Chapada dos Guimaraes, Mato Grosso, Brazil, 17 September 2024 (IICA). During the plenary session of the meeting of G20 ministers of agriculture and fourteen other leaders of international agencies and world-renowned scientists, held in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, the Director General of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), Manuel Otero, outlined solutions to the challenges facing the agriculture sector as it endeavours to guarantee global food security against the backdrop of the climate crisis.

The meeting of the G20 Agriculture Group took place in the region known as Chapada dos Guimaraes, 60 kilometres from the state capital of Cuiabá. The Group was created in 2011 to promote international cooperation on critical and strategic issues, such as the sustainability of production, food security, and adaptation to climate change, one of the greatest challenges facing the sector.

The participants witnessed first-hand the new climate scenarios with which agricultural production is having to contend, as Mato Grosso and much of Brazil’s central-west region — of key importance for the country’s grain production and global supplies — have, like large swathes of South America, gone almost 150 days without rain, raising air and soil humidity to critical levels and causing fires that affect air quality.

The ministers and their special guests discussed the challenges facing agriculture with regard to issues such as food and nutrition security, technological innovation, climate change adaptation, and sustainability.

Advantage was also taken of the Ministerial Meeting to prepare for the G20 Leaders’ Summit set to take place in November in Rio de Janeiro with the heads of state and government of the G20 nations in attendance. Five of IICA’s 34 member countries belong to the G20: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico and the USA.

At the meeting in Mato Grosso, IICA was the only international agency invited to make a presentation (lasting nearly 30 minutes) on the challenges facing agriculture in the Americas and across the globe.

Manuel Otero spoke about the need for decisive action to address soil degradation as part of the efforts to strengthen agricultural productivity and reduce environmental impacts, and highlighted IICA’s joint work on the issue with key partners such as Ohio State University, specifically with award-winning scientist Rattan Lal, and the Luiz de Queiroz School of Agriculture (ESALQ) at the University of São Paulo (USP), as well as Bayer, Syngenta and Pepsico, among others.

“In recent years, some 200 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean have been affected by natural disasters, including floods, extreme droughts, and other increasingly extreme weather events that have had an impact on agriculture and soils, and also caused political and economic shocks,” the Director General of IICA observed, stressing the importance of the “Living Soils of the Americas” programme, which the agency specializing in agriculture and rural development is now taking to Africa.

He also noted that agriculture is facing new challenges. In addition to sustainability, food and nutrition security, food safety, and rural and territorial development, issues such as energy security have also become increasingly important.

In that regard, he stressed that “the new frontier of science, technology and innovation offers opportunities for transforming agri-food systems and for producing in impossible environments,” although he also said that the task of tackling climate change and the multidimensional crisis it is causing lies with governments, the private sector, academia, international technical cooperation, financing institutions, and civil society.

“Biofortification and nutrition, synthetic biology, digital agriculture, biofuels, biotechnology, gene editing and soil health are paving the way for efficiency, sustainability, restoration, decarbonisation and the use of biodiversity,” said the director general of IICA, indicating that “the future is not random and depends on us.”

Invited to Cuiabá by the Minister of Agriculture and Livestock of Brazil Carlos Fávaro, the IICA director general also met with the president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) Álvaro Lario, and Azarbaijan Minister of Agriculture Majnun Mammadov.

The meeting with the Azerbaijani minister took place after Otero invited the G20 ministers of agriculture to visit the Home of Sustainable Agriculture of the Americas, a pavilion that IICA will be operating at COP29, which will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November. For the third consecutive year, the pavilion will allow the voice of the agriculture sector to be heard at the world’s biggest forum on environmental issues.

Otero also met with Livio Tedeschi, president of BASF Agricultural Solutions, chair of CropLife International and co-chair of the B20 Working Group on Sustainable Food Systems and Agriculture, a G20 business group, and took part in the meeting of the members of the CAS (Southern Agricultural Council), comprised of the ministers of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile and Bolivia.