What would I say to President Lula

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By JEAN MARC VON DER WEID*

The importance of the topic of agriculture in a government program

I am part of a self-titled group of “organic progressive intellectuals”, gathered in about 30 collectives, coordinated by Forum 21, which is organizing a meeting with Lula. There are more than 500 registered for this face-to-face and virtual meeting, to be held on September 16th. The proposal is to present to our former and future president contributions for the campaign and for his next government. This is predominantly a cadre of veteran activists who are also leading experts in various fields of public policy.

Among so many militants and highly prepared professionals, I will possibly not be among those who will be able to expose their ideas to our future president. Lula will not have time for so many people. For that very reason, I am putting on paper what I will say to Lula if I have the opportunity. If it's not possible, that's fine, the ideas will be circulating and one day they will arrive in the right place, at the right time.

It is good to clarify, from the outset, that I do not speak on behalf of anyone but myself. What I have to say is the fruit of 60 years of political militancy, since before the military dictatorship, of 40 years of militancy in the movement for agroecology and family farming, and of 30 years of participation in the formulation and negotiation of public policies for agroecological development , dialoguing with the governments of presidents Itamar Franco, Fernando Henrique, Lula and Dilma Rousseff. What I have to say is also the result of intense dialogue with social movements in the Brazilian countryside, over more than four decades.

I founded and directed, for many years, the first NGO to promote agroecological development in Brazil, today AS-PTA (Family Agriculture and Agroecology), one of the main vectors for the creation of ANA (National Articulation for Agroecology) and ABA ( Associação Brasileira de Agroecologia), who organize and represent the agroecological movement. Retired since 2016, today I dedicate myself to studying and systematizing our development experiences and the public policies we helped build. The aim is to critically analyze the past to help prepare for the future.

 

The importance of the topic of agriculture in a government program

In general, governments in Brazil looked at agriculture with two biases: economic, centered on agribusiness and social, centered on family farming. The priority of the first was a constant in all governments, President Lula, including his. This is explained by the legacy left by the policies of his predecessor's government. Agribusiness was even presented as the “green anchor” of the Real Plan, although this role is debatable. Everything was done by successive governments to ensure that agribusiness progressed and continued to bring foreign exchange into our economy. The positive results of these policies cannot be questioned, mainly due to the construction of a substantial exchange reserve, but there is a strong tendency to forget the costs they had and the side effects they caused.

Favoring agribusiness resulted in huge tax waivers, both on products and on inputs, as well as incessant help with credits, including huge amnesties and very easy renegotiations of debts for large producers.

As for the side effects, the first and most important was to orient the most dynamic sector of our rural economy towards exports. Or rather, emphasize a trend that already existed. Today, agribusiness is centered on a small number of commodities, with a strong predominance of soybeans and corn (50% or more of the cultivated area annually) and more sugar, coffee, oranges, cellulose, meats and other products of lesser significance. All aimed primarily at international markets, with weight in feed production. A smaller part of agribusiness focused its investments on products aimed at the A class, capable of remunerating producers, paying high prices, competitive with those of commodities on international markets. As you know, President, this class in Brazil is small and does not demand large production volumes, representing a narrow market.

During his presidency, he adopted the view that family farming would supply the domestic market, which goes against the social bias of the traditional view of this sector. Family farming was responsible for 70% of domestic food consumption, an assessment made in the 1990s that remains, without being revised, to this day. It is, or was, true, but it must be noted that the demand for food in Brazil is limited by the poverty of the majority of the people. Family farming never came close to producing enough to supply the potential domestic market, if all consumers earned enough income to buy the basic food basket. In other words, we have always had a domestic market with repressed demand, which also ends up affecting supply.

On the other hand, efforts to increase the supply of food through family farming passed from FHC to Dilma, including their two governments, the president, by favoring the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, company seeds and machinery, through highly subsidized and easily accessible. This led part of family farming to change its way of producing. From properties with many crops in consortia and low use of external inputs, family farmers began to cultivate a single crop (I remember that the credit does not finance the set of productive activities, being directed to a single product). And they started to use inputs that are expensive and with permanent high pressure, even when subsidized. The price of fertilizers, for example, increased by 200% from 2020 to now. It was a very high jump, but I remember that the increases have been continuous for decades.

