São Paulo – Increasing the presence of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) in Africa and developing sustainability-oriented projects are two priorities for new president Maurício Antônio Lopes. An agronomist, Lopes has been a researcher with the organization since 1989, and told ANBA in an interview that not only will he prioritize international actions, but he is already reassessing all overseas partnerships. He said technical cooperation projects already underway in Africa can potentially be expanded, and that partnerships can be had in the Middle East and North Africa.
The company’s overseas work was called into question after the minister of Agriculture, Mendes Ribeiro, published a note on the Federal Official Gazette announcing the extinction of the then-recently created Embrapa International, due to “non-compliance with legal dispositions” on the part of the company, which was headquartered in the United States. The unit’s extinction was announced on October 5th, a few days after its then-president, Pedro Antonio Arraes Pereira, resigned from his position.
In Brazil or abroad, however, all Embrapa projects will be developed with an emphasis on natural resource preservation, energy efficiency, productivity gains, and greenhouse gas emission reduction. This rule applies to everything from major projects to eventual partnerships with small and medium farmers. The latter, according to Lopes, currently work for their own livelihoods, but often even have the potential to export. Read below the main stretches of the interview given on Friday (26th).
What are your priorities while heading Embrapa?
Maurício Antônio Lopes – Our agriculture is still highly commodity-based and we believe Embrapa will be faced the challenge of developing technologies and knowledge that will let us add more value to our products and ensure they are safe. The safety issue is ever-more important if we are to reach international markets and guarantee that our population gets increasingly safer, higher quality products.
Technologically speaking, challenges are manifold when it comes to mechanization and the improvement of our productive systems. From an environmental perspective, Brazil is also facing a very big challenge. Brazil has revised its environment protection policy via the (forest) code, meaning that in the future we will no longer be able to increase agricultural productivity through physical expansion.
The code revision, which forbids “physical” expansion, may force producers to develop technologies which will lead to more productive, better crops…
There is no question to that. This forces the system, the businessmen, the farmers to constantly aim for more efficiency. This whole trend of more sustainable systems, of using our soils more efficiently, of greater productivity, of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, of using our water more efficiently, all of this forces agriculture to walk faster towards sustainability. To do all that you need knowledge, information, science and technology. Hence our emphasis at Embrapa in our programs to boost efficiency, productivity and competitiveness, but we also place a strong emphasis on programs devised to enhance the sustainability of our systems.
Yet another challenge is facing us. In Brazil, there are still a very large number of poor farmers who are at the outer edge of the market. They are small and medium farmers who still have a lot of trouble having access to technology, knowledge and information. This is also a challenge to us and our rural extension and technical assistance system. We are paying attention to this huge set of Brazilian farmers who are still in need of improving their technological level. They will need credit, logistics, and better infrastructure.
Are these farmers you have mentioned predominantly in any specific region of the country or grow less profitable crops?
There are approximately 5.2 rural establishments in Brazil. Roughly 500,000 of those are considered high-technology rural companies or entrepreneurs. So there we have four million properties performing below what they should. Many of these establishments are in the Northeast, which is Brazil’s poorest region. They are subsistence farmers who mostly grow cassava, small animals, and grains such as caupi bean, maize, or rice for their subsistence.
The biggest challenge will be to seek means in the future so these farmers can increase their efficiency, put on a stronger market effort to strengthen associative initiatives, such as cooperatives and associations. Right now we have important programs from the Ministry of Agrarian Development which provide backing to a large share of these farmers. But many of those four million properties will be able to reach the market and become established, domestically and even export-wise, provided that they get the adequate technology, the adequate funding and training support.
Will you reallocate or raise the budget to that end or is it a change in guideline and goal?
We have several programs targeting small farmers and family farmers. We have a strategy involving technology transfers, partnerships with the Agrarian Development Ministry, the Ministry of Agriculture. A major bottleneck in serving these populations is the technical assistance and rural extension system. We have a great work being done by different units of Emater (a rural extension company which helps develop planting techniques), by technical assistance and extension institutions throughout Brazil, but there are still limitations. We need to structure things out better, we need more investment in technology transfer. We need more investment in training, more credit, and in some cases we need to improve infrastructure.
How do you intend to strengthen Embrapa’s international work?
