As COVID further impacts the problems of malnutrition and hunger worldwide, Diplomat takes a look at what countries export the most agricultural products and what countries import the biggest number.
Mid 18th-Century France witnessed the emergence of an eclectic group of economists. They sought to challenge the prevailing mercantilism, favouring high tariffs, subsidies and physical gold supplies as the ultimate measures of wealth of the period.
Led by François Quesnay, an ambitious autodidact who had escaped poverty to become surgeon at the court of Louis XV before turning to economics, these physiocrats (as the school would be known) stigmatized inequality and luxuries, while arguing for measures to improve agriculture through better public infrastructure, lower taxes and support for small cultivators (rather than their landlords).
In fact, physiocracy considered agriculture the roots of a state, as if it were a tree, with the population its trunk, and arts and commerce its leaves. This analogy points to the central argument of physiocracy: The wealth of any nation lies in its land and what grows from it. Physiocracy lost its influence in the 1770s, but endeared itself to one prominent thinker of the period: Adam Smith. While Smith rejected the physiocrats’ arguments that agriculture is the sole source of wealth and land is more valuable than labour, he agreed with the school’s emphasis on efficient regulations and free trade.
It is easy to dismiss physiocracy by virtue of the fact that it emerged during a period when agriculture was the primary source of employment and income. But its endorsement of free trade gives it relevance.
Physiocracy also draws our attention to the value of agriculture. It supplies nourishment — and then some — in that it mirrors prevailing property relations, the state of the environment and political relations. In short, what lies on our plates (or not, in the case of hundreds of millions) is far from a mere personal choice.
As humanity prepares to feed its expected 10 billion members by 2050, in the face of anthropogenic climate change, Diplomat takes a look at two related categories: the five largest exporters of agricultural and food products (as measured by their annual value in 2019, all figures U.S. dollars) and the five countries that imported the most food as a percentage share of their imports.
Top-5 largest food and agricultural product exporting countries
1. United States
To appreciate the awesome productivity of American agriculture, consider the following numbers: American farms contributed about 0.6 per cent to overall gross domestic product (GDP) in 2019, while direct on-farm employment accounted for 1.3 per cent of U.S. employment, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). And yet, the United States led the world in the export of food and agricultural products with a total value of $103.4 billion, according to figures from the United Nations, with figures from the USDA pegging the figure even higher at $140 billion for 2018. (The World Bank puts the 2019 figure at $136 billion.)
True, the first two numbers (farm contributions to GDP and direct employment) downplay, even hide, the broader contributions of agriculture to the American economy-at-large. According to the USDA, agriculture, food and related industries contributed $1.109 trillion to the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States in 2019, a share of 5.2 per cent. Full- and part-time jobs in the agricultural and food sectors totalled 22.2 million, or 10.9 per cent of total employment — not insignificant figures by any measure.
The U.S. agricultural influence is appreciable on dinner tables around the world, whether it’s the developed or developing world. In 2019, the five largest export markets for American food were Canada ($20.7 billion), Mexico ($19.1 billion), China ($13.8 billion), the European Union ($11.74 billion) and Japan ($11.72 billion). These figures also draw attention to the changing state of U.S.-China relations, with agriculture one of the few areas where the U.S. has been running trade surpluses. Recent American exports to China peaked at almost $21.4 billion in 2016 before dropping slightly to $19.4 in 2017, then drastically to $9.14 billion in 2018 against the backdrop of Sino-American trade tensions. Chinese food purchases have since gone up again, but remain below previous levels, where they may remain for some time.
The United States is also the “food bank of the world,” as Foreign Policy put it, providing half of all global food aid as the single largest supplier. Since 1954, more than four billion people in more than 150 countries have received food assistance through formal American aid, a practice dating back to 1921-22, when Herbert Hoover — not yet president of the United States — organized a famine-relief campaign that saved 20 million from starvation in the former Soviet Union.
A distant echo of this American aid campaign appeared during the Cold War when the former Soviet Union procured — many say stole — vast quantities of grain from the U.S. at low prices (with American loans, no less) to compensate for domestic crop failures. This Great Grain Robbery of 1973 caused havoc on global markets and preceded the partial grain embargo that the U.S. imposed on the former U.S.S.R. as a response to its invasion of Afghanistan. It was a move many have blamed for the decline of U.S. family-owned farms to the benefit of large, corporate-controlled factory farms that now characterize American agriculture.
