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...
