(iPoster) The Tragedy of South-South Relations: On Latin American-Middle Eastern Trade

• In Event: Poster Session: Strategic Decision-Making in Global Security & International Relations Theory
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: International Relations Theory

Abstract

During Latin America’s turn-of-the-century “pink tide,” the region’s left-leaning leaders aggressively pursued diplomatic and economic partnerships in the Middle East. While interregional political ties subsequently stagnated, commercial exchange is currently booming, a trend driven largely by rising Middle Eastern demand for agricultural products from Brazil and neighboring countries to fill the void left by Russian and Ukrainian exports. Though many analysts and local political actors describe budding “South-South” ties as a hopeful sign of increasing Latin American and Global South autonomy, I argue that the overwhelming predominance of agricultural goods, raw materials, and commodities in the Middle East-bound export baskets of Latin American economies is reinforcing the latter’s longstanding “dependence” on primary products and contributing to the reproduction of a series of environmental, developmental, social, and political harms in Latin American societies. Notably, the primary beneficiaries of contemporary interregional ties are Brazilian agribusiness companies that contribute to Middle Eastern “food security,” particularly in the Gulf countries, by reproducing various forms of “insecurity” at home—for example, through buttressing far-right and anti-democratic political actors who are deeply linked to the agribusiness sector, promoting the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and provoking widespread deforestation in the Amazon. Accordingly, and despite the accompanying emancipatory rhetoric, I argue that current Latin American-Middle Eastern economic linkages contain little of the radical promise of past Third-World initiatives such as the New International Economic Order. Instead, the domestic consequences within Latin America are to reinscribe racialized class hierarchies, reinforce anti-democratic, inegalitarian and extractivist tendencies, and exacerbate the climate crisis.

Author

• Kevin Funk, Columbia University