This article was first published on 27 August 2025 by LAB partner Amazônia Latitude and translated for LAB by Stanton Geyer. You can read the original, in Portuguese, here. While it was written in the run-up to COP30 in Belém, the issues discussed remain vitally important to the peoples of the Amazon.
The Amazon produces vast quantities of food, yet millions still face hunger. This article examines the links between environmental justice, inequality, food sovereignty and COP30, arguing that the issue is not production but the system that governs distribution.
Rethinking the environment
When we speak of the environment, we often think first of nature: fauna, flora, ecosystems, and biomes such as the Amazon rainforest. Yet this view frequently sidelines the human element and its social, cultural, and economic dimensions. From a sociological perspective, any understanding of the environment detached from human relations is unsustainable. The ways natural resources are used and transformed are shaped directly by different social groups, which continuously intervene in nature to meet their needs. The natural environment, then, must be understood as an integral part of humanity’s historical, social, cultural, and economic experience.
Over the centuries, human ingenuity and technological advances have generated enormous wealth. Yet this growth has been based on a model of economic development driven by intensive, unregulated exploitation of natural resources. The consequences have been profound: accelerated deforestation, including in the Amazon, rising greenhouse gas emissions, and worsening global warming. Alongside this, land concentration has intensified, social inequality has deepened, and conditions such as inadequate housing and hunger have become more widespread.
This stark reality has fuelled debate across scientific, political, economic, and environmental spheres, highlighting the urgent need for a new development model that combines economic growth, social justice, and environmental sustainability. Overcoming hunger and poverty requires recognizing that they are not the result of food scarcity relative to population growth, as many believed in the nineteenth century. Rather, they are structural outcomes of land concentration, production systems driven exclusively by profit, and technological advances that, while increasing productivity, do not ensure equitable access to food. The issue, therefore, is not production, but unequal distribution and barriers to access.
Abundance without access
Hunger remains one of the clearest indicators of the global capitalist system’s inability to address inequality, even amid productive abundance and technological progress. In his article O silêncio da fome, Castillo (2020) notes that around 8,500 children die every day from hunger.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO, 2023) estimates that around 735 million people worldwide face hunger, representing 9.2 per cent of the global population. This situation worsened with the COVID-19 pandemic and recent geopolitical crises, such as the war in Ukraine, which directly disrupted global supply chains. Climate change has also played a significant role in intensifying this trend.
In Brazil, data from the Rede Brasileira de Pesquisa em Soberania e Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional (PENSSAN) reveal a stark reality: around 33 million people live in conditions of severe food insecurity, while a further 54 million experience moderate or severe food insecurity. Taken together, this means that nearly 40 per cent of the population struggles to secure regular access to adequate food. The pandemic deepened these inequalities further, intensifying the country’s food crisis.
Regional inequality worsens this picture. The North and Northeast record the highest levels of hunger and food insecurity, particularly in rural areas and urban peripheries. The North, home to the Brazilian Amazon, faces particularly severe levels of food insecurity. According to PENSSAN (2023), more than 10 million people in the Amazon experience hunger, roughly 30 per cent of the region’s population. In many isolated municipalities, access to adequate food is limited by weak infrastructure, logistical fragility, and the absence of consistent public policy. Severe food insecurity disproportionately affects riverine communities, Indigenous Peoples, and traditional communities, whose livelihoods are undermined by a lack of support and long-standing marginalization.
In the state of Pará, recent data from the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE, 2024) show that nearly 10 per cent of households still experience food deprivation, revealing the persistence of structural inequalities across the region.
After years marked by widespread hunger, Brazil has once again been recognized by the United Nations as a country no longer included on the Hunger Map. This was announced in July 2025. The Hunger Map is a tool developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), which monitors global food and agriculture issues and assesses both food quality and access. The report The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2025, based on data from 2022 to 2024, indicates that fewer than 2.5 per cent of Brazil’s population is at risk of undernourishment.
In Pará, the report shows an 85 per cent reduction in the number of households experiencing undernourishment or lacking sufficient food. In practical terms, around 400,000 families, approximately 2.2 million people in Pará, have gained access to at least three meals a day. Brazil, however, had already exited the Hunger Map in 2014, only to be reclassified by the United Nations after analyses of data from 2018 to 2020 showed food insecurity rising once more.
Even so, despite no longer appearing on the Hunger Map, millions of Brazilians remain threatened by food insecurity. More than 30 million people face daily uncertainty about what they will eat and are often forced to reduce the quality or quantity of their food or, in extreme cases, to go without it altogether.
