Colombian President Gustavo Petro stated on Tuesday that agrarian reform is key to promoting equality in society and highlighted the importance of protecting the Amazon to ensure food security. We are in a tension between inequality and the extinction of humanity, we need to balance society from the point of view of equality to once again place the flag of life on planet Earth as the main guide for human and political action, Petro said. He added that most of the credit money that the private banking sector provides to agriculture is for cattle ranching in the Amazon jungle. In Colombia, the Amazon is where the rivers are born that will later go to Brazil to feed the largest extensions of land, and this also happens in Ecuador and Peru, so the salvation of the jungle begins in our country, the head of state said. It is in the foothills where the water that begins the salvation or revitalization of the Amazon jungle is born, Petro emphasized. He also criticized that the country's private banking sector issues large volumes of credit to grow ethanol (ethyl alcohol) through sugarcane on large tracts of land. What is ethanol used for? To put gasoline in cars, and it is not used for anything else. And if fertile land is used for the machine, where is the food for human beings? This need, in terms of land and field, is called agrarian reform, the president concluded. The statement was made during the opening of the II International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20) in Cartagena de Indias. The conference, organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Colombian government, will for five days discuss access to land and secure tenure, sustainable land use, territorial planning, and strengthening agri-food systems. The meeting is being held twenty years after the first ICARRD conference, which took place in Porto Alegre (Brazil) in March 2006 and put the peasants' right to land tenure at the center of the international debate to combat structural inequality.
