El hambre de los otros: Ciencia y políticas alimentarias en Latinoamérica, siglos XX y XXI

Abstract

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition 2021, “an estimated 59.7 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean were undernourished” in 2020, “the highest figure in the last 20 years.” Forty-one percent of Latin Americans (267 million people) are food insecure, and while the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated hunger, the trend was already on the upswing before it: “Between 2019 and 2020,” according to the report, “the population living with hunger increased by 30 percent, rising by 14 million people in just one year.” The persistence (and absolute growth) of malnutrition and food insecurity is part of the long history of coloniality, racialized and gendered capitalist development, and the knowledge systems that these intertwined processes create and legitimize.El hambre de los otros helps us to understand the ways that Latin American governments understood, framed, and addressed the problems of hunger and nutrition throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This well-conceived and timely volume brings together some of the leading Latin American scholars working in the field to explore “the relationship between science, the state, and public policy at the time that governments conceived of and implemented policies to address the food problem in Latin America” (p. 3). This book helps move the study of Latin American food histories beyond studies of production and consumption. Instead, the authors seek to unravel the overlapping scientific and developmentalist discourses on food and poverty, in different national contexts, that undergird policy approaches to “the hunger of the others.”The introduction by Stefan Pohl-Valero and Joel Vargas Domínguez is, in and of itself, an important achievement. The editors provide a breathtaking historiographical and theoretical analysis that engages the international literature on science studies, food and nutrition, and development studies to contextualize the volume's case studies and demonstrate how they engage different but related fields of inquiry. Pohl-Valero and Vargas Domínguez utilize what they refer to as “assemblages of food governance” (ensamblajes del gobierno alimentario) to understand how intersecting discourses and institutions (local, national, international) shape social science research, which creates specific logics of understanding food and nutritional deficiencies and then is used to create policies.The tight focus of this volume is the product of a collaborative intellectual process guided by the editors. Pohl-Valero is a founder of the Red de Estudios Históricos y Sociales de la Nutrición y Alimentación en América Latina, an important research group that brings together scholars from throughout the world and fosters critical work on food and nutrition studies in Latin America. The authors' close collaboration is evident in the depth and breadth of each chapter and in how the chapters engage and intersect with each other.Individual chapters utilize diverse methods and approaches for peeling back the different layers of food policies in Latin America, with chapters on Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. While numerous themes emerge in the volume, several authors examine the use of science and policy to address the nutrition of the poor. On this theme, Sandra Aguilar Rodríguez addresses race and gender in postrevolutionary Mexican food policy, Vargas Domínguez writes on women's health and scientific interactions between Argentina and Mexico, Rodrigo Ramos Lima focuses on organotherapy and its connection to nutrition policies in Brazil, and Luisa Fernanda Rojas Sandoval examines the creation of Bienestarina, a low-cost nutritional supplement in Colombia. Other chapters center Latin America's engagement in international nutritional debates, such as José Buschini's chapter on the 1939 Third International Conference on Nutrition, Nicole Pacino's chapter on US public health and nutrition assistance to Bolivia, and Eve Buckley's chapter on debates on hunger and overpopulation in the United States and Brazil. Chapters by the research team of Stefan Pohl-Valero, Sebastián Albán, Johan Sebastián Ariza, Yaneth Becerra, Natalia Camacho, Claudia Cortés, and Beatriz Macías, by Sören Brinkmann, and by Pilar Zazueta examine the confluence of institutions and discourses involved in the creation and transformation of food policies in Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico, respectively. Flavia Demonte and Sandra Daza-Caicedo delve into recent nutritional policies, the former for Argentina and the latter for Bogotá, Colombia.El hambre de los otros is an outstanding collection and essential reading for students of contemporary Latin American history and for anyone interested in food studies, science studies, public policy, and the nation-state. The persistence of hunger and malnutrition amid plenty is at the core of Latin American realities. Fortunately, the contributors to this book help to reveal the structures of power, knowledge systems, and policies that have yet to find the magic beans to eradicate hunger.