Agriculture not for the experts alone!
Brazil a big agriculture and forestry country is a unique planetary gift of mankind to fellow humans.
Here is a country that needs to be studied in detail for its contribution to many of the current farm issues like climate change and deforestation, tree logging and cultivation of major agri crops like soybeans and can contribute to subdue much of the current abuses of environmental goods. Many issues of great impact, like for instance, the emerging problem of climate change is not often understood by the ordinary people. Yet, the so-called experts, policy makers or other high level bureaucrats, as we see in India itself, talk and go their own ways, giving a damn to the need for the vast mass of people who stand to be impacted, positively or negatively.
This vast gap in knowledge between the great issues of agriculture and the related questions like environment ,why even the production of food, food shortages and even such broader issues like food distribution and the solving of poverty and malnutrition, all great problems in themselves, this prevailing ignorance and the need to educate the public opinion is at the very central core of any agriculture issue. The purpose of agriculture journalism, always a losing proposition, thus acquires enormous priority.
We read a recent top editorial in The Economist(August 3rd,2019).It is about how the South American Brazil’s Amazon forest has been contributing to the human kind’s long sought food, fuel, timber and sublime inspiration. It is indeed a great inspiration for the rest of the world if we read the bare statistics about its contribution to every kind of man’s need to feed and seek land to grow many vital food needs.
First, it is still a livelihood for 1.5 billion people! Forests provides for local and regional ecosystems. And for the other 6.2 billion, a buffer against climate change. Now droughts, wildfires and other human induced changes are compounding the damage from chainsaws!
Brazil’s President Mr.Bolsonaro has also helped much damage from anti-environment lobbyists, because there is much logging, most of it is illegal, 70-80 per cent, trees have been disappearing, writes The Economist magazine, at the rate of two Manhattans a week! Pessimists fear that the rate of degradation and disappearance of trees can further contribute to the environmental destruction. Brazil is a big agricultural country in the world.
Soybeans cultivation is big business – Soybeans and beef is big agri market and also big exports. The drought is contributing to maize farmers in the central lost a third of the harvest. Food companies, pressed by consumers should spurn soybeans and beef produced illegally.
Brazil is a big agriculture country and also a big agri exporter. China is a big Brazil trading partner, as China needs Brazil’s soybeans for livestock feeding and oil. Deforestation in Brazil is also a contributor of world’s 8% of global green house-gas emissions.
But it earns only 3% of aid for combating climate change.
Brazils’ agriculture minister says the country as a member of the Paris climate agreement is aware that deforestation is a big issue for the country and ordinary Brazilians should press their president must take steps to reverse some of the actions that foreign boycott of Brazilian farm goods.