The following excerpt is from an article published on September 9, 2009 by CNN.com. To view the entire article, please click here.
(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.
The United Nations’ World Food Programme says Guatemala has the fourth highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world and the highest in Latin America and the Caribbean. Chronic undernutrition affects about half of the nation’s children under the age of 5, the U.N. agency said.
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.”
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