Costa Rican Minister of Agriculture, Luis Felipe Arauz Cavallini, speaks at the high-level closing plenary session from the second day of the Global Landscapes Forum 2015, in Paris, France alongside COP21.

The closing ceremony takes a closer look at some of the initiatives that emerged through the Forum and offers a space for tracking progress as well as outlining next steps.

Sunday, 6 December 2015
Global Landscapes Forum, Paris, France
#GLFCOP21 #ThinkLandscape

Transcript

Thank you. The most challenging thing is to be brief, but I’ll do my best.

Also on the topic of youth, I’d like to say that when we talk about sustainability we talk about the environment, we talk about economics, we talk about social justice. But, especially in agriculture, we cannot talk about sustainable agriculture if we don’t have farmers.

So we have an aging population of farmer. We need for the younger generations to become in love with agriculture again if we really want our agriculture to be sustainable. But that is not going to happen if agriculture does not address the challenge of food security and production. That is not going to happen if agriculture continues to reproduce poverty around the world.

So we need to address those challenges without compromising our environment. We need to address food security production in the face of climate change in the fruitful relationship that agriculture has with the environment. Being agriculture a victim of climate change, but also a contributor to climate change, it also provides opportunities to mitigate climate change. But that needs different approaches.

We cannot continue doing business as usual. We need more agroecological approaches to understand the complex relationships that occur in a landscape, in order to be able to have a really sustainable agriculture within the landscape framework. So we need better knowledge, knowledge management. We need better research, better information, and better knowledge to bring to the field this knowledge.

So we need to move from an agriculture that is intensive in inputs to an agriculture that is intensive in knowledge. And that’s the only way that the younger generation is going to fall in love with agriculture.

Thank you very much.