Nicaragua announced its withdrawal from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on Tuesday and demanded the closure of its offices in Managua, rejecting a report stating that hunger increased in the Central American country. “FAO’s attitude is unacceptable, inadmissible, and disrespectful. Consequently, we announce Nicaragua’s withdrawal from this Organization and demand the immediate closure of its Representation and Offices in Nicaragua,” according to a statement signed by Foreign Minister Valdrack Jaentschke.
According to the report, the prevalence of undernourishment in Nicaragua increased from 17.8% in 2018 to 19.6% in 2023. In Latin America and the Caribbean, only Haiti (50.4%) and Honduras (20.4%) are worse off. The government rejected the report “for lacking objectivity, methodological rigor, containing false information, with interventionist and aggressive tendencies, and for being maliciously disseminated for political purposes.”
Additionally, it accuses FAO of publishing data “that was neither authorized nor consulted” with Nicaraguan institutions “nor validated” by the government. Pro-government media reported that the protest letter was delivered to FAO headquarters in Rome, which has not yet commented on the matter.
Nicaraguan economist in exile, Enrique Sáenz, considered that the FAO document’s results “are a result of the economic model imposed by the bicephalous dictatorship,” referring to President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo. “Almost 30% of Nicaraguans don’t earn enough for food (…) it’s logical then that hunger, malnutrition, and anemia are increasing,” he said on social network X.
Ortega, who governed in the 1980s after the Sandinista revolution’s triumph, has been in power since 2007 and is accused by opponents and critics of establishing an authoritarian regime. Since January 30, Ortega and Murillo, as president and “co-president,” consolidated their power through a constitutional reform that allows them to control all state powers and civil society.
Some 5,600 NGOs have had to cease operations in Nicaragua since the anti-government protests of 2018, which according to a United Nations report left more than 300 dead. The former guerrilla fighter considered these protests against his government as a Washington-backed coup attempt supported by international humanitarian organizations.
In early January, the leftist government announced the closure of NGO Save the Children International.