The result of these policies, President, without a doubt, was to increase the risk margin of these farmers, who came to depend on a single product. Your technicians at the MDA were no fools and thought to minimize the risks with an agricultural insurance program. This worked to a certain extent, but farmers in the south and southeast soon realized that the risks they were taking would be less if they entered the typical agribusiness production chains and turned to the production of export-oriented commodities, especially corn and soybeans. The repressed demand of poor consumers did not absorb the higher costs of the new model adopted by family farming and the result was a decrease in this sector's contribution to the production of food for the common people. President, the per capita consumption of rice, corn, beans, cassava and other products of the popular traditional diet has dropped significantly over the last few decades.

Among the deleterious effects of these policies, we have to include the indebtedness of family farmers. You must remember, and President Dilma too, that the annual negotiating guidelines of the MST, CONTAG and CONTRAF with the governments have been dedicated, since 2006, to the request for debt forgiveness or its subsidized renegotiation, this despite the agricultural insurance that you instituted. Over a number of years, this has resulted for many farmers, in bankruptcies, abandonment of properties or their rent to larger landlords.

The comparison between the 2006 and 2017 censuses indicated that family farming lost 400 producers. And this, President, occurred at the same time that your second government distributed land to 280 families and that of President Dilma to another 120. This means that, despite efforts to increase and strengthen family farming and the food supply in the country, around 800 family farmers have left the countryside.

President, get ready to listen to specialists sympathetic to agribusiness using these data to say that agrarian reform is doomed to disaster and that the best thing is to forget about this policy and treat family farmers as a “social problem”, to be compensated with a program Bolsa Familia boosted, hoping that this class will disappear “naturally”. FHC's economy minister, Pedro Malan, prophesied exactly that back in 1996, predicting that, as in the developed countries of the West, the peasantry will be reduced to about 3% of the total number of rural producers, in another 20 to 30 years . However, President, it is necessary to remember that this would mean the migration of 3,6 million families to cities, at least 15 million people. Eliminating family farming would enormously increase the number of Brazilian men and women demanding jobs, social infrastructure, services and food in cities, which already have a huge number of marginalized people. It would be a catastrophic result to bequeath to future generations.

Another devastating effect of agribusiness agriculture was and is the impact on the environment. Brazil and the world already know the impact of agribusiness on the forests that defined, much more than gold, the color of our flag. We lost more than 90% of the Atlantic Forest, 54% of the Caatinga, 55% of the Cerrado, 20% of the Amazon and 54% of the Pampa Gaúcho. The data on the Pantanal I was unable to add up, but by 2020 the loss was 20% and in that year and the following year, 46% of the vegetation in this biome burned. If all this deforested area in Brazil were occupied by agriculture, be it agribusiness or family farming, it could still be argued whether it was worth it.

But the sad truth, President, is that the accelerated destruction of our green cover has resulted in more than 140 million hectares that have become “degraded lands”, half of which in an advanced degree of degradation. Many other millions of hectares have become very low productivity pastures. We cannot forget that in the northeast region, 12,3% of the semi-arid region is already undergoing an irreversible desertification process and that the area threatened by the expansion of the desert is 1,36 million hectares. This sinister accounting does not include the loss of fertility of soils saturated with chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

Another brutal impact is less visible to the general public, but is well known to specialists: the climate change that deforestation is already producing and that could provoke, in the medium term, the transformation of the Amazon into a large dry savannah and the Pantanal and the Cerrado in semi-arid zones. This would cause the elimination of the so-called “flying rivers”, the humid air masses that bring rain to the south and southeast of Brazil. Our entire agriculture is threatened by this effect, which already appears in the frequency with which we suffer from more intense droughts. This is another legacy you won't want to leave behind.

I cannot fail to mention another worrying impact of agribusiness. This is the contamination of soils, rivers, lakes and aquifers, of agricultural workers and rural residents and of rural and urban consumers, due to the use (a world record!) of pesticides, many of them banned in other parts of the world, particularly in the USA and in Europe. This is also a problem for our exports, as consumers, Europeans in particular, are very attentive to the quality of what they import and reject products full of pesticides.

To summarize, my dear President: (i) the way we produce in agriculture has effects on food supply, in particular on the availability of food for the more than 125 million Brazilian men and women who suffer from malnutrition (aka hunger), malnutrition and malnutrition. (ii) The way we produce in agriculture affects the distribution of population and employment; (iii) the way we produce in agriculture has a negative impact on the environment, soil, water, climate and biodiversity; (iv) the way we produce in agriculture has negative effects on the health of producers and consumers.

