of social instability in Bolivia. We had a coup d’état of November 2019. The lack of legitimacy of the new rulers and their inabilities to deal with the disease contagious and take care of the population resulted in a major health crisis, which generated several other crises. There was a lack of medicine and protection equipments, a lack of the basics of the government actions. The risk of the people dying of starvation also became real. Wealthy people started to stock food, which caused shortages for the rest of the population and the government had no way of providing food security for the underprivileged sectors of the population. This adds up to social inequality in a country that was in the midst of government instability. Hunger is an indicator that fundamental rights are being left aside. In many constitutions the right to food is guaranteed, however, in practice this does not happen,” he explained.
Data
In his presentation, the doctor in Social Policy from UnB, Newton Narciso Gomes showed data and sources about the numbers of hunger in the world. "At least one billion people in the world don't have anything to eat, that is, go hungry, which clearly violates countless human rights and generates an abyss among social classes. This hunger has race, gender, and place. What needs to be rethought is our model of food production and access to food. There are 3.1 billion people who do not have access to healthy food, for example, due to income restrictions. We have an abundance of food, but lack income. We know that this is a political problem, not exclusive to some countries, as we have seen in the reports of colleagues. Brazil, for example, during the pandemic, had 14 million more Brazilians in a situation of severe food insecurity and we reached 33 million, this cannot be normalized", he highlighted.
