Hunger in the Dominican Republic, Poor total almost a third of DR population

DR1.com - Although the Central Bank is saying that poverty has been reduced by 1.6% according to estimates contained in a household income study based on the "Work Force Survey" conducted in April 2011 by demographer Antonio Morillo Perez, a specialist in poverty, the reality remains that there are three million poor people in the country.

The study found that poverty affects 31.6% of the population now versus 33.2% back in 2010. The poorest of the poor, the indigent, make up 8.8% of the population, and although the percentage has been going down since 2005, according to the Ministry of Economy, Planning and Development, the parameters of the study were not revealed.

What was revealed by the study was the huge imbalance of income between the highest 20% and the lowest. The highest group receives 14.2 times as much income as the poorest 20% on average. However, the figure in 2000 was 19.4 times as much, so this might be a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

The figures surrounding food and nutrition in the Dominican Republic place the country alongside Bolivia and Guatemala as "serious", with Haiti, our neighbor, listed as "alarming." This is the conclusion of a report contained in the Global Index of Hunger (GIH), published by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and reported in today's Listin Diario. The growing demand for bio-fuels, climate change and the growing financial activities in food futures on commodity markets are the principal causes of high food prices and therefore the cause of hunger in the world. Together with these three main factors there is a lack of grain reserves, a concentration of the export markets in just a few countries and a lack of adequate information on food production, the levels of reserves and predictions of future prices. One notable case was Nicaragua, one of only 15 countries in the world that has managed to reduce hunger.

See the report here: www.ifpri.org/publication/2011-global-hunger-index

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