Latin America has to improve its food access for the hungry, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) regional representative for Latin America Carmen Rosa Villa said Thursday.
"The most important (issue) is that food must be accessible for everybody," Villa told Xinhua on the first day of the Inter-Parliamentarian Sessions on "The Right to Food Security" held in Panama City through Saturday.
Villa said governments had to set suitable policies to guarantee food distribution among people and to facilitate economic means for them to buy food.
"It is not that we do not have food in the world; what happens is that people do not have access to it," Villa said.
Meanwhile, General Secretary of the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino), Sonia Escudero, said Latin American countries had ratified international agreement to guarantee food as a human right.
"In this meeting we are going to analyze the advances in the region and the incorporation of these agreements to the internal law, and the norms of some countries to achieve its fulfillment," Escudero announced.
Escudero conceded that although Latin America was one of the planet's richest areas in terms of natural resources, there were more than 53 million people starving.
"Here we can see an inequality in distribution, which leads to the question of how the national budgets in our countries are being directed," Escudero said.
According to a recent report of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, some 1.02 billion people would suffer chronic hunger in 2009.
Escudero urged international organizations to promote international fair trade and eliminate subsidies to agriculture in the United States, the European Union and Japan.