Serious or moderate food insecurity in Colombia decreased in 2023 compared to 2022, but continues to affect more than a quarter of the country’s households, while serious food insecurity has hardly changed and continues to affect 4.8% of households, according to data published this Friday by the Colombian Government and the FAO.

The director of the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), Piedad Urdinola, revealed at a press conference that severe or moderate food insecurity “fell from 28.1% to 26.1%” in 2023, affecting more than 14 million people, while regretting that in severe food insecurity the “variations are very slight,” since it has barely gone from 4.9% of households to 4.8%.

Where severe or moderate food insecurity decreased the most was in the municipal capitals of Colombia (from 26.8% to 24.7%), while in dispersed populated and rural centers the decrease was more moderate (from 32.5% to 31.2%).

In addition, the results show that in the departments with the worst records of hunger or poverty, La Guajira and Chocó, food insecurity has had great decreases, even reaching a reduction of 24.3 percentage points in the Chocó jungle, where severe or moderate food insecurity went from affecting 43.2% of households to 18.9%.

“The report does not present a very encouraging picture for the goal of eradicating hunger by 2030,” admitted the representative of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Colombia, Agustín Zimmermann, although he admitted that there is “political will” and means to reverse the situation.

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“Colombia undoubtedly has all the natural resources, the productive capacity, the institutionality, and the human resources to advance this goal,” said the Argentine who emphasized that “the vision of a Colombia without hunger and without malnutrition is within reach.”

The data come from the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) developed by the FAO, published this Friday for the second year in Colombia, which is the largest in Latin America, carried out in more than 86,000 Colombian households.

The data on this scale show results similar to those presented by the World Food Program (WFP) in February that revealed that food insecurity was reduced in 2023 from 30% to 25%, with 13 million people still in moderate or severe food insecurity.

The data, which were included in the National Quality of Life Survey (ECV) of the DANE, show that food insecurity is greater where life situations are most vulnerable, such as when it comes to single-parent households, made up of migrants, where there is no work or with many family members or young children.

Thus, in 2023, severe or severe food insecurity affected 40.7% of households led by a black, Afro, raizal or palenquera person, and 46.3% of indigenous people.

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The situation in households led by a Venezuelan migrant is also particularly delicate, since “in households of international migrants in Venezuela, that prevalence goes to 41.6% so we see a very important gap that is replicated in regions,” according to Urdinola, and that contrasts with the 25.4% prevalence in households without migrants.

On the other hand, in households with more than five members, severe or moderate food insecurity reached 37.9% in 2023, while in single parents, food insecurity stood at 31.4%.

Food insecurity affected 32.8% of households with at least one child under 5 years of age, although “we are seeing an improvement from one year to the next,” said the director of DANE, pointing out that in 2022 it was 36.5%.