Interview: The Future of Latin-American Agriculture in a Post-Pandemic World

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Latin American agri-food systems face countless challenges to supply a constantly growing population without causing greater damage to biodiversity and promoting inclusive development models.

Being a farmer in Latin America is not an easy task, particularly during the Covid-19 era. Although the region, in general, has succeeded in meeting the challenges of the current pandemic, the future of its agrifood systems is fraught with challenges.

Being considered the world’s granary is no longer enough to meet the demand of a constantly growing population and to maintain price stability, but above all, to do so in a balanced way to pro region’s rich biodiversity.

Michael Morris, an agricultural expert with the World Bank, presented a report on the region’s agrifood systems along with colleagues Ashwini Rekha Sebastian and Viviana Maria Eugenia Perego, as well as collaborators from other institutions such as the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and McKinsey.

In this interview with El Pais, he provides an overview of the sector and insights into future agriculture in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Question: What is the current outlook for the agricultural sector in Latin America? What are the main challenges?

Answer by Morris: The agricultural and food systems in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) are legitimately recognized as one of the most successful on the planet. They have fed a rapidly growing population, enabled economic development, allowed urbanization, produced significant export revenues and contributed to reducing hunger and poverty, also for the approximately 20 million small producer families or family farmers.

Moreover, they have been extraordinarily resilient when faced with the Covid-19 pandemic, and have played a counter-cyclical role in ensuring adequate food supplies at stable prices to global markets.

LAC’s agricultural and food systems are important not only for the region, but also for the rest of the world. LAC’s net food export is the largest in the world and helps reduce and stabilize international prices, benefiting consumers everywhere. In addition, the region’s vast forests and savannas play a key role in shaping global climate patterns and mitigating climate change.

Despite these contributions, LAC’s agricultural and food systems’ public image as dynamic, productive and efficient reflects only part of a more complex reality. In many respects, these systems perform unsatisfactorily. They have been slow to react to global change, and many continue to rely on centuries-old, outdated, inefficient and harmful production methods for people and the environment.

Fortunately, the prospects are not entirely negative. In the current low-performance scenario, there are tremendous opportunities to be seized. Technological advances are introducing new, more efficient and environmentally friendly ways to produce, process, distribute, consume and recycle food, maximizing the potential gains from the adoption of more advanced technologies and practices.

Q. In recent decades, we have witnessed the expansion of the agricultural border in the region. How can we balance the growth of agricultural production without harming the environment?

A. The environmental footprint of LAC’s agricultural and food systems is significant. Agriculture covers over a third of the region’s land, consumes almost three quarters of fresh water and produces almost half of all greenhouse gas emissions.

Feeding a larger world population will create pressure to convert more natural habitats into agricultural production areas, and this can lead to additional carbon emissions, depletion of natural resources and loss of biodiversity. While the actions needed will vary from country to country, the strain between preserving vital ecosystem services and maintaining the stability of diverse and nutritious food supplies will require attention at local and global levels.

While some producers and livestock breeders are at the forefront of adopting green technology, agricultural and food systems in many LAC countries still maintain production models based on unsustainable practices that are detrimental to ecosystem services essential to human well-being while producing significant greenhouse gas emissions that contribute significantly to climate change.

Emissions from LAC’s agricultural production account for almost half of the region’s emissions, with agriculture and livestock responsible for 70 percent of the regional habitat conversion, while the deforestation rate in the region corresponds to three times the global average.

Current production models threaten the viability of food production capacity, and will need to be replaced by better models that increase productivity, reduce food loss and waste and ensure the sustainability of the natural resource base on which agriculture relies, increasing ecosystem service provision and increasing climate resilience.

As with most complex problems, there is no magic solution, but a combination of actions that would be required, ranging from intensive farming and livestock practices to payment for ecosystem services, smart climate digitization and technology adoption. One approach that offers great potential to integrate many of these approaches is the circular economy.

It provides an integral approach to agricultural supply chains, leveraging the best soil management, energy and water consumption, waste management and pollution prevention. Technological innovations such as precision agriculture, water reuse, bioenergy and biofertilizers – or intelligent agriculture – offer countless opportunities to complement this approach, enabling the intensive and efficient use of resources, high productivity and low environmental footprint, and increased climate resilience.

And in a region where four out of five people live in areas classified as urban, the integration of a circular economy into urban and peri-urban agriculture (the practice of growing food and livestock in or near urban areas) seems a particularly promising option.

Q. In this pandemic context, what is the role of the agricultural sector in supporting a sustainable economic rebound in Latin America?

A. Although the full scale of the pandemic’s impacts has not yet been defined, impacts on LAC’s agricultural and food systems are being perceived in several dimensions. Fortunately, primary production has proved extraordinarily resilient in the sense that most producers and livestock breeders have been able to sustain their activities.

On the other hand, challenges often directly impact the supply chain, as the flow of various products has been interrupted by mobility restrictions, causing distribution bottlenecks or preventing the redirection of the food flow, as some sectors of the economy have closed.

The agricultural and food sector can play a vital role in supporting LAC’s sustainable economic rebound, safeguarding food supplies, providing millions with jobs, generating foreign exchange gains for exporting countries, favoring the trade balance of importing countries and restoring the ecosystem services on which the planet’s well-being relies in the long term.

It is important to emphasize that the rebound offers an opportunity to rebuild and promote integrated actions aimed at human, animal and environmental health, the three axes of the One Health concept. Systems, policies and institutions in the post-covid-19 transition will need to be reformulated to ensure cleaner, greener and more inclusive food environments, and quality food that is safer and more nutritious. Jobs and economic transformation should be at the heart of this future-oriented strategy, based on a resilient infrastructure and a strengthened human capital.

Q. What could impact LAC’s future agricultural and food systems?

A. The report identifies factors divided into two categories: trends and disruptive factors. Trends are long-term forces such as population growth, income growth and urbanization. They have a major impact on agrifood systems, although they are slow and quite predictable, so governments should be able to deal with them relatively more easily.

On the other hand, disruptive factors are sudden forces, such as technological advances, catastrophic climate events, pandemics or radical changes in government policies. Disruptive factors can also have major impacts on food systems, but as they can occur in a swift and unpredictable way, it is more difficult to prepare for them.

Because we cannot predict the future, the report offers no projections on how trends and disruptive factors may impact the region’s agricultural and food systems. Instead, it provides the results of a scenario-building exercise involving a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, and a wide range of stakeholders through the combination of in-person and virtual platforms.

The exercise explored how different factor combinations could lead to diverse results for the future of LAC’s agricultural and food systems. Based on these scenarios, priority actions were identified that could be useful in achieving favorable results and protecting us from unfavorable outcomes.

The relevance of the scenarios is that they compel us to contemplate worlds that could be unimaginable to policy makers and other stakeholders, and to consider the types of actions that could be taken in order to prepare for a range of possible realities that are quite different from the current one.

Source: El País