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Climate change and family and business agricultural production in Latin America

Abstract:

One of the greatest current concerns worldwide refers to the global warming of the planet caused by the excessive and continuous emission of greenhouse gases, whose effects could be reversed by sequestering and mitigating the excess of such gases. For treating this subject, the authors used the deductive method and a documentary, descriptive and comparative research. The article is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the evolution of the food production model applied in the Latin America and Caribbean region, considering two different modes of production: Peasant family agriculture and corporate-entrepreneur agriculture, whose objectives, use of production factors and, consequently, their behavior and results, are different, but affect the environment differently. The second part reviews, and compares the negative effects of the application of these two modes of production. We made a distinction between agricultural and livestock activities and their implications for the satisfaction of domestic food needs, according to the objectives of maintaining and/or increasing the population’s food security levels. The population is characterized by low indices of social and economic well-being, on the one hand, and by being under pressure from the need for sufficient foreign exchange to finance the economic development of the countries of the region, which are subject to so many shortages, on the other. A greater imbalance in the achievement of these two objectives will be reflected, as it has been historically, in the intensity of climate change at the regional level, with its consequences for the global level in critical environmental areas such as the Amazon basin. One of the main differential elements in the two modes of production examined refers to the form of cultivation applied (monoculture models or sowing of a specific crop and those of polyculture or diversified crops); the activity developed (agricultural or livestock), examining its negative effects on the environment; and, finally, reviewing the main public and private policy measures applied in the primary sector (organizational, technological and agro-ecological), from a short-and long-term perspective, in order to mitigate the effects of climate change.