This development has not been without benefits, as scale has brought down costs. The share of disposable income spent on food has been dropping from 17 per cent in 1960 to just under 10 per cent in 2019. Whether American farmers can ensure their own survival is another question.
2. The Netherlands
The smallest of the world’s largest agricultural exporters by area (41,543 square kilometres) and population (17.3 million), the Netherlands exported agricultural and food products worth $87.7 billion in 2019. This figure becomes even more impressive when compared to the United States, whose area is about 200 times larger with a far lower population density as compared to the Netherlands’ more than 500 people per square kilometre.
Several factors account for the country’s agricultural productivity relative to size, starting with climate and geography. A temperate climate characterized by fair rainfall distribution and relatively fertile soils in a flat landscape favour what the United Nations calls a “varied and productive agriculture.”
The Netherland’s access to the North Sea as well as to several major European rivers enhanced over time through excellent, evolving infrastructure has also long given the country easy access to the European hinterland and beyond. It’s a fact that government officials are quick to promote in their pitch to foreign investors.
But these excellent starting conditions tell only part of the story. One defining moment in the country’s emergence as an agricultural superpower was the tragic effect of the Hongerwinter (Hunger Winter) as 1944 turned into 1945, with Nazi Germany still occupying much of the country.
German retaliation for a Dutch railway strike in the fall, designed to assist the advancing Allies, severely disrupted food transportation. This disruption, coupled with local hoarding and a cold winter, caused food shortages in major urban areas, with 20,000 dying of starvation. Millions more suffered long-term effects.
This famine, which Canadian troops helped alleviate with 1,000 tonnes of food, inspired far-ranging efforts to increase agricultural production. First, they moved to large-scale mechanized farming, generously subsidized. Then, the Dutch increasingly shifted toward high value-added products developed by the country’s agriculture-focused research sector, its crown jewel being Wageningen University and Research, one of — and possibly the best — agricultural university in the world.
Scientists in the Netherlands are currently working on a number of ideas that could help square the circle of raising agricultural output without further straining the natural environment in the face of climate change. They include autonomous greenhouses based on artificial intelligence, vertical farming techniques that lower the use of pesticides and water, and robots programmed to harvest or spray a drop of herbicide at the right time.
In 2019, a dairy cow farm opened in Rotterdam, where three robots outnumber the two humans looking after the animals, with other cities around the world paying attention to the concept.
This level of innovation responds to necessity as Ad van Adrichem, managing director at Duijvestijn Tomatoes, told the World Economic Forum.
“Holland is pretty crowded,” he said. “Our land is quite expensive and labour is expensive, so we have to be more efficient than others to compete. And that competition drives innovation and technology.”
But if the Netherlands is shaping the future of farming, it is also still dealing with the legacy of its past. That includes excessive levels of nitrogen, partially caused by the country’s highly productive livestock (especially dairy) farms as well as harmful greenhouse gas emissions.
3. China
China’s presence among the world’s largest agricultural exporters appears obvious on the surface. Like the United States, Russia, India and Brazil, China has a large land mass.
It also boasts the world’s largest population, with about 1.43 billion people or 18.5 per cent of the global population. So the trajectory of Chinese agriculture is of significant importance to the global population at large, especially as the country continues its rise toward possibly supplanting the United States as the world’s leading power. This said, the status of agriculture in the world’s most populous and fourth-largest country by area differs in several ways. Comparing China with its main global rival — the United States — Wendong Zhang of Iowa State University of Science and Technology has argued that key differences separate the countries. Writing in the Centre for Agricultural and Rural Development’s Agricultural Policy Review, he notes that while agriculture in both countries might be big business and be deeply integrated into global markets, American agriculture is more productive.
Far more Chinese — by one account, 33 per cent of the population or more than the entire population of the U.S. — work in agriculture. But China has less than half the arable land available for farming compared to the United States and 7 per cent of all arable land in the world.
Zhang also finds that the Chinese
government views national food security as a much more important goal in making agricultural food-policy decisions. By way of background, a 1995 white paper established a 95 per cent self-sufficiency target for grains, including rice, wheat and corn, goals that have become increasingly ambitious over time. Many older Chinese still remember China’s Great Famine, which killed an estimated 20 million people between 1959 and 1962, during the Great Leap Forward.
Political statements and policy decisions point to this agenda. China’s 14th five-year plan also speaks of boosting the country’s self-sufficiency in agriculture along with other fields, including energy, technology and industry.