Hunger therefore remains a central challenge, particularly in the Amazon. Here, the critique of philosopher Vandana Shiva (2020) remains highly relevant. For Shiva, food scarcity is not the result of insufficient production, but of a consumerist, market-driven logic that turns food into a commodity controlled by large corporations. Overcoming these conditions, she argues, requires democratizing access to natural resources and moving away from a predatory capitalist model towards an economy grounded in environmental justice, sustainability, and peace.
Global commitments, local setbacks
Concerns about environmental impacts and their intersections with social justice are not new. As early as 1972, the report The Limits to Growth, published by the Club of Rome, warned of the risk of environmental collapse resulting from the prevailing model of economic growth. The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (ECO-92), consolidated this agenda by recognizing, among other issues, the historical responsibility of developed countries for environmental damage and the need for international support to enable developing countries to pursue more sustainable pathways.
This conference led to agreements such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which later gave rise to the Kyoto Protocol (1997) and, more recently, the Paris Agreement (2015), adopted at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21). The agreement established ambitious targets, including limiting the rise in global average temperature to no more than 2 °C, ideally 1.5 °C, and enabling financial support from wealthier countries to help poorer nations address the impacts of climate change.
To monitor and implement these commitments, the 193 United Nations member states adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015. It comprises 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 integrated targets. These goals bring together the social, environmental, and economic dimensions of development, reinforcing that poverty, hunger, inequality, and environmental degradation are interconnected challenges. SDG 1 (no poverty) and SDG 13 (climate action) exemplify this integrated approach.
The concept of environmental justice is grounded in a critique of the dominant utilitarian perspective, which promotes the ecological modernization of capitalism without addressing the roots of social inequality. In this sense, advocating for environmental justice means calling for a reorganization of the material conditions of social life based on rights, bringing together social justice and environmental protection. Grassroots movements have embraced this idea, understanding the environment not as a market commodity, but as a space where dignity is collectively built.
Despite important advances in global environmental governance, Brazil has experienced significant setbacks in recent years. This became particularly pronounced during a ministerial meeting on 22 April 2020, when the then Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles, argued it was time to passar a boiada, in other words, to take advantage of the media’s focus on the pandemic to weaken environmental protections. The effects of these policies are felt daily in urban peripheries, where flooding is increasingly common, and among traditional communities resisting land grabbing, agribusiness expansion, and state neglect.
The Amazon, with its vast biodiversity, offers a striking illustration of these contradictions. Despite being a major producer of foods such as cassava and açaí, staples of the local diet, hunger continues to affect millions across the region. This paradox echoes Vandana Shiva’s critique of the ‘monoculture of the mind’: a productivist logic that concentrates power, profit, and land while excluding traditional communities from the benefits of the very production they sustain. High levels of food production do not guarantee universal access, as the dominant model prioritises export markets and wealth concentration.
Food sovereignty or hunger
Family farming, which accounts for a large share of regional production, does not receive the support needed to ensure food sovereignty. Instead, it is increasingly threatened by the expansion of large-scale monocultures, such as soy and cattle, geared towards global markets. This agroindustrial model intensifies inequality, disrupts traditional ways of life, and deepens food insecurity.
As Shiva argues, the solution lies not simply in increasing production, but in strengthening food systems based on diversity, local self-sufficiency, and the recovery of traditional knowledge. The Amazon could serve as a model of food sovereignty and balance between production and social justice, if public policy prioritized the redistribution of resources, the strengthening of communities, and the recognition of food as a right rather than a commodity.
COP30, having been held in Belém, represents a historic opportunity for Brazil to reaffirm its commitment to climate justice, food sovereignty, and a living Amazon. This international event must go beyond the physical transformation of the ‘city of mango trees’ and leave a lasting legacy in how we produce, consume, and relate to the planet and to one another. Ultimately, addressing hunger also means confronting the system that produces it.
About the author
Miguel Picanço is a postdoctoral researcher in the Anthropology of Food at the University of Barcelona and holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the Graduate Programme at the Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (UNISINOS). He is the author of Na roça, na mesa, na vida: uma viagem pela trajetória da mandioca, no e além do nordeste paraense (2018), Comida cabocla: uma questão de identidade na Amazônia, desde uma perspectiva fotoetnográfica (2021), and A vida social da mandiocaba: um ingrediente amazónico (2021). He is a public school teacher with the Pará State Department of Education (SEDUC) and the Municipal Department of Education of Belém (SEMEC), a researcher in the Anthropology of Food, and a member of the Brazilian Anthropological Association.
Original editing by Juliana Carvalho
Original page design by Alice Palmeira
