The European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy and Latin America’s Food Sovereignty: A Dialectical Interrelation

Abstract

The productive and commercial strategies laid down by the European Union’s (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) are dialectically related to the gradual deterioration of food sovereignty in Latin America. By means of the CAP, the EU has promoted and championed an unsustainable food and agriculture system with serious economic, social and environmental drawbacks in Latin American countries. Maintaining the European consumption pattern based on meat and other animal proteins, alongside the scope of the forthcoming CAP reform –which involves producing less and buying more at lower prices in global markets– will bring about a renovated cycle of exploitation of Latin America’s natural resources, which will, in turn, lead to the replacement of even more crops for human consumption with raw materials for export, the increase of deforestation and the destruction of ecosystems, the rise of monoculture, the displacement of small farmers, the increase of rural poverty, the worsening of malnutrition and hunger, the increase of food insecurity, and the loss of food sovereignty for the people.