Within this context, the government is drafting a food security plan, improving grain security measures, increasing domestic capabilities and diversifying sources of agricultural imports, according to an analysis by the Congressional Research Service.
This reality responds to China’s high reliance on food imports. China might have exported agricultural and food products valued at $70.3 billion in 2019, according to figures from the United Nations, but imports far outstripped them, a reflection of the country’s growing demand for food as its wealth has grown and tastes are more discriminating, a key inflection point being the country’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001.
Imports amounted to $142 billion in 2019 (or 6.4 per cent of global imports), according to IHS Market, a research firm.
This said, the world’s largest importer of food (according to the USDA) is becoming an increasingly important player in several agricultural sectors, including animal products (dominated by marine and aquatic products), beverages and oil.
The country is also positioning itself as a major player in research and development of agricultural technology. Chinese public- and private-sector spending in agricultural R&D eclipsed that of the United States toward the end of the first decade of the new millennium, according to the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, with China’s commitment to a more efficient, productive use of agricultural resources. These moves respond to broader trends: the country’s ongoing urbanization, which has caused a population exodus from rural, agricultural regions.
4. Germany
Pork and Porsches. This shorthand captures two central components of Germany’s global export portfolio: high-volume food products and high-end automobiles, among other items, of course.
This duality becomes especially apparent when considering German exports to China. Chinese buyers purchase one in three German-made cars, with the trend line pointing up as the total value of car exports topped $27 billion in 2019, just behind exports to the United States at $28.3 billion. The growing importance of the Chinese market for German exports, cars or otherwise, has raised questions about Germany’s dependency on Chinese customers, a point that hit home in the fall of 2020 when China, along with South Korea and Japan, embargoed German pork imports after African swine flu was found in wild boar.
The embargo upset global markets generally and German producers specifically. German pork exports topped $5 billion in 2019, third-best in the world just behind Spain ($5.218 billion) and the United States ($5.21 billion), with 40 per cent of German pork production going abroad. China, in turn, has become increasingly important as Germany’s largest customer apart from its immediate neighbours in the European Union.
During the first five months of 2020, China alone absorbed 30 per cent of all German exports and the Chinese pork ban upset an industry already rocked by the COVID-19 pandemic. While this unprecedented health crisis has ruthlessly exposed many lingering flaws in Germany — from its creaky digital infrastructure to its complex administrative state hampered by competitive, even confrontational federalism — it has also shone a harsh light on its pork industry, itself a representative example of much of what ails German agriculture.
The country’s level of agricultural exports may be high at $65 billion in 2019, but producers, especially large ones, rely on imported eastern European workers hired as sub-contractors. These outsourced workers must hand over a share of their relatively meagre earnings for equipment and sub-standard accommodations, to which they return after long hours of labour in slaughterhouses or fields.
These facts are not new, but the large COVID-19 outbreaks that flared up in those accommodations sparked public outrage and some sensible, albeit incomplete, reforms.
Much of the discourse dissected the responsibility of Clemens Tönnies, Germany’s Kotelett-Kaiser, literally translated as pork chop-emperor, with many blaming him directly for the unappetizing state of the industry. Others coolly retort that he only delivers what the people want: affordable meat.
This pervasive “discount” mentality has had disastrous consequences in the minds of many. Facing pressure from larger discounters and tight profit margins, small- to medium-sized farmers have gone for volume, a development that has drawn the ire of animal rights supporters and environmentalists concerned about the ethics and ecological effects of such economics.
Farmers, for their part, resent being exploited while being held responsible for environmental problems.
This said, Germany also has a long tradition of favouring organically grown food and has become one of the world’s largest markets for such products, with the Netherlands as the dominant supplier.
These points highlight another duality. Some Germans will only consume the best; everyone else will have to settle for the wurst.
5. Brazil
The cynical appeal to never waste a serious crisis has perhaps never been more apparent in recent times than in Brazil, as the country seeks to expand its agricultural production, with exports valued at $46.3 billion in 2019, according to figures from the United Nations.
Various groups, including farmers, have used the authorities’ preoccupation with the COVID-19 pandemic to illegally cut down large swaths of land in the Amazon, clearing the way for the type of fires that outraged the global community in 2019, many of them connected to illegal land use.
Once put out, fires set during the drier months between August and October help prepare the newly cleared land for grazing by cattle, one of the country’s most important agricultural exports.
