Latin American and Caribbean Agri-Food Exports: From the Belle Époque to Reprimarization, 1850-2024

Latin America’s agri-food export trajectory from 1850 to 2024 reveals a long-term pattern of deep global integration, mid-twentieth-century relative decline, and renewed expansion in the early twenty-first century. During the first globalization, the region became a major supplier of agricultural commodities, especially in South America, benefiting from strong complementarity with industrial economies, expanding foreign demand, favorable terms of trade, and falling transport costs. The interwar period disrupted this model: wars, the Great Depression, protectionism, and deteriorating terms of trade exposed the fragility of export-led growth. After 1950, import-substitution industrialization, anti-export policy biases, weak regional integration, and specialization in products with low income elasticity reduced Latin America’s relative weight in world agri-food trade, even as exports continued to grow in absolute terms. Since the 1990s, however, market-oriented reforms, trade agreements, technological change, and especially rising Asian demand have driven an extraordinary export boom. This recent surge has increased the region’s global prominence but has also reinforced dependence on primary commodities, generating a new phase of reprimarization with uneven developmental and environmental consequences.