Loss of food sovereignty: a current facet of underdeveloped countries.

Abstract

In the current phase of the world economy - globalization - underdeveloped countries are moving even further away from achieving robust, sustainable, supportable, and balanced economic growth among the economic sectors and regions of their territories, which would allow them to reduce poverty and create societies with fewer inequalities. Underdevelopment has increased in these regions due to various economic and political causes, which, moreover, tend to perpetuate themselves. The objective of this article is to explain that one of these causes is the loss of the capacity to feed their populations with internal resources. The methods of study were comparative and deductive, to find common characteristics and to identify trends; historical-logical to address the background; and, based on the analysis of various sources of information, a framework of four variables of the causes of the non-existence of food sovereignty in underdeveloped countries was prepared ex profeso. The research found that two thirds of underdeveloped countries lack food self-sufficiency, a situation that forces them to depend on the purchase of food from the external market, where interests of large transnational agribusiness corporations prevail, which has the effect of gradually distancing them from food sovereignty, as they lack the power to decide on the food of their peoples. The main conclusion is that food insufficiency is no longer a temporary or transitory condition, but a structural or permanent one (exacerbated by the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic), which is yet another obstacle to the development of these countries. Modifying this situation requires a complete change in the policies of the governments of underdeveloped countries, which have given priority to agribusiness and food security based on imports, abandoning self-sufficiency and deepening food dependence; in addition, leaving small farmers without support, who, even with their limited resources and very few incentives, are the mainstay of world food supply, generating more than 80 percent of the planet’s food.