Shoppers at a food market in Riohacha, Colombia, August 2022. Nicolo Filippo Rosso
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Should an international conflict tomorrow disrupt trade with Canada, as happened with Ukraine in March 2022 at the start of the war with Russia, experts say Latin America would be “very stressed” due to shortages of essential food.
Colombia, for example, would run out of its blends as more than 67% of the wheat consumed in this country is imported from this northern country. For Chile, this hypothetical case would spell some setback for supplies of legumes like lentils, a vital food that fills the lack of animal protein in many diets of the poorest households and comes almost exclusively from Canada. It is estimated that only 25% of the legumes they eat are grown in this country.
The exercise can be repeated with many other producing countries, or as journalist Martín Caparrós has dubbed them “food exporters” in his book El Hambre. And the threat of the day can be changed by an environmental catastrophe or, to be less pessimistic, by a ship getting stuck in a strategic sea channel for trade, as happened in 2021. In the end, the result is the same: “We took care of an extremely fragile global food system,” explains Felipe Roa-Clavijo, PhD in International Development at the University of Oxford and author of The Politics of Food Provisioning in Colombia, and adds emphatically added: “This system also produces hunger, inequality and ecological unsustainability in the Global South”.
With the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the vulnerability of the food system has been exposed like never before. The closure of Ukrainian ports has hampered Ukrainian exports and far away countries have been left without basic necessities. North Africa, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa were particularly hard hit by the grain shortage.
However, it is not necessary to resort to hypothetical cases and extrapolate events in Ukraine to show the devastating consequences for Latin America of a system that has undermined food sovereignty and made entire areas dependent on others miles away, almost entirely, in are able to provide the population with the necessary meals.
According to the latest United Nations Food and Agriculture Administration (FAO) report with figures for 2021, 34 million South Americans are starving. “In South America, in Peru, about half the population is moderately or severely food insecure. In Argentina, Ecuador and Suriname, it affects almost 37% of the population,” the document said. But in the pantry of the world, one of the regions that exports the most food, how do many people go to bed on empty stomachs?
A farmer near Puno (Peru).
“Latin America is a food export superpower, due in part to high production of soybeans and grains grown in Brazil and Argentina to feed Chinese cows. At the same time, however, the region faces severe food insecurity and worrying levels of malnutrition, as the FAO recently warned,” stresses Roa-Clavijo.
Fewer farmers and more monocultures
Researcher Daniella Paola Gac, from the Department of Rural Management and Innovation, Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, University of Chile, details her country’s case to shed light on this worrying paradox: “Our production of food for domestic consumption in Chile.” It lies almost entirely in the hands of small producers, but we have a very depressed social fabric in the agricultural spaces, we do not have an active peasantry, but one that no longer wants to work in the fields and, moreover, does not have access to water, the one is private good. When there are fewer and fewer farmers, our food security becomes increasingly vulnerable.”
To the complex panorama, according to the scientist, we must add millions of hectares of land dedicated to forestry, fruit, grape and berry monocultures, hand in hand with an agribusiness that has sought a productive vocation for each area and has monopolized it, without doing it This allows for diversification of the food grown and there is also no room for small-scale producers.
“For example, the production of cherries is so important and the value of the land has risen so much that it is unprofitable for small producers to insist on growing them, which is why they choose to sell their plots to grow berries for the Chinese .” Market. . I know rural areas where there is no fresh food production for consumption, most of what we produce is for export and we have to import what we eat at international market prices,” explains Gac.
In Colombia, similar factors caused the dependency on wheat and corn, which originated in Canada and the USA and today, in historical numbers, produce from the local basic basket is more expensive. “During World War II, the United States began the Marshall Plan to send wheat and corn to help rebuild Europe. Given this opportunity, Colombia is without wheat and grain and has been forced to become self-sufficient in grain. Crops of all colors were seen in the savannah. But that only lasted for a very short time. When this plan ends, all surplus grains in the United States will return to our countries in the form of charities, undermining the grain economy,” explains Felipe Roa-Clavijo.
With the opening of the economy in the 1990s, which was the result of the Washington Consensus, this situation became extreme and, in the absence of good national supplies, ultimately favored the United States. In 2021, more than five million tons of corn were imported to Colombia, according to July figures, while local production topped just under 1.5 million tons.
A man stores crates of avocados for export at a trader in Peribán, Michoacán state, April 28. Juan José Estrada Serafín (Cuartoscuro)
The Latin American Paradox
The promises of the so-called “Green Revolution,” a model implemented between the 1940s and 1970s with the goal of meeting the world’s food needs, failed to calculate the social and environmental damage it would cause (today’s Food systems produce one… one-third of greenhouse gases) and made it clear that increasing agricultural productivity does not necessarily mean better access to food. For their part, fantasies of signing free trade agreements, widespread in the region, would illustrate the devastating effects of a model that shifted its focus from eradicating hunger for the many to considerations of raising the incomes of a few.
“We came here because of a deregulated system, with very unclear rules of the game, very permissive on critical issues such as pesticides, transgenic seeds, deregulation of labor contracts, entry of migrants without the basic minimum requirements and because this model is extreme , we achieve one Border. We are hungry. “I see places in Chile where there is no access to fresh food, there is no water, and they prefer processed foods or subsidies that lead to more malnutrition and poverty,” says Gac, author of the study Food Sovereignty in Latin America: Crossed views on”. a concept in action and in dispute.
A regional governance model is being drawn from across sectors in the face of the worrying paradox that Latin America is experiencing, aiming to bring different sectors and social movements to the table to establish a clear boundary on how much is exported and how much is saved intended to feed the population local population. “India, a major wheat exporter, has already done so and, given the evidence, decided to reduce its grain exports to be better supplied,” says Roa-Clavijo.
Another avenue analyzed by the Academy is to work on territorial planning so that countries can decide which vocation to allocate to certain areas and thus the tensions between the export agribusiness, small farmers and, for example, a new actor that has done so , can reduce Energy projects in rural and potentially cultivable areas came into play.
“There is an urgent need to consider nutrition as part of social security, along with access to water, education and health. Social security is related to food security. The state must ensure access to food,” says Gac.
“Political will will be crucial if we are to change these numbers. Some public policy bets show us possible paths. In Colombia, for example, there is a law that seems revolutionary to me, to say the least, namely the Law on Public Procurement, which obliges all public bodies that collaborate or contract with the state and distribute food in military bases and schools , etc. to buy at least 30% of their food from small producers, resulting in short marketing channels,” says Professor Roa-Clavijo, who concludes: “This is how we make sure that these small producers have someone to sell their products.” and that the decisions about what is produced in a country do not remain solely in the hands of external demands.”