Embrapa has been strongly active since 1998. We maintain a highly structured scientific cooperation program. Our program has expanded, and now it’s in the United States, France, United Kingdom and Germany, and lately we have established scientific cooperation programs in Asia with South Korea, China and Japan. The goal is to develop integrated actions in areas such as biotechnology, genetic resources, nanotechnology, cutting-edge fields which Brazil needs to pay attention to.
We have our technical cooperation which is developed based on the South-South cooperation model (among developing countries). We have been operating in Africa for a few years now, looking to develop technology transfer actions or adapt tropical farming technologies that have been tried and tested in Brazil to African countries. We are also active in Latin American countries.
Embrapa International was an “arm” meant to facilitate, to make Embrapa’s overseas actions swifter, more efficient and flexible. We are reassessing our internationalization strategy, with a steady emphasis on Embrapa International. We are not by any means going to reduce our emphasis on international cooperation, we have agreements with more than 180 countries, and dozens and dozens of international technical cooperation projects. Cooperation is essential these days because problems are increasingly complex.
Technical cooperation actions encompass Ghana, Mozambique, Mali, Senegal, Venezuela and Panama. Are there other countries which Embrapa intends to expand the cooperation into?
We are always considering what the best options are. There is a huge demand for expanding cooperation in both Latin America and Africa. At this time we are reviewing our entire cooperation work, especially in Africa, over the last few years. There is a very high expectation for us to increase our ties and cooperation in Africa. We are conducting an analysis right now to ascertain which alternatives are best, where we will boost cooperation, or areas in which we are not present and it would be worthwhile being in. We are conducting that process this very moment.
Do you consider having partnerships with a country in the Middle East or North Africa?
We are engaging in talks and seeking interaction. Many of those countries are seeking us. We are keenly interested in talking, conversing and seeking ways to interact with Middle Eastern and North African countries. I do believe there are several interesting possibilities. For instance: technologies which allow us to save scarce resources such as water. Genetic resource exchange. These countries have important genetic resources which are well adapted to more limiting conditions such as drought and scant water. So, we are definitely interested in seeking interaction with countries in the Middle East and North Africa, in exploring possibilities of exchanging technologies, sharing information, genetic resources, training. We are in talks with some of those countries, and we are open to proceeding with these dialogues, and to opportunities to cooperate and interact.
You have spoken a lot about increasing Embrapa’s participation in the sugar and energy industry. I would like to know if that is one of your priorities.
For instance, we have several programs and portfolios focusing on aquaculture, animal health, biological control, silviculture of native plants, which is very important in Brazil, especially with the new forest code, crop-livestock-forest integration, biological nitrogen fixation, which is important for our Low-Carbon Agriculture program (ABC – Agricultura de Baixo Carbono), crop protection, reducing the use of agrochemicals or making their use more efficient. These are priorities, but the highlight is the sugar and ethanol industry.
We are also concerned with guaranteeing research on genetic resources and genetic improvement of cane, because we know that in the future we will have really big challenges with climate change. Embrapa has made the decision of strengthening its research on cane; actually, not just cane, but rather the whole sugar and ethanol and energy industry. We must consider that the industry will become increasingly complex. It won’t be just cane. Even today, the possibility is being discussed of combining sugarcane with saccharine sorghum.
We are also considering other sources of biomass. With the possibility of cogeneration, of plants producing electricity as well, you could perhaps include other sources of biomass in the process. We are investing in advanced technologies, such as second-generation ethanol, or processing biomass into other components. In the future, some Brazilian sugar and ethanol manufacturing plants may be converted into true bio-industries or bio-refineries, processing biomass into various components.
Is it a priority to combine ongoing and new sustainability-oriented projects?
We cannot lose sight of competitiveness, of productivity, of product specialization, of increasing productive efficiency. It is absolutely no longer possible to do so without carefully considering the sustainability issue. We cannot envision a future in which we do not pay a lot of attention to the various dimensions of sustainability, to the environmental issues relating to the good use of natural resources, the good use of scarce resources such as water, the reduction of emissions, and the increasing value of concepts such as environmental services and ecosystemic services.
In fact, Brazilian agriculture already is a good provider of services. For instance, if you check direct planting in Brazil, for instance, it is an important provider of ecosystemic and environmental services. By covering the soil, protecting the soil and reducing erosion, you have an agriculture that produces clean water. Instead of becoming lost and carrying the soil over to the rivers, the riverbeds, the water penetrates and recomposes the groundwater. We must progress ever further into developing technology, knowledge and information to enable our systems to migrate increasingly faster into sustainability.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
