By RICARDO ABRAMOVAY*
Just as it led the most important agricultural transformation in the tropical world in the 20th century, Brazil can be a leader in the ecological transformation of the global agri-food system.
There is no country better placed to combine the fight against climate change with the effort to protect and regenerate biodiversity than Brazil. The gap between these two objectives in multilateral commitments, government plans and private investments is a serious threat to the success of the fight against what the United Nations has been calling the “triple planetary crises” (climate, biodiversity and pollution).
The Brazilian presidency of the G20 has strengthened two fundamental themes on the global agenda. The first is the need to begin, in an internationally coordinated manner, the taxation of the super-rich. The second was presented at the United Nations last June and aims to fulfill the second Sustainable Development Goal (Zero Hunger). It is about Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty.
It is urgent that the protection and regeneration of biodiversity also move to the top of the global agenda. The United Nations Conference on Biodiversity — COP16, in Cali, Colombia, to be held between October 21 and November 1 — is an opportunity for Brazil to play a decisive role in this agenda that currently does not receive the attention it deserves. There are many challenges: payment for environmental services, biodiversity credits and patents for living organisms, among others. But two of them are especially important.
The first is to immediately halt the destruction of the various Latin American biomes, not only the largest tropical forest in the world, but also the Chaco, the Guyana savannah, the Pantanal, the Cerrado, the Caatinga, the Atlantic Forest and the Pampas. To this end, it is urgent to coordinate police intelligence in the fight against organized crime, which is at the root of much of the devastation in the Amazon and which is clearly multinational in nature.
It is also essential that the appetite of international investors in Latin American infrastructuress is regulated and channeled towards initiatives that respect forest peoples and benefit the populations of the territories in which they will affect.
The second challenge concerns agriculture. The model based on which Brazil became the epicenter of the global agrifood system is severely threatened by extreme weather events, of which the current drought in the Amazon and the Cerrado is an example. Large grain producing companies have already realized that the monotony of agricultural landscapes reduces resilience and the ability to resist the climate crisis.
The notion, coming from the Green Revolution, that the path to wealth lies in monotonous production, boosted by chemical inputs and flanked by protected areas where biodiversity would be concentrated, belongs to the 20th century. Our challenge today is incorporate biodiversity into agricultural production.
Just as it led the most important agricultural transformation in the tropical world in the 20th century, Brazil can be a leader in the ecological transformation of the global agrifood system. The premise for this is to strengthen the biodiversity of agriculture, not only to expand the range of products it offers, but, above all, to protect it in the face of the advancing climate crisis. Brazil's strong presence in Cali will be a fundamental contribution in this regard.
*Ricardo Abramovay is a professor at the Josué de Castro Chair at the Faculty of Public Health at USP. Author, among other books, of Infrastructure for Sustainable Development (Elephant). [https://amzn.to/3QcqWM3]
Originally published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paul.
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