Latin America and the Caribbean produce the most food in the world, but millions of people there are hungry. This is because so many people live in poverty that they can’t afford to buy enough food to feed themselves or their families. In fact, 222 million people in Latin America alone live in poverty—that’s 42.9 percent of the region’s population.

In every Latin American country, except for Costa Rica and Haiti, people of indigenous or African descent are more likely to live in situations of poverty, as is reflected in this chart:

Liklihood to live in poverty
Panama	Nicaragua	Ecuador
5.9 times more likely	2.3 times more likely	2.1 times more likely

Inequality in the region has many causes, including that these populations receive very little cultural recognition and have very little access to decision-making positions.

Causes of Inequality

Some other factors leading to this inequality and heightened poverty include:

• Progressive loss of lands for people of indigenous and African descent
• Breakdown of community-based economies
• Less access to educational and health care services
• Ethnic and racial prejudice
• Less pay for comparable work than the rest of the population

Fact File

More than 2.5 million Nicaraguans, or 46 percent of the population, are living in poverty.

In Ecuador, an indigenous baby is more than twice as likely to die before the age of five than a non-indigenous baby. Latin America has been one of the main exporters of natural resources to the world over the last two centuries, but despite this, the average person living in the region survives through subsistence farming. That’s when families grow just enough food to feed themselves, and perhaps sell some leftovers in the market. Because many indigenous people live in the mountains, where it is hard to grow food, some families are struggling to get by. A recent study showed almost 50 million rural Latin American farmers are living in extreme poverty and these numbers are rising quickly.