Behind the last plate of food that you have had in front of you, perhaps there was a story of great interest.
It is not just a question of who ultimately provided that food, but a series of factors that go from its production to its arrival on the market.
And in each of these instances there can be a struggle between corporations or countries, says Juan José Borrell, author of the book “Geopolitics and Food: The Challenge of Food Security in the Face of International Competition for Natural Resources.”
“Food is a factor of power,” says this professor and geopolitical researcher at the Universidad del Rosario and the Universidad de la Defensa Nacional in Argentina, in an interview with BBC Mundo.
What follows is a summary of the dialogue with Borrell, who was an adviser to the Argentine delegation before the Committee on World Food Security of the FAO (the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) and participates in the Hay Festival of Cartagena that takes place between January 26 and 29 in that Colombian city:
How did food come to be a geopolitical issue?
Food was always important throughout civilization. Human beings have structured their existence around procuring food supply since prior to the Neolithic.
Now, we can say that they became a geopolitical issue after the Second World War with the great leap that the United States made internationally. Within the framework of the containment doctrine, humanitarian aid, the creation of organizations such as the UN, issues such as hunger or poverty, which revolve around food production, acquire international status.
In recent decades, we have experienced a renewed interest in a series of geopolitical phenomena that have once again put the issue of food supply on the great agenda of international politics. For example, the growth of the new economies, the competition for resources, the increase in the world population or the damage to ecosystems.
Is it a matter of the State or of corporations competing for their position in the market?
It is a very interesting question because it is generally approached from a public versus private dichotomy. And it is not like that.
For example, one of the largest food producers, marketers and consumers to emerge in the last 20 years is China. And we know that the Chinese communist regime, which plans the economic and foreign policy of Chinese corporations, has an activity that can be compared to any other of a private western company such as Cargill, Monsanto or Unilever.
Entities, corporations and international organizations are part of this competition. In the great powers, the private sector works hand in hand with the public sector.
Which are the best positioned countries in this aspect?
The one who has grown gargantuan in recent years is China, with an efficient expansion policy that has led it to procure new resources and improve the diet of its population. It has changed its eating habits and eats more animal protein, increasing the demand in the producing countries of the Southern Cone, for example.
At the level of food powers, the United States is the center of some of the largest corporations that have fueled the “green revolution” since the end of World War II. There is also the United Kingdom.
And in what was previously labeled as the Third World, we can mention Brazil and, on a more distant plane, Argentina, which has been subjected to intensive exploitation and monoculture, with a loss of biodiversity.
Coincidentally, in this production boom, structural poverty and food insecurity are increasing in Latin American countries. It is a paradox.
What is the objective of the countries in this? Guaranteeing one’s own food autonomy or gaining political and economic influence through food?
Both. Food is a power factor. Production, seeds, patents, inputs, trade, ports, fleet, prices or products on shelves in markets are an enormous source of power, influence capacity and wealth generation.
Powers compete for market space, earn income and have greater food autonomy.
Other countries serve to extract income, as is the case of Argentina. There is no strategic food policy that solves the problem of the population’s access to food.
It is not a given that, because a country has an intensive agricultural production system, its population automatically has its food needs satisfied.
According to a UN report last year, the world stepped back in its efforts to end hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition. Why is there more and more hunger when we have better technology to produce food?
There is a great myth: that thanks to technology, yields will increase and, therefore, more of the population will be able to access a greater supply of food.
Or, conversely: that there are famines where there is a lack of food or a surplus of population.
A Nobel Prize winner in Economics, the Indian Amartya Sen, shows that in many historical famines there was a food supply but the population had no way of acquiring it.
In fact, this intensive production system does not necessarily generate food; It generates a raw material that can also be used, for example, for animal feed or to make biofuels. Argentina is the world’s largest producer of soy biodiesel and the US makes ethanol from more than a third of its corn crop.
In other words, the problem of hunger is not necessarily due to the amount of food available…
Exact. It has to do, as the FAO suggests, with a question of access.
More than 85% of the world population access food from the market. If I do not have the financial means to obtain them, I will see my access violated.
What role does Latin America play on the global agri-food map?
What is called Latin America and the Caribbean represents a great paradox. Of the areas that were previously mentioned as being under development, our continent is the one with the fewest people suffering from chronic hunger. The latest reports from the World Bank established an average of around 55 million people.
But today Latin America produces food for 1.3 billion people and has the capacity to produce even more.
Latin America is a large food producer, but part of its population does not have access to that food supply. Latin America is where the least amount of hungry population should be in the world. It is perhaps the richest continent in resources, fertile land, drinking water, biodiversity…
So what is the problem?
It is political economy, a combination of extreme liberal politics and extreme socialist politics. Both have generated greater impoverishment, a decline in the middle-class sectors, a change in the type of diet.
We are seeing a phenomenon that was not seen half a century ago: people who manage to access the food supply do so with food of poorer nutritional quality. It is a phenomenon that is not only limited to poverty, but also to the middle classes.
The middle sectors that have resources, cars, good housing, cell phones, and well-being, due to bad eating habits or industrial products of poor nutritional quality, are overweight, morbidly obese, or problems of other characteristics.
Do you see China as an actor that gives Latin America greater freedom of action?
It is a thorny question. It is not a question of freedom. What China has been doing is winning markets. We have to understand that the type of relations that China also establishes are of an asymmetrical nature.
China becomes a large buyer and at the same time imposes conditions that leave the countries of the region less room for action.
Powers never establish relationships among equals with weaker, more vulnerable or peripheral countries.
Argentina has been considered the “breadbasket of the world,” but about four out of 10 people in the country live below the poverty line. How is this contradiction explained?
The label “breadbasket of the world” is a gross exaggeration; there was not one but several barns in the world. It has more to do with a national lyric from a past of greatness that is not like that.
Argentina, being a country rich in resources but with a deficient economic policy that is a factory for generating pauperism, is in no way going to be its own granary and even less can be the world’s granary.
Argentina has all the conditions to be a great food producer. Some estimate that it could produce for 300 million people. But, what is the point of producing for so many people if half of the children under 14 years of age in Argentina suffer from chronic hunger?
A generation is being deprived of the possibilities of development, growth and work due to a series of economic policies of the last decades that have generated greater impoverishment of the population, on the right and on the left.
This article is part of the Hay Festival of Cartagena, a meeting of writers and thinkers that takes place from January 26 to 29, 2023.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-64394716, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-01-31 12:10:06
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