 

What to do when you get back to the plateau, president?

First of all, I want to make it clear that I don't believe in miracles. You are going to inherit a truly cursed inheritance, in no way comparable to the one you received in 2003. The country is broken, the State is broken. The international economy has entered a prolonged crisis and is not going to give us many exit possibilities, either in terms of investment or favorable terms of trade. The country is deindustrialized, employment is limited and precarious. The people live in misery, as they have probably never lived. Public services are scrapped. The repressed demands are enormous and the expectations for your government will be immense.

On the other hand, governing will be much more complicated, especially if the outpouring of money that the Centrão manipulated in these elections results in maintaining or increasing the influence of these vultures of the Republic in the National Congress. You're going to have a deficit budget, stuck and with very little resources available under the executive's control. In addition, you will be harassed by the Bolsonarist hordes and spurred on at every step by the demands of the “upstairs”, always ready to treat you as they treated President Dilma. It won't be possible to do much, except clean up the house, recover the institutions from the disasters accumulated by the 4 years of mismanagement and prepare for the future.

That is, the formulation of proposals has to take this situation into account and the solutions will have to be very well calculated to adjust to what will be possible.

In this sense, President, I dare to make some suggestions of priorities for your government, in the area that I dominate, agriculture and its correlations with food, employment, the environment and public health.

 

Priorities

Of all the demands that will fall on your government, President, none will be as urgent or even desperate as facing the food crisis that affects more than half of the population. You are endowed with great human and political sensitivity and you know this better than I do. This should be your government's number one priority, especially in the first year, when expectations regarding your management will be defined.

“The nutritional reality of Brazilians today is marked by a sad paradox. At the same time, we have high rates of malnutrition, nutritional deficiencies and obesity. This triple load is responsible for the considerable increase in the occurrence of chronic diseases, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and cancer, which are now the main causes of death in Brazil”. (Ludmila Hajjar, Globo, 16/8/2022).

 

The food crisis calls for short, medium and long-term measures

As you know, President, 33,1 million are hungry every day, 32,4 million are hungry from time to time and 60 million are qualitatively poorly fed. In round numbers.

It's terrible to have to say that, but in the situation you're going to face, it's going to be necessary to prioritize the immediate target audience, and this is made up of the 33 million people (which must be more numerous by now, at this point in the evolution of food inflation ). The 32,4 million people affected by moderate food insecurity also demand action from the State, albeit with less urgency.

There are 65,5 million people, less than those assisted by Auxílio Brasil. However, unlike Bolsonaro's electoral program, the programs that you cannot fail to implement will have to go beyond the mere distribution of poorly calculated and distributed financial aid. The values ​​of the Auxílio Brasil, even if maintained at 600,00 reais per month per family, do not even come close to resolving the suffering, especially those affected by endemic hunger, the priority block of future beneficiaries of its programs. Firstly, food inflation has already eroded these values ​​by more than 20% and this process is ongoing.

Secondly, 600,00 reais of aid per family served means less than the value of the basic food basket in almost all capitals where the DIEESE research is carried out. You will remember that this basket was calculated for a standard family of 4 people and research indicates that the poorest families are the most numerous. Let us also remember that the basic basket is an outdated definition and does not correspond to the nutritional needs of a family. In order to properly feed a family of Brazilians, the composition of the basic food basket will have to be redefined and its cost will increase. By my calculations it should be almost double the value of the current basket, defined by the minimum wage law of 1937.

When defining the size of the aid needed for the most needy, it should be noted that most of them have no other source of income and that a family's expenses involve expenses other than food. These expenses often end up being prioritized by families, who cannot afford not to pay rent, transport, medication, electricity, water and gas. At the moment, this set of expenses is implying close to 65 million people in debt and an imprecise number of families who are selling the little they have to pay their bills. In other words, if we want to deal with hunger, we will have to deal with the broader problem of the income needed to support a family minimally.

