The world's garden is starving: how did Latin America get here?

Shoppers at a food market in Riohacha, Colombia, in August 2022.Nicolo Filippo Rosso

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If tomorrow an international conflict were to close trade with Canada, as happened with Ukraine in March 2022 at the beginning of the war with Russia, Latin America would be, in the words of experts, "very stressed", due to the lack of essential foods.

Colombia, for example, would run out of its doughnuts, since more than 67% of the wheat consumed in this country is imported from that northern country. For Chile, this hypothetical contingency would give a certain blow in the supply of legumes such as lentils, an essential food to supply the lack of animal protein in many diets of the most impoverished households and that come almost entirely from Canada. It is estimated that only 25% of the legumes they consume are grown in this country.

The exercise can be repeated with many other producing countries, or as the journalist Martín Caparrós has baptized them in his book El Hambre, "food exporters". And the threat of turn can be changed by an environmental catastrophe or, not to be so pessimistic, by the jamming of a ship in a strategic maritime channel for trade as also happened in 2021. In the end, the result is the same: "We are witnessing an extremely fragile global food system," explains Felipe Roa-Clavijo, PhD in International Development at the University of Oxford and author of the book The politics of food provisioning in Colombia, who adds bluntly: "This system, in addition, is producing hunger, inequality and environmental unsustainability in the global south."

With the pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the vulnerability of the food system was exposed as never before. The closure of Ukraine's ports disabled exports from this country and distant countries ran out of basic foodstuffs. North Africa, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa were especially impacted by the lack of grains.

But we must not resort to hypothetical cases and extrapolate what has happened with Ukraine to show the ravages for Latin America of a system that has undermined food sovereignty and has made entire territories depend on others kilometers away, almost entirely, to be able to supply the necessary meals for their population.

According to the most recent report of the Food and Agriculture Agency of the United Nations (FAO) with figures for 2021, 34 million South Americans are hungry. "Within South America, in Peru, about half of the population experiences moderate or severe food insecurity. In Argentina, Ecuador and Suriname, it affects almost 37% of the population," the document says. But how in the pantry of the world, one of the regions that exports the most food, many people go to bed on an empty stomach?

A farmer in the surroundings of Puno (Peru).

"Latin America is a food exporting superpower, this mediated, in part, by the high production of soybeans and cereals produced in Brazil and Argentina so that Chinese cows have food. But at the same time, it is a region mired in deep food insecurity and worrying levels of malnutrition, as FAO has recently warned," emphasizes Roa-Clavijo.

Fewer farmers and more monocultures

The researcher Daniella Paola Gac, from the Department of Rural Management and Innovation of the Faculty of Agronomic Sciences, University of Chile, details the case of her country to shed light on this worrying paradox: "Our production of food for domestic consumption in Chile is almost entirely in the hands of small producers, but we have a very depressed social fabric in agricultural spaces. We do not have an active peasantry, but rather one that no longer wants to work in the fields and that, moreover, cannot access water, which is a private good. If there are fewer and fewer farmers, then our food security is increasingly vulnerable."

To the complex panorama, according to the academic, we must add millions of hectares of territory dedicated to monoculture tree plantations, fruit, grape and berry crops, hand in hand with an agribusiness that has sought a productive vocation for each territory and has monopolized it, without allowing the food grown to diversify, nor there are spaces for small producers.

"For example, cherry production is so important and has increased the value of the land to such a degree that it is unprofitable for small producers to insist on cultivating, so they choose to sell their plots to produce berries for the Chinese market. I know rural places where they do not have fresh food production for consumption, most of what we produce goes to export and we have to import what we need to eat at international market prices," explains Gac.

In Colombia, the dependence on wheat and corn that comes from Canada and the United States and that today makes products of the local basic basket more expensive in historical figures, was cooked under similar factors. "During World War II, with the Marshall Plan, the United States began to send wheat and cereals for the reconstruction of Europe. Faced with this contingency, Colombia runs out of wheat and cereals, and was forced to become self-sufficient in grains. You saw in the savannah crops of all colors. But that was short-lived. When this plan ends, all the surplus grain from the United States comes back in the form of charity to our countries and that undermined the grain economy," explains Felipe Roa-Clavijo.

With the economic opening in the 90s, the result of the Washington Consensus, this situation is extreme and, not having a good national offer, ends up favoring the United States. In 2021, as of July, more than five million tons of corn had been imported into Colombia, while local production barely exceeded 1.5 million tons.

A man arranges boxes of avocado for export, at a distributor in Peribán, Michoacán, on April 28. Juan José Estrada Serafín (Cuartoscuro)

The Latin American paradox

The promises of the so-called "green revolution", a model implemented between the 40s and 70s with the intention of satisfying the demand for food worldwide, did not calculate the social and environmental havoc it would entail (food systems today produce a third of greenhouse gases) and made it clear that an increase in agricultural productivity did not mean, necessarily, greater access to food. For its part, the fantasies widely created in the region with the signing of free trade agreements would highlight the ravages of a model that changed its focus from eliminating the hunger of the many, to thinking about increasing the incomes of a few.

"We arrived here because of a deregulated system, with very unclear rules of the game, very permissive on critical issues such as agrochemicals, transgenic seeds, deregulation of employment contracts, the entry of migrants without the basic minimums, and when this model is extreme, we reach a limit. We are hungry. I see localities in Chile where there is no access to fresh food, there is no water, and they prefer processed foods or subsidies that generate 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.

From various sectors, given the worrying paradox that Latin America is experiencing, a regional governance model is invoked that seeks to put on the table several sectors and social movements to put a clear limit on how much to export and how much to save for the feeding of the local population. "India has already done it, which is a large exporter of wheat, which before the evidence decided to reduce its exports of the cereal to be better supplied," says Roa-Clavijo.

Another of the routes that are analyzed from the academy is to work on territorial planning, so that countries can decide what vocation they give to certain territories and thus reduce tensions between export agribusiness, small growers and, for example, a new player that has entered the equation: energy projects that are being established in rural and potentially arable territories.

"It is urgent that the issue of food be taken as part of social security, just as access to water, education and health has been included. Social security is about food security. The State has to ensure access to food," Gac said.

"Political will is going to be critical if we want 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, which is the Public Procurement Law, which obliges all public entities that work or contract with the State, and that distribute food in military bases, schools, etc., to buy at least 30% of their food from small producers creating short marketing circuits. says Professor Roa-Clavijo, who concludes: "This way we are ensuring that these small producers will have someone to sell their products to and that the decisions of what is produced in a country are not only in the hands of external demands."