Taking a look at the keywords for this week’s reflection, I realized all these terms intersect in one capacity or another. For me, the most important thing, is food security and food sovereignty. I, along with a few others in this course, am taking a Latin American Literature and Environment course taught by Profe Alessandra Santos. In that class, we read a short introduction from author Eduardo Galeano from his well-known book Open Veins of Latin America. In it he makes many a connection to how little food security or sovereignty Latin America has had since the Spanish Conquest:

 

“Latin America is the region of open veins. Everything, from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into European— or later United States— capital, and as such has accumulated in distant centers of power. Everything: the soil, its fruits and its mineral-rich depths, the people and their capacity to work and to consume, natural resources and human resources.” (12) (If you have not read this book, I highly recommend! Galeano has a way of being poetically just with his writing)

 

This quote has always stuck with me because it perfectly encapsulates the degree of influence from outside powers in Latin America. Over the last 500 years we have seen an extreme amount of exploitation in Latin America. First from colonization and then multinational occupation of Latin American resources. In terms of food, indigenous communities have dealt with a loss of food autonomy or sovereignty at the hands of failing economies. Small farms and communities cannot compete with the large free market, which is predominantly controlled by high political powers like the United States. A lot of land in Latin America is used for cash-cropping or resource extraction that benefits outside influence more while leaving local communities to suffer. For example, the impacts of extractive resources like oil. Local communities, largely indigenous, deal with the long term environmental and health risks of oil extraction of their land while the transnational corporations make the big bucks, often free of environmental liability. Because of neoliberal policies and foreign interference, food self-sufficiency is at a all time low in Latin America.

 

A lot of things lead to an overwhelming lack of food security in Latin America: rising food prices, inaccessibility to supply, economical failures, lack of public and social funding, an unbalanced access to wealth, extreme poverty for the most marginalized, food deserts, unfair trade agreements, landlessness, environmental change and the global impact of GMO foods just to name a few things. Not to mention the current VERY REAL impact on how COVID has shaped food insecurity in Latin America.

 

There are resistances though to the rise of food insecurity in Latin America. People are protesting food cost inflations in Mexico as the prices for corn increases, which is a staple ingredient of the national diet. More and more communities are popping up working together to be self-sufficient, sustainable and to regain autonomy over their land and lives, like the Zapatista autonomous communities in Mexico.

 

 

Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Scribe Publications, 2009.