Brazil hosted a three-day “Second Brazil-Africa Dialogue on Food Security, the Fight Against Hunger and Rural Development” in Brasilia from May 20-22. Ministers of Agriculture, representatives of cooperatives and private businessmen from 44 African nations participated, along with leaders of 9 African and global agricultural programs.
“No country in the world can be sovereign if its people do not have the right to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner each and every day,” yet 730 million people in this world suffer from hunger, President Inácio Luiz Lula da Silva stated in opening the High-Level Dialogue which concluded the conference on May 22. But hunger, he insisted, is not caused by nature, nor the weather, drought or rain, “We human beings are in a position to change this [hunger], however poor our country may be. It is only a matter of prioritizing.” People need to eat; they need drinking water, and they need electricity, a basic requirement for a country to grow, he specified. Brazil will pay its historic debt to Africa from the slave trade through technology transfer, “so you can produce some of what we produce,” he offered.
The dialogue concentrated on exchanging experiences in modernizing agriculture and aquaculture practices. Large parts of Africa and Brazil have a similar climate and soil, which facilitates technology transfer between them, Brazilian Agriculture and Livestock Minister Carlos Fávaro reminded the first panel of the High-Level Dialogue, whose subject was “Sustainable and Climate-Resilient Agrifood Systems and the Importance of Family Farming—National Experiences.” He pointed out that 50 years ago, Brazil had been a food importer, but the first major step toward changing that was the creation of a public agricultural research company, EMBRAPA, which transformed the nation’s agriculture through genetic improvement of animals and seeds and the development of appropriate production practices. The delegations spent the first two days of the Dialogue visiting Brazilian agriculture improvement programs, including EMBRAPA’s semi-arid program center, which had succeeded in transforming “land seen as doomed to drought” into a major fruit-producing region.
