Food security, trade specialization, and violence in Colombia (1916-2016)

  1. Alexander Urrego-Mesa 1
  1. 1 Universitat de Barcelona
    info

    Universitat de Barcelona

    Barcelona, España

    ROR https://ror.org/021018s57

Journal:
Investigaciones de Historia Económica = Economic History Research

ISSN: 1698-6989

Year of publication: 2021

Volume: 17

Issue: 4

Pages: 1-15

Type: Article

DOI: 10.33231/J.IHE.2021.08.001 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openOpen access editor

More publications in: Investigaciones de Historia Económica = Economic History Research

Abstract

Socioeconomic and historical approaches can contribute to the understanding of the relationship between food security, agricultural trade, and armed conflicts in developing countries. While the market-based perspective advocates that trade is a useful way to maintain food security nationally, other works suggest that trade liberalization and agroexport specialization have threatened food security since the 1980s, especially the self-sufficiency capacity. In Colombia, this agrarian change to agroexport specialization and food dependence has also been linked to the surge of the second wave of violence (c. 1980). Is there a dichotomy between trade and self-sufficiency during the Colombian twentieth century? Did armed conflict contribute to the spe-cialization in agroexports during the Second Globalization? This work contributes to the dichotomic debate between food security and agricultural trade with a more nuanced view along throughout the twentieth cen-tury and confirms a long-term relationship going from violence and international prices towards tropical specialization.

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Funding information

I want to thank Juan Infante-Amate and Enric Tello for their revisions on all drafts I sent to them; to Xabier Garcia-Fuente and M. José Fuentes-Vasquez for their thoughtful talks which helped me to define the frame of the paper; to Simone Ging-rich and Fridolin Krausmann for their helpful comments on the last versions. I would like to address special thanks to Sergio Lozano-Pérez for his guidance and advice in the modelling process. The last version was also significantly improved thanks to the comments of the three anonymous reviewers of the journal. This paper was awarded R. Carande 2021 prize and is part of the Authors’ PhD dissertation, funded by the Spanish projects RTI2018-093970-B-C33, MCIU/AEI/FEDER-UE and its associated grant BES-2016-076599.

Funders

  • FEDER
    • RTI2018-093970-B-C33
  • MCIU Spain
    • RTI2018-093970-B-C33
  • AEI Spain
    • RTI2018-093970-B-C33

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