…
Brazil accounts for more than half of the world’s soybean trade. About 70% of that goes to China for use as animal feed. It is also the world’s second largest corn exporter, mostly for animal feed and biofuels.
Such exports have enriched Brazilian agribusiness, but they have undermined domestic food production. This is negatively affecting the food security of poorer communities. Between 2010 and 2022, soybean production increased by over 100% while rice production fell by 30%. The production of other basic food crops also fell.
Domestic food prices increased faster than general inflation, and low-income families have experienced food insecurity and have cut their food consumption.
…
Global supply chains are designed and operate as systems of production and trade that reward profitable exports, rather than combatting food insecurity. They often direct resources away from where they are needed to where they are profitable.
When right-to-food systems are established to tackle food insecurity, as in Belo Horizonte, they must cater to their local context. Policies such as subsidised food consumption and production, plus coordinated distribution are all ingredients required for tackling food insecurity.
This is a bit of a catch-22, isn’t it? And I’m saying this as someone that grew up poor and lived in communities where people lived on $1 a day. This isn’t the solution it thinks it is.
Poverty rates in urban areas mean that a lot of people who are food insecure live in places distantly removed from where food is grown. Even in Brazil. The crops spoken of here are popular specifically because they travel well, store well, are cheap to mill, and common commodities so a bag of rice from Thailand can go to Brazil or the US or Nigeria or France or India and everyone knows what to expect. But other than high value crops like flowers, cocoa or coffee, it’s exceedingly rare that large numbers of farmers grow crops that they don’t consume even a bit themselves or sell locally. Post-harvest waste products for most staple grains are their own market, and plenty of broken rice makes it to the market for sale as well. I’m not saying this is a perfect or good system, just that it hits a lot of very basic human desires that do, in fact, feed most people on earth already.
A right to food system is nice, but it’s expensive, especially as populations continue to urbanize. Many countries subsidize agriculture, focused on smallholder farming, because it’s a cheap way to get votes and funnel things like fertilizer contracts to your friends.
If this was such a good idea, the logical conclusion is to just make exports of edible products illegal and only allow imports. Flood your own markets with food that would be so cheap no one would bother farming it because the inputs alone would run you at a huge loss.