Forces Driving More
clock. And media reports focus on the drama of the day, not on the
country’s decades-long history of relying on petroleum while neglecting
their own food production.
Venezuela’s tragedy is a reminder that you can’t eat money. The false
equivalency between cash and access to food does not disabuse our innate
fear of hunger. Venezuelans, in their dire circumstances, are involuntarily
reacquainting themselves with evolutionary genetics. In the end, this
genetic drive for sustenance and survival may one day rescue the country
from imploding and restore access to food.
While Venezuela’s economy has been in free fall (shrinking per-
cent in 0 7 ), Colombia’s economy has become the^ thirty-ninth-largest
in the world, placing it in the top fifth of the world’s national economies.
(Venezuela’s economy, meanwhile, because of the nation’s sorry state of
affairs, and despite its immense oil reserves, is not included in the world’s
top two hundred economies by the World Bank.)^ In the last half cen-
tury, its population nearly tripled. In the last quarter century, national
income rose by 00 percent. As the economy became more diversified,
agriculture’s financial contribution to overall growth declined.
Nonetheless, livestock production still dominates land usage, and
agriculture still benefits from vast natural resources. Agricultural
research spending has recently increased by one-third. Over a quarter
century, the availability of fruits and vegetables has more than doubled,
and the level of undernourishment has fallen by close to one-half.
Yet Colombia is not without its challenges. Refugees have flooded
in from Venezuela. Its shared borders with other countries jeopar-
dize earlier progress made to control animal diseases. Curtailing cocaine
production is a perpetual challenge. And the accord that ended the
longest-running insurgency in Latin America is in jeopardy.^ But the
country exports more agricultural and food products than it imports,^
and its tradition of wide-ranging support for domestic food production
is well ingrained.
Although not as obvious in countries where food is plentiful, the role
of genetics to control scarcity through the quest for more food never
relents. At the core of America’s obesity epidemic is individual DNA