Global Pulse Blog

Sisters Vidalia, left, and Maribel Agustin, who suffer from malnutrition, sit at a shelter in Guatemala in August.

From CNN:

Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom has declared a state of national calamity because so many citizens do not have food or proper nutrition.

Speaking in a nationally televised address late Tuesday, Colom said his declaration will make it easier to get food to the thousands of Guatemalan families who are in dire need.

“This will help us access resources from the international community that are generously offered for this type of situation and to mobilize national resources more rapidly,” he said.

This is horrible, though not unexpected, news. The United Nations Food Program has Guatemala as the country with the fourth highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world. Of course, such problems did not just worsen overnight.

Colom said the nation’s food problems are the result of a drought this year, global warming and the effects of the international economic crisis. He also cited the Central American nation’s “history of unfairness that has made Guatemala live since long ago with high and shameful poverty levels, extreme poverty and undernutrition.”

[...] “This is the cause of the food and nutritional crisis that this country is going through,” Colom said. “There is food. What we don’t have are the financial means so that those who are affected can buy the available food. … Let’s not wait until we have a famine to act.”

The natural resources, at least thus far, are there, but ultimately, it is a financial problem. Years of neglect, shock capitalism, and the never-ending spiral of debt have taken its toll, and the current economic crisis has stripped all false illusions of prosperity. If the government cannot afford the basics, how much better do you think regular people are doing?