 productivity in El Salvador will fall 30 percent over the next 15 years,” he said.
In a world where the agricultural agenda is increasingly overlapping with the environmental agenda, the sector is also singled out for the generation of greenhouse gases.
According to FAO’s data, 61 percent of the 33 countries in the region pledged at the United Nations to reduce agricultural emissions, in the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, reached in December 2015.
The director of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), Manuel Otero, stressed that agriculture, “although it generates problems, can also be part of the solution.”
“Many of the measurements linked to climate change are taken with indicators that we have not generated ourselves. This means they do not take into account situations in which, far from emitting, we are actually sequestering carbon,” he told IPS.
For Otero, “Argentina is a clear example with its widespread zero tillage system. And Brazil is making incredible progress with agri-silviculture integration.”
The director of IICA also drew attention to the fact that “there are many losers with global warming, but a few winners, which are the temperate countries.”
The Buenos Aires meeting came at a particularly dramatic time for the region: in the last three years, the number of hungry people has increased.
There are 39 million hungry people, despite the fact that, according to FAO, Latin America and the Caribbean produce enough food not only for the region’s 646 million inhabitants but also for 169 million more.
In addition, 294 million people (46 per cent of the population) suffer from some form of malnutrition.
The extraordinary movement of resources generated by climate change could also be an opportunity for the region, according to Deissy Martínez Barón, coordinator of the Center for Research on Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), an institution based in Cali, Colombia.
“Since the 1990s there has been a downward trend in the participation of the agricultural sector in the economies of the countries of the region. This could be due to climate change,” she explained.
Martínez Barón added: “Latin America and the Caribbean contribute 16 percent of world food exports. Potentially by 2050 that proportion could reach 30 percent.”
“In order to do this, it is essential to build sustainable agriculture adapted to the climate. If we do nothing, there are 36 million people in the region whose food security is at risk due to loss of agricultural yields. But climate change can give us the financing we need,” she concluded.
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