IFPRI: 2020 News & Views, February 1998
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2020VISION
News & Views

February 1998

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Coping with Urbanization in Latin America

coverThe population of Latin America is becoming increasingly urban, and with greater urbanization, greater problems of poverty and malnutrition in cities are appearing. IFPRI 2020 Vision Discussion Paper 23, Seguridad Alimentaria y Estrategias Sociales: Su Contribución a la Seguridad Nutricional en Areas Urbanas de América Latina (Food Security and Social Strategies: Their Contribution to Nutritional Security in Urban Areas of Latin America, available in Spanish only), details the complex health and sociodemographic changes that are accompanying increased urbanization. Author María Inés Sánchez- Griñan, research associate at the Institute of Nutritional Research (IIN) in Lima, Peru, also highlights the implications of these changes for the region’s food and nutrition policies and programs.

By 2020, 83 percent of the population of Latin America will live in urban areas, rising from 72 percent in 1990. Currently 40 percent of the urban population— about 115 million people—is poor. The author concludes that the region faces a number of serious challenges to urban nutritional security:

  • The diet of the urban poor is inadequate in terms of both quantity and quality.
  • Many nutrition programs fail to recognize that nutritional vulnerability varies among family members by age, sex, and physiological status, such as whether the woman is pregnant or lactating.
  • Chronic diseases and obesity in adults are often found in the same household as infectious diseases and undernutrition among children.
  • Health systems place too much emphasis on curative, rather than preventive, care and underserve the poor.
  • Many of the urban poor have limited access to sanitation and sewage services and so live in squalid environmental conditions.
  • Urban residents have little information about measures they can take to improve their health and nutrition.
The author suggests that achieving nutritional security in urban areas will require strengthening local capabilities and optimizing the use of resources available in households, communities, and institutions. She argues that actions should concentrate on the following areas: (1) promoting information and education on health, nutrition, and hygiene; (2) increasing local people’s participation in actions to improve their own health, food, and nutrition security; (3) mobilizing local financial, technical, and human resources to better design, implement, and sustain activities promoting food and nutrition security; and (4) strengthening systems for collecting information to improve the analysis, evaluation, and research in health and nutrition that is needed to develop effective, efficient programs.

By paying special attention to the interactions of malnutrition with health, and to the region’s new emphasis on involving the private sector and the community in providing for public welfare, this paper points the way to an effective response to urban-based threats to food and nutrition security.

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