Lima (AFP) – With her son carried on her back, Ana Cristina Sucño waits with two plastic bowls for the noodles with chicken giblets that they will have for lunch in a common pot for residents in a neighborhood in Lima. It’s noon and that will be the only meal of her day.
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Chicken legs, spines and blood have become the main food alternative for the families that participate in the Corazón de Jesús communal pot in a country considered by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as the greatest food insecurity in South America.
The austere and barely nutritious menu costs 0.37 cents of a dollar, in the same city where the delights of the renowned chefs Gastón Acurio or Virgilio Martínez, from the Central de Lima restaurant, number one in the world of gastronomy according to the British Best Restaurants classification, They cost $330 per diner.
“Eating meat is a luxury, I don’t buy meat. What I buy is chicken offal,” Sucño, a 23-year-old mother, tells AFP, carrying her one-year-old son wrapped in an Andean blanket while waiting in line to receive their daily ration of food.
“The government should be concerned about generating more jobs with better salaries, so one will not suffer so much in terms of food,” he adds.
The common pot is located at the top of a hill in the populous district of Villa María del Triunfo, with 459,000 inhabitants. To access it you have to travel a muddy and winding road, covered by fog and drizzle.
“It is an absolute paradox that a country that produces food, with enormous biodiversity, cannot consume it because it is expensive. It is a tragedy to have such gastronomic wealth and not be able to access the food that Peruvian soil provides,” says the representative of FAO in Peru, Mariana Escobar.
The pots multiply
The common pot became one of the faces of the pandemic due to the increase in poverty due to the severe quarantines that closed the Peruvian economy, leaving thousands unemployed. Some 2,500 communal dining organizations have emerged in Lima alone, serving a quarter of a million families since 2020.
“Our children are not nourished. We do not buy offal in large quantities, the money is not enough,” laments Rosa Huachaca, 39 years old and mother of three children aged 3 months, 5 and 18 years.
Born in the Andean region of Apurimac, Huachaca indicated that children and pregnant mothers in the neighborhood suffer from malnutrition and anemia due to low consumption of iron and proteins such as meat.
“In Peru sometimes you can’t buy food and that’s why children are living in malnutrition,” says Wendy Andrade, a 30-year-old mother with two children, ages 9 and 3.
The Corazón de Jesús communal pot operates in a wooden house with a tin roof, where 90 daily portions are prepared for 23 families. There every morning two women light the stove and throw onions, chicken legs and noodles into a pot blackened by the soot of the wood.
“Gloomy outlook”
About five kilometers from the dusty and densely populated hills where the communal pots are organized, the FAO representative reiterates the alert that the organization launched in 2022 when it warned that “Peru had become the most food insecure country in South America.”
“The outlook is very complex, gloomy, in a country that has a slowing economy and that will grow little this year. The El Niño phenomenon adds another reason why the situation in Peru is a worrying case in the region,” he points out to the AFP Escobar, of Colombian nationality.
According to the report, of the 33 million inhabitants in the country, 16.6 million Peruvians are in moderate and severe food insecurity, a figure that doubles the eight million in that condition in 2019.
Poverty went from 20% in 2019 to 30% in 2020, dropped to 25.9% in 2021 but rose to 27.5% in 2022, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INEI), which put the number at 9.18 million. poor.
The FAO measures food insecurity on a scale that goes from mild to severe, using variables such as lack of income to obtain food, not having access to three meals a day, undernourishment, anemia, obesity or overweight, among other factors.
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