ROME – Nicaragua, under the regime led by Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, has withdrawn from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and ordered its staff to leave in a spat over hunger statistics in the poverty-stricken country, diplomatic sources say.

 Not only this but the regime has also ordered the that the representative office of the United Nations in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, has been told to close and leave the country. The measures arrived a few days after the FAO published a report claiming that 1,400,000 Nicaraguans are suffering from hunger, which is 19.6 percent of the total population, thus, around 1 in 5 people. This level of starvation places Nicaragua in second highest place in Central America after Honduras, where the number is 20.4 percent of people. 

 In the opinion of the Nicaraguan government, this should be treated as false information that was neither authorised nor proven. The government stated in a letter addressed to the director general of the FAO Qu Dongyu and presented to the Ambassador of the F.A.O’s seat in Rome, Monica Robelo, that ‘the attitude of the FAO is unacceptable, inadmissible and disrespectful. The consequence, that we are communicating pertains to the withdrawal of Nicaragua from this organisation and we are asking for the immediate closure of your representation and offices in Nicaragua.’

 The FAO is accused of both ‘interference’ and not having consulted any part of the government in the drafting of the report, which in the opinion of the government was published with ‘malicious intent for political purposes’ and with information and data ‘that was neither authorised, nor presented to our institutions, nor proven.’ In the report Nicaragua was one of 36 countries and territories ‘classed as countries with prolonged food crises’ together with Haiti, Honduras and Guatemala. 

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