All this is to say that the program for the 33,1 million people, between 5 and 6 million families, will have to have values ​​that go beyond this electoral debate on the 600,00 reais. It will be necessary to define a much broader program and do the calculations seriously. Without that, you are stuck in discussions without a concrete basis and end up being at Bolsonaro’s level, or discussing retail additions, such as the idea of ​​offering 150,00 reais more per child in each family. Ciro was bolder, although without justifying the amounts he proposes for aid, of 1200,00 per family.

The hunger of these unfortunate Brazilian men and women who wake up and go to sleep with an empty stomach and go on deceiving it with leftover food, often found in garbage dumps or with the meager generosity of third parties, has to be faced as a priority of priorities.

I suggest going back to the name of your first program and using the title “Zero Hunger” again. To carry out this program, I think you should create a special body, which could be called the Coordination or the National Food and Nutrition Program, linked to the Presidency of the Republic. The best cadres in the country should be called to work in this organism; nutritionists, economists, specialists in food stocks, distribution of foodstuffs, among others. This coordination/program should have full powers to articulate ministries and secretariats. And it should be actively seeking the collaboration of civil society through the recreation of the National Council for Food and Nutrition Security, which was CONSEA and now, turbocharged, should be CONSEAN.

This team's first task should be to calculate the essential dietary needs of this public and identify how much of each product will need to be offered. With this, it will be possible to assess, in view of the supply of food produced in the country, how much will need to be imported. It won't be little, especially if we avoid the practice of “stuffing our bellies” to deceive hunger and adopt a program with essential nutritional quality.

That is, once the nutritionally necessary basic food basket and its value have been defined, it will be necessary to organize the importation and distribution of what national production cannot cover in the first years.

In my opinion, one cannot assume that the market will do the job and let it take over the organization of imports and distribution. The government will have to play an active role, stimulating and articulating market agents. The government should, when taking office, call on the whole of society to collaborate with this program, from economic agents to civil society organizations that can contribute to the mobilization for the distribution of food to the most vulnerable sectors. It is about mobilizing the living forces of society so that those who can help those most in need organize themselves to receive help. It's more than giving money to the hungry, it's necessary to win over society to enter the game with all its might.

The definition of per capita family income will demand an effort to improve data in the single register. This will make it possible to assess how much each family will need in addition to their income to reach the level of consumption necessary to eat properly in order to be able to work or study. The Bolsa Família experience will be important to guide these definitions.

Financing this program will be a problem for the State's meager and paralyzed budget. I think you should launch immediately after taking office an emergency bill taxing the millionaires and billionaires on the rich side of our country to raise this money. Leave tax reform for later. It is more laborious and broader. This rate should be calculated to last three years and launch a campaign asking for the adhesion of the “upstairs” to support the MP in Congress.

As you can see, President, what I am proposing is a gigantic social movement of solidarity by all with the most suffering sectors of our country. Movements of this type were launched in the past by civil society itself, the most important and well-known being the Citizenship Action Against Hunger and Misery, initiated by my dear friend and fellow fighter Betinho. They were important as examples, but the task requires more.

The appeal for donations is not enough. It is necessary to open wallets and coffers with broader resources, managed by the State. It will be necessary to move the state machine to stop being a sucker of public money for private purposes, as we have seen in recent years. And I'm not just talking about the federal government, but all federal entities that should be called upon to participate in this endeavor. Such a campaign could unite our society so divided by the force of Bolsonaro's hate politics.

Medium-term measures to tackle the food crisis

In the medium term, President, we have to increase the supply of food produced in the country. We cannot depend on imports, not least because food prices on the international market are skyrocketing and rising. Importing rice, for example, does not allow this product to be offered at prices lower than those of domestic production. Imported products will have to have subsidized prices or food inflation will erode the Bolsa Família 4.0 that is created.

And who can respond to this increased demand for the Zero Hunger policy? Agribusiness has no interest in the market for the poor, even with very remunerative prices guaranteed by the government (which will be necessary anyway). The agricultural chains integrated in exports have agreements with buyers and stable relationships. They are not going to trade this for a market that is historically depressed and has low buying capacity. Of course, some large producers can join this line and they will be welcome, but don't expect the complete solution to come from this sector.

Family farming has the potential to provide this answer, but a set of policies will be needed for it to make a leap in food supply.