Brazil was the second-largest producer of beef, behind the United States, in 2020 and the largest global exporter, exporting approximately one-fifth of its production.
While the industry provides nourishment, economic development and foreign currency for Brazil, it is also a “major driver of deforestation,” according to a 2020 paper from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
According to the paper, two thirds of cleared land in the Amazon and Cerrado biomes has been converted to cattle pasture, thereby making the Brazilian cattle sector responsible for one fifth of all emissions from commodity-driven deforestation across the entire tropics.
These facts on the ground and balance sheets respond to signals from the country’s political leadership, as was in the case in April 2020 when the country’s environment minister, Ricardo Salles, urged state governors to use the media’s attention on the pandemic to get to work in passando a boiada (pushing through the cattle) — a metaphorical and literal appeal to circumvent regulations to the benefit of the cattle industry.
As such, Salles was only following his boss, President Jair Bolsonaro, who assumed office in January 2019 in part on the promise of allowing more mining, logging and agriculture in the Amazon rainforest.
Backed by Brazil’s agri-business, Bolsonaro did not wait to fulfil those promises by granting the country’s agriculture ministry control over key rules concerning Indigenous reserves, many of them located in the Amazon. Critics have since accused Bolsonaro’s administration of further hollowing out environmental protection for the benefit of farming interests and to the detriment of Indigenous communities, now appealing to the International Criminal Court for assistance.
Brazilian authorities, starting with Bolsonaro, have responded to these charges with appeals to patriotism, indignation and gaslighting, with Bolsonaro claiming in 2019 that the Amazon was “practically untouched.”
Yet at the same time, official figures confirm the critics’ charges.
According to figures supplied by the government’s environment agency, the number of fines for illegal deforestation and damage to vegetation has fallen by 42 per cent from August 2019 to July 2020, while deforestation rates — already on the rise before Bolsonaro’s ascent to office — reached their highest point in 12 years at the end of 2020.
Top 5 largest food and agricultural product importing countries
1. Comoros
This tropical archipelago of four islands in the Indian Ocean, located at equal distance between Madagascar and the African continent, captures many of the complexities that confront poor nations looking to feed themselves.
While primary industries, including agriculture, account for about 50 per cent of Comoros’ gross domestic product with three crops — vanilla, ylang-ylang flower extracts and cloves — adding up to a disproportionate share of total exports. Food imports added up to 42.9 per cent of all imports in 2019, according to the World Bank. Comoros, in other words, earns international currency through a handful of cash crops, then spends a significant share of it on food from abroad to feed its population of just under 864,000.
True, several factors stack against Comoros. As with neighbouring Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles and Reunion, Comoros appears distant from foreign markets, has a limited natural resource base for local food production and experiences climatic volatility, as evident in April 2019 when Tropical Cyclone Kenneth caused some parts of the country to lose up to 80 per cent of agricultural capabilities.
These factors have made domestic food production a costly, unpredictable undertaking. Comoros’ agriculture and fishery sectors have potential, but face several obstacles, some of them by choice. A history of deforestation has left more than half of the country’s land degraded and erosion affects the “vast majority” of the country’s arable land, according to an assessment by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
Current agricultural practices such as slash-and-burn cultivation have only worsened the degradation of soil, said to be “extremely fragile” because of the islands’ geological youth, according to an assessment by the United Nations. This same assessment also finds Comoros’ complex land-tenure system, caused by the co-existence of colonial, traditional and Islamic tradition, constitutes a “major obstacle” to the reclaiming of land. Areas under production also suffer from lack of modern farm-management methods.
These issues compound increasingly irreversible natural realities in the face of climate change. Experts fear that Comoros’ forecast for higher temperatures, heavier rainfall and rising sea levels will simultaneously speed up soil erosion while increasing the salinity of aquifers as seawater seeps into the ground. Prolonged periods of drought during the dry season, the emergence of new pests and the acidification of oceans caused by climate change also loom.
These threats may appear abstract, but Comoros’ population is already facing significant food supply problems. A 2017 FAO report finds that under-nourishment affects 65 per cent of the population.
2. Yemen
The high-level donor conference for Yemen hosted by the United Nations along with the governments of Sweden and Switzerland on March 1, 2021, was in many ways depressingly familiar.
Officials, starting with United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP), used stark, even severe language to press home the point that millions of Yemenis face the prospect of starving, unless governments step up with additional support.
