Food Systems and Access to Healthy Food in an Amazonian Context

Abstract

The article aims to identify how systemic, multi-scale dynamics influence access to adequate and healthy food and eating and how food is produced and circulated in the Amazonian context of the Metropolitan Region of Santarém (PA). We conducted a literature review, qualitative interviews with key actors, discussion groups and visits to food retailers to address the following research questions: how do socio-economic and political dynamics, especially those related to the soy-meat agroindustrial complex, create or reproduce social inequalities, injustices and inequities, and how do they affect the access to adequate and healthy food? Our findings suggest that the expansion of large-scale soybean growing and livestock, forming the industrial soy-meat complex, contributes to the impoverishment of certain social segments of the local population, accompanied by the erosion of the base for food production. Smallholder farmers and Indigenous and traditional people are among the main affected groups, while violence in rural areas contributes to restricting access to adequate and healthy food. The novelties of our study lie in approaching food systems, taking access to food as the entry point and linking adverse effects of the soy-meat complex to inequalities in access to healthy food. The study also discusses value conflicts between “traditional” and “modern food” (e.g., ultra-processed food), reflecting intergenerational disputes between ways of life and culture, which are also nurtured by the expansion of the soy-meat complex. These multi-scale dynamics have significant repercussions on how food is produced and circulated and highlight the relations between local food politics and conflicts, as well as their connections with processes beyond the local scale. Finally, the article calls for advancing integrated and multi-scale analysis of food production and access to address challenges of social injustices in food system transitions, fostering sustainability, human health and climate change mitigation and adaptation.