TO CHANGE Agroecology is AN OPTION OF SURVIVAL
For Ing Agr Fernando Queiroz Armand Ugón *
neoliberal globalization, trade liberalization policies of our economies and markets, the continued and growing structural adjustment, together with the landing of large agribusiness corporations, we have imposed their laws and rules that go through plunder nature, creating imbalances, generating disease and hunger, at the expense of multiplying your profits and hegemony in global commodity chains in an integrated manner, ie, control production raw materials, processing, marketing and consumption.
These are the reasons why we are facing an environmental catastrophe is characterized by accelerated deforestation, soil erosion, exacerbated growth of cities (for rural migration, among other causes) overexploitation of natural resources and increasing inequality.
can not transform the nature of goods and services forever, as required by this global model and unsustainable . The appropriation of natural resources to as a commodity, is only intended to increase the gain and profit, and it becomes increasingly resisted by the people.
sovereignty for survival
Food sovereignty does not only refer to the production of food to prevent starvation of the population, but also means ensuring that food is optimal for biological health, mental and spiritual human being. In this sense, it is necessary to promote a paradigm shift in the way food is produced, how it is distributed and exchanged, the way we consume and the manner in which the consumer relates to the production process.
If a country can not decide how their food production, then is far from having food sovereignty.
The advance of agricultural frontier driven by biofuels is an attack on food sovereignty in the South, as land for agricultural production is being used as growing to feed cars. The amount of grain needed to fill a tank of about 100 liters with ethanol once, enough to feed a person for a year. Biofuel production affects directly on consumers, increasing the cost of food.
Of all human activities, agriculture is applied to a larger area, which involves us in a growing conflict between the forms and styles of doing agriculture, satisfying basic needs and the sustainability of the natural environment.
More productivity and more poverty
control over our seeds by large multinationals such as Monsanto, Dupont , Syngenta, Bayer , Dow , BASF , is the first step toward loss of food sovereignty, due to changes in the logic of production.
"disaster capitalism that uses to generate new business leads and generate new disasters like these, then there will be new business. "
The farm is located in close interdependence with nature. The agricultural sector remains the main country's export engine. Over 85 percent of exports has this origin: meat, wool, dairy, grains, oilseeds, citrus, honey, wine, rice and timber. While everyone accepts this economic importance, yet few people realize that this sector is embedded in an ecological system . Our wealth as a country of agriculture and tourism are based on the nature. This framework identifies constraints to production and tourism.
In our country there is evidence that although increasing productivity, it was a strong land degradation, water problems (organic pollution by nitrates, for availability) indiscriminate application of pesticides and growing.
The alleged increase in productivity of modern technology packages are achieved from large additional inputs of energy and matter. Thus, each extra kilogram obtained from the soil requires proportionally more and more contributions, where the efficiency of the process, instead of growing, is reduced. Although yields per hectare increase, it requires increasingly expensive inputs, intensive, sophisticated and often polluting. Many of these environmental impacts go unnoticed by its diffuse, as with the erosion or alteration of hydrological cycles, which makes it difficult to put in evidence.
However, a correct balance of agricultural productivity should include these environmental costs, and possibly Many activities are defined as profitable today actually be generating economic deficits are transferred to the State or the rest of society. It also is intensifying the concentration of land ownership, the delocalisation of the same, the purchase of national agribusiness by foreign capital and the quarrel between the country's natural resources by the major world powers and their mega . In less than six years on 24 percent of the country's land changed hands, primarily for the benefit of foreigners. From 2000 until the first half of 2006 were sold in Uruguay 3.9 million hectares representing almost 24 percent of the land surface .
As in the case of monoculture eucalyptus, pine, sugar cane, soybeans and others, the problem is not the tree or grass or legume, but the model production technology in which it implements. All of these crops and plantations are common problems that cause-injure the land rights of farmers, soil erosion, alter the water cycle, contaminated with pesticides, remove other ecosystems and reduce biodiversity.
Reclaiming the benefit of the majority
Sustainability and healthy agriculture beyond mere conservation of natural resources and environment to become the expression economic development and social equity.
The transition from a conventional to sustainable agriculture is a slow, complex, that can hardly happen naturally. Means having a set of economic instruments, social and political as well as technology, to guide producers and consumers to a healthy agriculture.
In many countries in Europe farmers are subsidized to understand that agriculture is not just producing a commodity (raw material), but implies a set of values, a culture that must be protected, preserved and recognized. Meanwhile, in our case is an attack against an integrated rural development . undoubtedly promote a diversified production system that preserves the rural landscape and production, would maintain environmental quality, preserve biodiversity, protect soil resources, watersheds sustainably manage and sustain family field.
Our country must implement massive and sustained funding in their systems of formal and informal "bottom" educating for life, human beings become capable of coping with the dominant culture critically and transform it. Shall support measures and legislation to regulate the use, ownership and foreign ownership of land, promoting environmental and land use participatory and sustainable, ensuring support permanent, diversified agriculture, agro-ecological production, family farmers and rural youth, promoting the use of appropriate technologies.
Conventional agriculture has impacts on soil (changes in the microflora, microfauna, erosion), biodiversity (simplification of systems, running of the agricultural and livestock) in the disappearance of native species on the health of consumers and farm workers (residues of pesticides), pollution of waterways, pollution, genetic (GM), pollution air. All these negative impacts are not calculated to set the final price of products (wheat, milk, meat, fruits, vegetables), but should be incorporated into the final price and consider what they are: costs.
This will become clear that conventional agriculture is not only socially and environmentally damaging, but that is not even economically viable.
Opposition to the spread of agro-ecological production is based on concepts not technical or economic, but ideological and political.
To really have a truly sustainable land management requires a joint effort with all stakeholders in a region to ensure a path that leads us to achieve: food sovereignty through local production systems based agroecological , diversity and no monoculture, decentralization and not the concentration, allowing access to water, seeds, land and the use of various renewable energy. say, a new broader sense of our passing through this world, of our coexistence as human beings, to make Earth, humanity can and continue to have future ".
As the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff : "It is not enough to adapt to new realities, nor is it sufficient to lessen the harmful effects of global warming global, but you have to go to something more profound: we must reestablish the sense of life, we must recreate a new spirituality is
* agronomist, teacher and producer agroecological
Literature consulted
-Biofuels. World Rainforest Movement . Ecoportal.net . July 2007
-Biofuels versus food sovereignty. Silvia Ribeiro. ETC Group researcher. Ecoportal.net.
-Alternative to Genetically Modified Food: The Rise of Sustainable Agriculture. Carmelo Ruiz Marrero . Ecoportal.net. July 2007
-In search of food sovereignty. Maya Rivera and Sergio Arispe Mazorco Barrientos. Biodiversity in Latin America. August 2007.
-Rural Development in Argentina the XXI century. Walter Pengue. Ecoportal.net. August 2007.
-La option ecological farming. Eduardo Gudynas Researcher CLAES - (Latin American Center Social Ecology).
"The social and ecological tragedy of agricultural biofuel production in America. Miguel Altieri and Elizabeth Bravo. LATIN AMERICAN RED ONE FREE TRANSGENIC. BULLETIN 235. April 2007
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