The next global breadbasket: how Latin America can feed the world: a call to action for addressing challenges & developing solutions

Addressing humanity’s great challenge — finding sustainable ways to feed rapidly increasing numbers of people around the world — is Latin America’s great opportunity.

Across Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), a more productive and environmentally sustainable agriculture system holds great promise for achieving food security around the world — as well as for the region’s development, for poverty alleviation and for social progress.

The LAC region has a third of the world’s fresh water resources, the most of any developing region when measured on a per capita basis, and more than a quarter of the world’s medium to high potential farmland. The region as a whole is already the largest net food exporting region in the world, and it still has achieved only a small fraction of its potential to expand agricultural production for regional consumption and global export.1 In addition to its abundant natural resources, the region has a large number of farmers who have extensive experience and capacity to innovate, as well as relatively strong institutions and markets. The essential building blocks for massive and sustainable agricultural growth are already in place.

But in order for the entire LAC region to deliver on its enormous agricultural potential, many “moving parts” will have to be brought into harmony. How to do that is the subject of this report.

The next 10 to 20 years offer a critical window of opportunity to advance new forms of productive and environmentally sustainable agriculture in the region. With that in mind, we have set out to illustrate the great potential that exists, the obstacles and challenges that stand in the way of realizing that potential, and how the private and public sectors can and must move forward together.