First of all, an important part of family farmers do not have enough land in terms of size and quality, nor are they located in ecosystems that are more suitable for agriculture. They constitute the great mass of producers in the northeast and north and part of the southeast. For these it will take an effort to ensure food self-sufficiency and production for local markets. This would already be an important advance, since around one million of these families are now dependent on financial aid and are in the category of those who are hungry or eat poorly. For these farmers, it will be necessary to invest in water infrastructure (in the semi-arid region), technical assistance in the production of vegetables and fruits and in raising small animals, based on agroecology.

This would be a program with an important target on women producers, in general those responsible for supplying food to families, in the area called “around the house”. The surpluses produced both by women and by the production of swiddens managed by men should be used to purchase school lunches (PNAE) or to resume a plan inaugurated in its first government, president, the Food Acquisition Program (PAA ), but both will have to be boosted with much more resources than were available in the past. In this proposal, President, what will be done is nothing more than what has already been done in experiences located throughout the country, promoted by rural social movements and by the National Articulation of Agroecology.

The production of family farmers on a larger scale will be found, above all, among those located in the south and southeast regions. Ideally, this production should adopt agroecology practices. I remind you, President, that agroecology is a way of producing that has already demonstrated, here and around the world, its ability to deliver healthy products, maintaining competitive productivity, lower costs and risks than conventional systems, conserving resources natural resources, the environment and contributing to curb global warming.

Perhaps you are not informed, President, but your former advisor for agricultural affairs, former FAO Director General José Graziano, knows very well that agroecology is being practiced with strong state support in several European countries and is growing without support. state in the United States. The programs in these countries are committed to a transition in the medium and long term, with a view to making agroecology the production model for all agriculture. I think we should imitate them.

It will be necessary to create an intense program of transition to agroecological production, with strong support from technical assistance, development resources and very flexible credit, directed towards the set of productive activities on the property and adapted to the practices of this system. Once again, public purchases will play an essential role, both in the PAA and the PNAE, as well as in restoring public food stocks. Your government will also have to offer minimum incentive prices and targeted insurance for the whole property. It will also be necessary to guarantee resources to encourage experimentation by farmers in agroecology practices and investment credit, with some associated funding. I remind you that agroecology does not systematically use inputs external to the properties, so the usual recurring credit in conventional systems will not be necessary.

To operate the policy to promote agroecological development, I believe that the best option would be to create a program that concentrates resources for development, credit, technical assistance and processing in a Special Fund, with flexibility for a non-bureaucratic use of financing.

On the other hand, President, we cannot expect the conversion from family farming to agroecology to take place at the accelerated pace necessary to expand the food supply in a short time to quell the hunger of the 33,1 million people. Agroecological transition processes are slow and delicate and require technical support that does not exist in Brazil in the necessary volume. You will need to encourage the training of technicians and agronomists with this specialization, in order to increase this program throughout your government. There are already courses, in the technical schools that you created in your previous governments, focused on agroecology and important centers of professors and researchers in many rural universities that also follow this orientation. They will need support to respond to staff training needs, focused on technical assistance in agroecology to expand family farming production.

The future belongs to agroecological production, but the proportion of farmers adopting this proposal in the next four years will not be enough to respond to the breadth of demand from the hungry. It will be necessary to produce food in the conventional way for some time to come.

Conventional food production has practices that are well known both by technical assistance agents and by the producers themselves. What is needed to encourage this category of conventional producers is to promote some practices that save on the use of chemical inputs and guarantee prices and markets. Once again, government purchases will play an important role, both in the PAA and the PNAE, as a program to replenish public stocks of basic foodstuffs.

In summary, President, what will be needed is: (1) Create a program to support agroecological food production. (2) Expand the forms of support for conventional food production. (3) Create a food procurement program that is turbocharged compared to previous governments. PNAE, PAA, buffer stocks. (4) Guarantee remunerative prices for family farmers so that they feel safe when dedicating themselves to production for the food program. (5) Create a modality of the credit program, which you and President Dilma boosted, focused on agroecology, correcting the mistakes of PRONAF's attempts in this direction. As I said above, it is mainly an investment program and a small associated cost.

(6) Guarantee insurance for the whole productive property and not for a specific product. (7) Guarantee funding for agroecological experimentation. (8) Support the training of middle and higher-level technicians focused on agroecology who can support producers engaged in this alternative. (9) Support public scientific research in the production of useful knowledge for the practice of agroecology.

