The celebration of the 37th edition of the FAO Latin America and Caribbean Conference could not coincide with a more transcendent moment: adding to the food insecurity that the region was suffering is now the aggravation that will mean what some are calling certainties » the conflict in Eastern Europe.
It is true that the region is not directly among the areas most affected by the impossibility of Russia and Ukraine involved in a confrontation triggered by the influence of the geopolitics of the United States and NATO and in their Impact is exacerbated by the sanctions against them Moscow, for this year and next meet the agreed exports of grain, cereals and oilseeds, both of which are main suppliers.
Asia and the Pacific, sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the Middle East will be the regions that will suffer the worst, FAO warns. But Latin America and the Caribbean will also be affected.
Precisely preventing the spread of a threat such as hunger, which already exists in the South, is among the motivations of the FAO meeting – an ordinary appointment that does not address the current situation – and explains that one of the purposes of the meeting is to promote more sustainable Agricultural and food systems that are adapted to the conditions of the respective country and take into account climate change, transform the landscape and are resilient so that the human right to food is guaranteed for all citizens with the necessary food sovereignty.
When that is achieved, such moments will not be so hard for the South.
The landscape has always been difficult for poor nations, and Covid-19 has made it worse. While ECLAC warned of the fall in regional GDP at the end of 2020 (-8 percent, twice the global drop of 4.7 percent) and spoke of an “economic recession of historic proportions”, the FAO has been reporting since February that the The global food price had risen for the fourth straight month, hitting an all-time high of 140.7 points.
The number reflected a 24.1 percent increase compared to prices a year ago, when the UN body warned that 47.7 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean were affected by hunger in 2019 alone. It was the fifth consecutive year of rising hunger in the region. The situation was challenging even before the impact of the pandemic.
And the global context began to resemble a kind of pliers gripping poor nations and individuals: less economic growth and less purchasing power on the one hand, and more expensive food on the other, which would benefit exporters but hurt farming countries.
Below are the unjust inequalities created by the plundering of the South and an unjust economic and financial system that continues to benefit the North.
Perfect Storm
It is now difficult to avoid hunger, a concept that falls short of the long-awaited goal of food security, which the FAO says would mean that all people have physical, social and economic access at all times to adequate, safe food and nutritious food that Meet your daily energy needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.
The FAO’s new alert itself has been going around the world in the past few days. The projected drop of 25 million tons in the combined exports of wheat and corn from Ukraine and Russia and the loss of three million tons of oilseeds will hit their importers without exception and cause further losses in 2023, since it will also not be possible for this planting to guarantee.
The lack of fertilizer exports is also a concern, a line on which both Kyiv and Moscow are leaders.
Add to this the increase in fuel prices due to the punitive measures against Moscow – the cost of which is the most worrying and which remains at around a hundred dollars a barrel of crude oil – which further pushes up the food prices due on production and transport costs and drives up consequently inflation into a combination of conditions that analysts have dubbed “the perfect storm”.
According to the FAO, food prices could increase by 20 to 22 percent worldwide. It will certainly be worse in underdeveloped countries, where the palliative measures taken in some cases to avoid social upheaval may not be enough. Analysts are not ruling out new scenes of instability.
Despite the tensions, there is no shortage of experts showing that Latin America could seize the moment given its status as a net exporter of commodities and in some cases food.
War endangers food security. Photo: Los Angeles Times.
A few days ago, experts from the World Bank and US financial firms called for investments in the region, aware of the rise that minerals such as lithium, which are at the forefront of new technologies and are abundant in some Latin American countries, will have in the future. Market.
But the balance won’t compensate for countries in the region that are more import-dependent and resource-constrained, like El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, experts assured.
Manuel Otero, director general of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture, explained in an interview with the German agency DW that the Eastern Caribbean alone spends around 8 billion dollars on buying food every year.
With the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine still without concrete results; NATO, ignoring Russian demands to remove arms from its borders; and the announcement this week of possible new punitive measures by the United States and the European Union against Moscow, a return to stability does not seem close, let alone a return of things to the place they were – and it was no better – it will take a while.
It’s bad weather and it didn’t arrive, right after the calm. The worst thing is that, according to Socrates, it will rain behind the storm.