According to UN figures, more than 16 million Yemenis (about half of the population) will face hunger this year as the proxy war in Yemen between Saudi Arabia, backing a multinational coalition of Sunni Islamic countries, and Shia Iran-backing local Houthis has entered its sixth year. Nearly 50,000 are already starving to death in famine-like conditions and another 400,000 children under the age of five could die from acute malnutrition.
But if this fifth donor conference since the start of the war in 2015 heard familiar, but no less serious, facts about the suffering of the country, such appeals did not loosen global purse strings as the donors pledged $1.7 billion — less than half of the targeted amount of $3.85 billion.
Guterres’ response was one of disappointment and it remains uncertain whether the global community will heed his appeal to reassess their contributions to help resolve the world’s worst humanitarian crisis as an unprecedented famine lies ahead.
While the sheer number of small and large actors on both sides of the conflict have stood in the way of a settlement easing the suffering, the war has exposed the country’s reliance on food imports, casting Yemenis, especially blameless children, into a “special kind of hell,” as Guterres said.
According to World Bank figures, food accounted for 39.1 per cent of the country’s total imports in 2019 and an Oxfam report published in 2017 found 90 per cent of the country’s food comes from abroad.
Food insecurity had been a fact of life for millions in the Middle East’s poorest country before the war. Factors have included poverty (now gripping more than 80 per cent of Yemen’s population) in the face of economic mismanagement and limited areas of cultivation — arable land accounts for 2.2 per cent of land use with 41.7 per cent used for permanent pasture — increasingly stressed by growing water scarcity and various pests such as desert locusts that have been destroying vast amounts of locally grown vegetation and crops.
The war has meant the strategic blocking, by both sides, of ports receiving foreign aid, which has worsened these conditions.
As former UN official Jan Egeland, now secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, told National Public Radio, hunger has become a weapon in Yemen.
3. Benin
This former French colony in West Africa demonstrates par excellence the many paradoxes that increasingly define the food situation in Africa. Agriculture accounts for up to 27 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and about 38 per cent of its total employment. This dependency on agriculture appears even more apparent when 70 per cent of the country’s total employment depends on it, according the World Food Programme (WFP.) And yet, in 2019, food accounted for 38.3 per cent of Benin’s imports, as local agriculture is unproductive, with farmers working small plots.
The country also frequently loses crops and livestock through climate shocks and floods, as was the case in 2010, when Benin was perhaps the hardest-hit by flooding caused by heavy rains in the region. The floods destroyed or damaged an estimated 10,000 homes and impacted almost 700,000 people, while killing dozens. The country also experienced notable flooding in 2016, 2019 and 2020 with scientists warning of more frequent and severe flooding through the West African coastal area and its extensive network of rivers running through the multinational region.
These environmental effects have unfolded against steadily rising food prices that have forced families to cut the quantity and quality of food consumption, factors exacerbating food insecurity and malnutrition, according to the WFP, which finds that 9.6 per cent of all households are food insecure, with 32 per cent of children aged 5 and under suffering from chronic malnutrition.
Yet this existential scarcity coexists with excessive caloric consumption as obesity (defined as body mass index of 30 or more) has been rising in Benin, as it has in many other African countries. Obesity among females reached 14.2 per cent in 2016, up from 9.5 per cent in 2005. Obesity among males is lower (4.7 per cent in 2016), but also rising. Reasons for this development include urbanization, cultural factors and rising middle-class wealth, but also the import of cheap, processed food from the developed world.
José Graziano da Silva, former director general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), perhaps summed up this point best in 2019 during a forum held by the World Trade Organization: “Many countries depend heavily on food imports to guarantee the availability of food for their people,” he said. “Unfortunately, unhealthy ultra-processed food fares better in international trade in terms of transportation and conservation than non-processed food.”
Poverty, in other words, is pushing up the scales, without eliminating hunger itself, leaving millions trapped in a “double-burden of malnutrition,” as experts have called it.
4. The Gambia
Starting from its 80-kilometre-long Atlantic shoreline, this sliver of a state meanders along the Gambia River 338 kilometres deep into surrounding Senegal, with the river dividing the country into two narrow slices.
This peculiar geography, itself the product of colonial compromise between Britain (the country’s former colonial master) and France (Senegal’s former colonial master,) has complicated the country’s social and economic development, a familiar aspect of the African experience.