I have two final remarks at this point, Chairman. Unfortunately, I don't think you will have the resources to carry out the agrarian reform that we will need in the long term. You settled, on average, 70 thousand families per year for 8 years. It was very important, but far from what was necessary to make a bigger leap in changing paradigms in agricultural production. As I wrote above, this effort was not well accompanied by a correct policy to promote production in the settlements. It is time to focus our efforts on transforming settlements into sustainable productive areas, integrated into the national food production program, based on the use of agroecological practices. All social movements in the Brazilian countryside, CONTAG, MST and CONTRAF, have numerous successful agroecological production experiences throughout the country. It will be important to take advantage of these experiences when expanding the proposal to other settlements.

You will have much less resources available to carry out agrarian reform, compared to your previous governments. To expand them, it would be very important to apply the law in cases of irregular deforestation and slave labor and to expropriate land for the purposes of agrarian reform. Other resources could be sought by withdrawing the tax exemption for fertilizers and pesticides and directing them to INCRA.

 

How to deal with the impacts of agribusiness on the environment and on the health of producers and consumers?

The biggest priority in a program to reduce the environmental impacts of agribusiness will have to be the reduction of deforestation and fires, aiming to eliminate these aggressions to the forests of all biomes. For this, it will be necessary to recover and expand the operational capacity of IBAMA, ICMBio and FUNAI and the creation of a police and military task force to support the control operations of these agencies. The cooperation of state governors from all biomes will be important, but particularly from the Amazon.

The situation in the Amazon is extremely dangerous, as illegal miners alone number more than 300, many of them working under the orders of drug cartels. On another front, thousands of land grabbers are illegally appropriating the lands of indigenous reserves, national parks, public areas with no yet agreed destination, the so-called vacant lands. There are immense areas, where the power of the State does not exist and the power of various illicit acts prevails. The complicity of mayors, delegates, police, judges and prosecutors is flagrant. Restoring the Amazon will be a tough nut to crack, but extremely necessary.

In other biomes, things are less dramatic, but also worrisome and requiring strong State intervention.

A national program of Zero Deforestation would be very well regarded at the international level and, certainly, you will get financial support from the developed countries to put it in motion. By eliminating deforestation, we will have reduced Brazil's contribution to the production of greenhouse gases by more than half.

The zero deforestation/burning program should be supplemented by another aimed at reforestation with the planting of native trees, for the recovery of more than 80 million hectares of degraded land in the Amazon alone. I believe that international financial support will be as significant as in the zero deforestation program. This is because large areas of replanting and natural recovery of forests will remove enormous amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. This program would provide a great demand for labor in the rural zone and could absorb illegal workers in the most threatened biomes, particularly in the Amazon.

Another front for improving the agribusiness model is controlling the use of pesticides. It will be necessary to review the unbridled releases of pesticides conducted by the Temer and Bolsonaro governments. And the use of these products should be subordinated to a federal government program in cooperation with FAO, promoting Integrated Pest Management (IPM). FAO programs in Asia and Africa have enabled the reduction of pesticide use in several countries, even reducing the use of pesticides in rice production in the Philippines to less than 30%. Removing subsidies for the use of pesticides is one of the mechanisms used by FAO to discourage the abuse of these products. Don't worry about the cries of the ruralists, they are not fools and they know that this technique (MIP) is consecrated and they just don't apply it because it is easier to apply subsidized pesticides. There is nothing revolutionary or innovative here. It's just common sense, good agricultural practices and economy of inputs.

 

Conclusion

There are many complementary proposals that can be included in this set that I am submitting to you, Chairman. Such as, for example, the creation of an organic fertilizer production program through the treatment of garbage and sewage sludge. Or the creation of a giant urban garden program. But they can be dealt with in detail later and evaluated in terms of their cost and potential impact. The most important thing at the moment is to decide on the points presented. If I had to choose just one among these proposals, I would defend the Zero Hunger Program as a national campaign, enlisting the forces of the federal government, states and municipalities and civil society, businessmen and workers mobilized to face the suffering of the poorest, the 33,1 million hungry.

I apologize for the length of this text, which perhaps someone from your advisory office will read and summarize for you. If this does not happen, I understand perfectly, President. But I will stubbornly continue to present my proposals to society and I think that, over time, they will reach you.

*Jean Marc von der Weid is a former president of the UNE (1969-71). Founder of the non-governmental organization Family Agriculture and Agroecology (ASTA).

 

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