The grass is always greener at home: Uruguay is defending its pastoral systems
Anyone who has had the opportunity to explore some corners of this beautiful country knows that the identity of our nation breathes through pastoral-based livestock. No globalist or postmodern imposition can erase the identity of a people who live and struggle to preserve their invaluable grassland biome — of which we can never know enough — and subsist through it. Science and state policy are aiming to preserve this way of life. However, as I mentioned in another piece, I believe we have not sufficiently spread the word about our achievements.
Not long ago, I took an eight-year-old girl to the Municipal Planetarium to watch a brief documentary on climate change and ecosystem deterioration worldwide. The sponsoring embassy and prevailing hegemonic discourse could have spoiled what I was about to encounter, but I remain disappointed. To explain to the children that the planet is heading for catastrophe, they only say that the dispute over arable land is leading to deforestation, and that most of this land is used for livestock rather than feeding humans, perpetuating a false dichotomy. Finally, those who have led the world into chaos with consumption levels unviable for the planet’s physical limits explain to third-world children — as they watch in awe — that reducing their consumption of meat and dairy can help the planet. And recycling, of course.
On another day, some time ago, I attended a fantastic activity where a beekeeper educated children about bees. His effort was incredible, and the artistic display he put on to explain the role of bees was simply marvelous; the children were captivated. However, the beekeeper decided to use some audiovisual resources to explain certain issues. In one of the videos he showed, an animation depicted what would happen in a world without bees: the protagonist of the video ended up naked and with an empty house because all the raw materials stopped being produced in the process, and a social crisis ensued due to shortages of goods and jobs. I had seen fear-inducing environmental education before, but this one exceeded my expectations. Following such a prediction, the solution proposed was to place flower pots, stop using insecticides, buy organic food, etc. Once again, an individualistic solution, with the necessary eco-phobic component to neutralize any collective action conceived from territorial conditions.
I am not interested in exhaustively analyzing everything that is wrong with this discourse in these cases. What I regret is that there is no state policy defining the foundations of environmental education desired for national conditions and combating this cascade of fallacies coming from the developed world. Children will leave these exhibitions thinking that forests are being cleared here to make way for cows, and that the agricultural frontier is managed the same way as in the Amazon or other parts of the world. We will not be able to discuss with them the importance of livestock in processing industrial by-products that would otherwise be discarded, nor all the mistakes of linear thinking about the use of arable land for forage. Nor can we address the problem of bee mortality or other living beings from a comprehensive perspective, looking at the major anthropogenic actions that cause the phenomenon, the need for legislation, and the funding of technologies to replace harmful practices. Nor how silvopastoral systems are crucial allies of beekeeping in our conditions. Pedagogically, we draw the curtain, and with adults, it often doesn’t end up being different.
While the use of fossil fuels represents a net production of greenhouse gases, livestock systems participate in recycling the emissions they generate, in the dynamics of the carbon cycle. They also provide territorial and cultural roots, with inhabitants safeguarding landscapes and their intrinsic resources. This is well known by the people who live and work here. I remember an advisor from the Ministry recounting how he hosted a delegation from the European Union who couldn’t understand why Uruguay wasn’t clearing trees to make way for cows because they did it in the Amazon…tomato, tomato.
As Mónica Bruckerman explains, there is a logic of domination in what the explanations from the North silence about the causes of the climate crisis, leading to the importance of Latin America and the Caribbean being aware of their implications in environmental geopolitics. Since the argument explaining the crisis is not sustained, solutions from the developed world are simplistic, do not fit our reality, and above all, are failing.
A study recently published in the journal Nature notes that EU conservation policies tend to reduce yields; they force importing food to meet that demand, increasing land use and impacting more distant systems with limited control. Practices that have recently sparked controversy, such as rewilding, are conservation initiatives by powerful foreigners that often face valid criticisms from a scientific perspective. The largest food production lobbies in Europe are behind environmental policies that favor their interests, above comprehensive environmental protection, and end up as the main beneficiaries of Europe’s conservation subsidies.
This approach is shifting the necessary alignment between science and politics needed to carry out a fair and effective ecological transition. The article continues to delve into various aspects, including how abandoning the maximization of yields through the adoption of purely organic production systems — free from any agrochemicals — can be detrimental to sustainability, increasing the use of arable land that displaces natural ecosystems.
In the face of all this, our compatriots work in ways that make me proud. We have conducted research with very limited resources and investment, achieving an excellent level to propose our own solutions to the problems we face.
The Livestock and Climate project carried out by the Ministry of Livestock, Agriculture, and Fisheries is a brilliant state policy whose importance we may not fully appreciate until the coming years. It aims to “promote sustainable increases in productivity and net income in family and medium-sized livestock systems, and contribute to mitigating climate change, restoring degraded lands, and improving resilience in systems through a co-innovation process.” The project contributes to the process of ceasing to overestimate the impact of different environmental variables on our country’s systems by using coefficients and analysis frameworks from abroad, created for other systems. By using national coefficients, we can measure environmental impact not only more accurately but also more fairly for our productive models, strategically planning their adaptation.
National information is pointing in several directions to address this issue. To name a few examples, it proposes managing the different dynamics that contribute to methane degradation, the gas with the greatest greenhouse effect capacity and the most harmful emissions from livestock, with several variables affecting the trend called “carbon-neutral meat production.” This can be achieved by increasing its mitigation capacity through the use of high-nutrient pastures, increasing pregnancy rates, or through genetic improvement of breeds, to name a few.
Regarding food quality, avenues are being analyzed that explain the different composition of fatty acids in meat depending on cattle feed, concluding in part that pasture-based meat (even finished in feedlots) has the lowest oxidation of fatty acids and the best quality of them, constituting a healthier alternative than feedlot-produced meat.
In terms of carbon sequestration, researcher Fernando Lattanzi explains that pastures capture carbon from the soil and fix it through their roots, which in turn protect the soil from erosion.
Can you imagine what the interest and identity attachment to our prairie ecosystem could represent for all Uruguayans, even a fraction of what glaciers represent in Inuit culture, the Andean plateau for the Quechuas, or the Amazon rainforest for the hundreds of indigenous peoples living there? Our (urban) children may know more about other ecological regions than our own.
National research is a real battleground to present to the world. If at some point in the future we understand that there is no climate policy possible in a country of these dimensions without making international policy, as well understood by island countries, we can demand from the great powers that we are suffering the effects of unsustainable growth in which we do not participate and, in turn, defend our own way of relating to natural resources not only from slurs but also propose it as a possible and replicable alternative.
And as the columnist Leo Lagos brilliantly concludes in an old article where he dedicates himself to debunking myths about livestock: “If I were the UN’s community manager, I would be adding right now that a hamburger made from grass-fed beef in Uruguay is less harmful to the planet than a soy-based burger.”
Article in Spanish here
