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Technological innovation and the climate agenda shape the 21st century, showing the path by which the planet seeks and finds solutions towards harmonious development, associated with the recovery of nature and well-being. This path requires food, water, energy and climate security, pillars and starting point to attack hunger, poverty and exclusion, and address essential issues for peace and development, such as health, education, employment and social coexistence.
Latin America and the Caribbean is home to 46% of the fresh water and 50% of the planet’s biodiversity. Its vibrant agricultural sector constitutes it as the most important food exporting region in the world and therefore guarantor of global food security, which also provides 14% of total jobs and represents 5% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). with an increasingly deeper interaction with science, technology and innovation.
This new agenda offers Latin America and the Caribbean an irreplaceable role: that of being, at the same time as a great agri-food and energy power, a strategic and main protagonist in the combat, mitigation and adaptation to climate change, conservation and the sustainable management of biodiversity and nature.
In this framework, sustainable and resilient agriculture is presented as the most relevant sector for our region, an area of the world without armed conflicts, to build a common strategic vision and exercise true leadership capable of providing climate solutions, understanding that the increase in The temperature of the planet and extreme weather events are no longer a strictly environmental issue, which today must be treated as inherent to socioeconomic development, innovation and regional and global geopolitics.
For this reason, the geopolitics of food and climate make Latin America and the Caribbean an essential territory to offer the securities that the world demands, including bioenergy, hand in hand with clean energies that come from biomass, offering a catalyst to development and a new integration agenda that consolidates our density as a region.
This common vision requires ambitious strategies and an organization aimed at providing solutions using undeniable comparative advantages – sun, land, soil, climate, water, natural resources, biodiversity and photosynthesis – to, from that base, add value to our production and start the path towards a green, intelligent, inclusive and sustainable industrialization.
The diversity of the region, which at the same time presents vulnerabilities, an innovative imprint, business capacity and an organized and attentive civil society, forms a mosaic to successfully face these challenges and take advantage of the opportunity to build a symbiotic relationship between agriculture and the environment, leaving side strategies based on traditional models. The agricultural sector must continue working to participate in an organized manner in all environmental and climate negotiation forums, in which its positioning is necessary and vital.
This means promoting a sustainable, climate-resilient and low-carbon agricultural sector, using biological resources intensively and circularly, reducing and reusing waste from productive cycles and chains, today considered valuable bioinputs, in order to convert our territories rural communities in large green factories, producing healthy and nutritious foods, bioenergies, biomaterials and probiotics, offering opportunities for inclusive development in rural territories.
It also means acting without complexes, decisively assuming that the new agenda grants strategic character and specific weight to Latin American nations on the global board. It will be necessary for the region, in the search for resilience and a reduction in its vulnerability to climate change, to agree on a vision on adaptation trajectories.
Behind closed doors, the promotion of this agricultural model requires new and better public policy environments, systematic research, innovation, entrepreneurs and capital, to move towards an eco-intensification that allows us to produce more with less use of land, have more food with less water, less fertilizers, less pesticides and less energy, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and even sequestering carbon to turn agriculture into a tool for mitigation.
These conceptions and strategies, which encourage the modernization of the agricultural sector, the innovation of public management and commerce, feed and converge with the agenda of decarbonization of the global economy, and help create and expand local capacities by incorporating them into the productive face of the social, environmental, technological and scientific dimensions.
As never before, it is time to put farmers in Latin America and the Caribbean at the center of climate policies and nature protection. They are the core pieces for this new development, anchored in knowledge management, trade facilitation, bioeconomy, climate action and territorial development, providing concrete solutions to a planet in crisis that screams and demands new and committed leadership. .
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