One of the poorest, most densely populated countries on the African continent, with a population of 2.4 million, 33.2 per cent of The Gambia’s imports were food in 2019, despite the fact that agriculture constitutes the country’s primary economic activity, according to the FAO. But its analysis also found that The Gambia’s agricultural performance has not been consistent, with production stagnating or even declining over the years. Factors have included lack of infrastructure, rising prices in the face of declining revenues from the sales of cash crops, changing climatic conditions responsible for eroding soil, fluctuating temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns.
These aspects become more apparent when taking a closer look at the nature of Gambian agriculture. It mixes low-yield subsistence farming for domestic consumption with cash crop production for foreign export, but relies heavily on rainfall rather than modern irrigation techniques, which means agriculture is highly vulnerable to weather variability and climate change. Food self-sufficiency thus suffers, forcing the country to spend its precious foreign currency, earned through cash crops, on importing basic goods, such as rice, to fill local bellies. But fluctuating exchange rates create uncertainty and contribute to inflation on the domestic food market, eroding local purchasing, according to the FAO.
Proposed remedies for raising agricultural productivity include obvious measures such as improved irrigation and marketing as a part of a larger agenda to diversify the country’s economy away from agriculture and tourism, its other main source of income.
The FAO’s assessment also drew attention to what it calls “inadequate domestic policies,” which observers can read as a charitable, perhaps diplomatic, nod to the country’s domestic politics, dominated by former president Yahya Jammeh for more than two decades.
Jammeh’s portly public demeanour and billowing white robes, signalling a combination of friendliness and Islamic devoutness, could not hide the ugly truths of his regime, which “ruthlessly repressed” political opposition after gaining power through a military coup in 1994, in the words of Human Rights Watch.
Arbitrary detentions, disappearances and extrajudicial killings defined the rule of Jammeh, who stands accused of having stolen $1 billion from public coffers and raping women while in office. His government also discriminated against homosexuals while Jammeh, like other African leaders, also promoted dangerous views about HIV/AIDS.
A foreign military intervention following his refusal to accept the outcome of the 2016 presential election in favour of Adama Barrow eventually forced Jammeh to flee for Equatorial Guinea from where he has been plotting his return.
In the meantime, he has been seen working as a farmer in Equatorial Guinea.
5. Sao Tome and Principe
Two volcanic islands and several smaller islets constitute this African country in the Gulf of Guinea. Portugal first colonized Sao Tome in the late 1400s, using convicts and slaves from the African mainland to grow sugar as the archipelago emerged as the first plantation economy in the tropics during the 16th Century.
Coffee and cocoa — all grown with slave labour, a modified form of which lasted into the 20th Century — eventually supplanted sugar in the 19th Century. In fact, by the early 20th Century, Sao Tome and Principe was briefly the largest producer of cocoa in the world, before a boycott over labour practices had its effect. Portuguese control of the islands did not cease until independence in 1975.
This long legacy of colonialism has remained apparent in the country’s population of 215,000 — a multi-ethnic, multi-hued mix of people descended from six major groups — who have settled by choice, force or accident on these previously uninhabited islands and integrated into its agricultural system still dominated by plantation agriculture.
Consider the following: In 2018, the country’s large cocoa plantations accounted for 90 per cent of the farmed land and two thirds of employment, according to the International Monetary Fund, which also found that cocoa exports accounted for 52.4 per cent of total goods exports and 1.6 per cent of GDP in 2019.
While a major land reform in the early 1990s divided up 15 large plantation enterprises among small holders and medium-sized enterprises, agriculture remains relatively unproductive for a litany of familiar reasons, despite the fact that growing conditions (fertile volcanic soils, abundant water and tropical temperatures) are excellent.
Such reasons include the country’s infrastructure, its remoteness, which hampers access to markets, and the available labour.
Contemporary political instability and corruption, coupled with the legacy of colonialism, have left this country poor (according to the World Food Programme, 66 per cent of the population lives on less than $3.20 a day) and reliant on outside support, as food accounted for 30.9 per cent of all imports in 2019.
However, this story is not without its bright spots. The country’s political system has a history of fair and competitive elections with peaceful transfers of power, and civil liberties enjoy a high degree of protection.
Tourism remains a largely untapped potential and the sale of offshore oil concessions holds promise, assuming the country can avoid the dreaded “resource curse” with all its consequences, such as political corruption.
Wolfgang Depner lives and writes in Greater Victoria, where he teaches at Royal Roads University. He has previously taught political theory, international relations and Canadian politics at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus.
