How to enhance Latin America’s agri-food safety in a altering world

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New Atlanticist

June 5, 2025 • 12:02 pm ET

How to enhance Latin America’s agri-food safety in a altering world

By
Peter Engelke and Ginger Matchett

Trade, innovation, and the change of individuals and concepts are elementary elements of at the moment’s international meals safety system. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has noticed that a fifth of all energy which might be consumed on the planet cross at the very least one border. The agriculturally wealthy Western Hemisphere performs a crucial position on this international system. The United States, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and Argentina are among the many world’s largest staple crop producers and exporters. Brazil and the United States, for instance, rank first or second globally in exports by quantity of corn, soybeans, and rice, whereas Canada is the world’s fourth largest wheat exporter. Other nations within the Americas are necessary producers of espresso, sugarcane, bananas, and different vegetables and fruit. Five of the world’s prime ten banana exporters, for instance, are in South and Central America, as are three of the world’s prime 5 espresso exporters. 

However, the uninterrupted circulate of commerce within the meals and agriculture that feeds humanity just isn’t assured. The hemisphere’s leaders should assume strategically and determine alternatives to strengthen the area’s agri-food structure. 

The Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security’s Food Security: Strategic Alignment within the Americas challenge, performed in partnership with The Mosaic Company, assesses the Western Hemisphere’s meals safety in a altering strategic panorama. The challenge attracts upon views from throughout the Americas to know the challenges and alternatives going through regional and international agri-food techniques.

On April 10, the Scowcroft Center’s GeoStrategy Initiative hosted the challenge’s first non-public roundtable, bringing collectively dozens of main specialists from throughout the Americas from an array of analysis establishments, universities, the agri-food business, authorities, and multilateral establishments. The dialogue targeted on meals safety in Latin America, highlighting the significance of commerce, geopolitics, local weather change, innovation, and funding tendencies.

A season of change

The Americas are navigating novel geopolitical and geoeconomic situations, with uncertainties launched by proposed new tariffs that the United States has positioned (and may but place) on its hemispheric neighbors. A vital concern entails the affect that such tariffs might have on established agri-food commerce relationships throughout the hemisphere. Should the United States, Canada, or Mexico implement excessive tariffs on agri-food merchandise, one potential consequence could possibly be giant reductions within the ranges of agri-food commerce across the globe and within the Americas. At the identical time, some South and Central American nations may profit from enhanced exports to a number of of these three nations. 

There are simply as many, if no more, alternatives all through the area to reinforce meals safety. Intraregional commerce in agri-food merchandise—together with processed items similar to cereals, meals residues, meats, fat and oils, meals preparations, oilseeds, drinks, and dairy merchandise—gives a major alternative for enhanced cooperation within the Americas. Studies by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Inter-American Development Bank have projected that Latin America’s intraregional agricultural market has room to develop; they recognized some sixty-seven agri-food merchandise with potential for development sooner or later, forecasting market development of some $3 billion (from $21.6 billion to $24.7 billion). Latin America’s subregions have substantial capability to develop agri-food change with each other, thereby enhancing competitiveness in international markets. For instance, whereas 60 % of South America’s meals imports come from intraregional commerce in Latin American and Caribbean markets, in Mexico and Central America, that determine is just 20 %.

Policymakers in Latin America ought to facilitate intraregional commerce by means of regional commerce agreements that, amongst different issues, dismantle the advanced algorithm at present hindering integration. Greater funding in ports, rail, and roads can create extra bodily connectivity. And digital connectivity, which may ease exchanges of all sorts, similar to commerce logistics, ought to be enhanced as nicely. As meals safety will depend upon the rise of crop productiveness within the coming years, there are alternatives to deepen intraregional partnerships on agri-food sciences, which can assist sustainable manufacturing development in these nations.

A altering local weather

Roundtable individuals additionally confused how the altering local weather will affect agriculture in Latin America. The planet’s ongoing warming (above 1.5 levels Celsius in contrast with pre-industrial ranges) poses severe challenges to Latin American agriculture. Strategies to beat local weather impacts ought to embody a give attention to each adaptation and mitigation to make sure that the area’s agriculture stays viable. Policymakers ought to focus consideration on learn how to make smallholder farmers extra resilient given the disproportionately harsh local weather impacts they face. One technique is to supply low-interest loans and entry to coaching and different providers to smallholder farmers. Such actions can enhance entry to land, fertilizers, seeds, and instruments whereas boosting incentives to implement modern agriculture know-how, in the end growing yields and market entry.

Roundtable individuals additionally noticed that on- and off-farm innovation performs an necessary position in shaping Latin America’s agri-food sector, stressing the criticality of rising applied sciences in a extra sustainable and resilient meals system. The central problem, they asserted, entails crafting the methods wanted to finance and efficiently scale new techniques given their expense. Improvements in information assortment and evaluation improve understanding of how local weather change is contributing to pest outbreaks and crop illnesses. Alternative chemical processes for creating fertilizers and seed certification applications may enhance soil and plant resiliency. The adoption of low-carbon agriculture fashions, backed with authorities assist inside streamlined and science-based regulatory processes, might additional align agricultural coverage with local weather adaptation and mitigation targets.

These reforms are wanted partly as a result of Latin America continues to face issues associated to meals insecurity. While the area has seen declining starvation and meals insecurity in recent times, partly resulting from investments in social safety techniques, 41 million individuals throughout the area had been nonetheless affected by starvation final yr. Even in main food-producing nations similar to Brazil and Argentina, which dominate South American manufacturing and exports of soybeans, wheat, corn, and rice, lower-income populations proceed to battle to realize entry to adequate quantities of wholesome meals. 

To overcome meals insecurity whereas making certain that Latin America’s agri-food techniques are resilient and interconnected, the area’s farmers, farming associations, agri-food companies and processors, provide distributors, and policymakers should cooperate with new, modern methods. Agri-food frameworks which might be predictable, clear, and based mostly on guidelines and science will assist cement the area as economically diversified, local weather adaptive, and modern. The Americas should benefit from its strengths within the agri-food area for preeminence on the worldwide stage.

Peter Engelke is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security in addition to a senior fellow with its Global Energy Center.

Ginger Matchett is a program assistant with the GeoStrategy Initiative within the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Further studying

Thu, May 29, 2025

Why Latin America and the Caribbean matter for OECD nations

Report
By
Jason Marczak, Martin Cassinelli

Latin America and the Caribbean are more and more very important companions for OECD nations, providing crucial minerals, meals safety, and clear vitality belongings. With democratic establishments, open markets, and energetic multilateral engagement, the area helps international resilience. Strengthened OECD–LAC cooperation can advance shared objectives in financial safety amid shifting international dynamics.

Image: Machines lined up earlier than harvesting soybeans at a farm in Tangara da Serra in Cuiaba March 27, 2012. U.S. soybean futures fell from a six-month excessive on Tuesday as merchants booked earnings forward of extremely anticipated crop reviews due on the finish of the week. REUTERS/Paulo Whitaker

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