Why in Plan País Argentina do we choose to say "Bioeconomy"?

Conceptual evolution from agriculture to bioeconomy | ✍️Por Fernando Vilella

⏳ In the seniority the farmers traded They delivered wheat grain and received flour from the community mills. They delivered wheat grain and received flour from the community mills. The urban population that was not self-sufficient was only a small part of the population, they were those in charge of governance, the clergy, the guilds such as the masons, the soldiers in times of war (almost always), some very few artists.

🏭 With the industrial revolutionThe number of people dependent on others to produce their food increases sharply. Cities grew and the scale of quantities and qualities became more complex. Actors appeared who traded without producing, such as general stores, greengrocers, butchers and bakers. In the economy, the concepts of primary production raw material suppliers (farmers, miners, etc.), the secondary o industry that processes these inputs and services, basically trade. When agro-based products are processed, be they food, fibre or forestry, they are called agro-industry.

At that stage the consumers were workers 👷🏼 which generated almost the only income for families with many children born 👶🏼, few survived, with a wife who used almost all her income for food or heating in cold environments (firewood or coal) from very little processed products (flour), bought every day (without cold chain) in cash. Their education was elementary school and their quality requirements were non-existent.

Post Second World War there is a social revolution which represents the fullest incorporation of the woman 🙋🏻‍♀️ to the world of work and higher education. This changes the family to the traditional family of 2 children on average 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦, who have less time for food and there appears the fortnightly/monthly shopping at weekends in a supermarket facilitated by refrigerators (cold chain) and paid for with credit cards. This cold chain makes it possible to bring in food from other regions of the country or the world 📈 The secondary school level passes to secondary school and with it the information and quality requirements increase. They buy agro-industrial products such as noodles, tomato sauce or grated cheese, which they use in their kitchen. Producers are conceptually and sometimes geographically distant. In this context, economic theory does not correspond to reality.

At the end of the 1950s at Harvard University a new vision appeared, that of Agribusiness, which tried to capture this complexity and adjust production to consumption and first Davis and Goldberg, and then Ray Goldberg (1968) defined "(...) an Agribusiness Commodity System brings together all the participants in the production, processing, and marketing of a simple agricultural-livestock product. This system includes the field and the people who work in it, the storage operations, the processors, the wholesalers, the supermarkets or retailers in the flow of commodities from the initial inputs to the final consumer. It also includes the institutions that affect and coordinate the successive stages of the commodity flow such as governments, futures and options markets, and trade associations".

In this more complex system, in order to analyse it, it is necessary to look not only at the productive actors (the organisations) but also at the rules of the game (the institutions) and also the technological ones. We move from the concepts of the Neoclassical Economics to another vision in which the theoretical core is made up of the new institutional economythe industrial organisationthe transaction coststhe property rightsthe agencythe evolutionismthe conventions and the regulation.

In this century, two relevant issues are very visible, namely the population growth 👫🏻(demanding more and better food and services) and the environmental issue 🌎 with the serious effects of Climate Change. Its origins are attributed to the massive use of energy based on hydrocarbons (oil, gas and coal), massive deforestation to expand cities or the agricultural frontier (the immense forest that covered almost all of Europe no longer existed) and the use of chemical products in industry and agriculture that pollute water, air and soil.

On the other hand, although on a historical scale the average human being has never lived better or for so many years, there are 800 million people who do not have access to the minimum daily calorie requirements for their quality of life and income inequality is extremely high. This means that not only environmentally sustainable but also socially just production systems must be certified ⚖️.

🔬 This century is also that of the exponential growth of scienceThe 20th century had been the century of physics and chemistry, especially ICT and advanced biology. Biotechnologies 🧪 together with computer science are achieving unthinkable successes, for example, in less than a year multiple vaccines were developed for COVID, then the problems were of a pharmaceutical industry scale, due to lack of vials or syringes or other types of preservatives or cold chain. It has never happened before that the limit was industrial and not science.

💁🏽‍♂️ The new global consumer is a middle class with few or no children, with a university education, spends very little of their income on food, consumes most of their food prepared outside the home ready to eat just by heating ♨️ or other minor procedure or directly in premises outside the place where they sleep (no longer far from the producer of inputs, also from the pans with which it was prepared), buys it via the web 💻 and pays electronically. Their demands on the quality of the product, as well as on the production system in its environmental and social dimensions, are maximum and growing, requiring certifications and traceability.

👉🏼 Faced with these characteristics of consumers and their suppliers, this evolution of complexity that we are describing as the passage from agriculture, to agribusiness, to agribusiness requires adding environmental and social impacts in depth, and there the Bioeconomy 🌿 gives an answer to it.

🧑🏼‍🔬 The vital and irreplaceable equation of photosynthesis, where CO2 and H2O are transformed into sugars and oxygen, not only generates the only source of energy for life, but also extracts and fixes CO2 from the atmosphere. Modern farmers can capture that CO2 in plant or animal biomass and transform them into products that capture those greenhouse gases (GHG), that will be more efficient if they do it with a lot of applied science that amplifies productivity with the minimum environmental and social impact in circular economy circuits.

📌 To the concepts of agribusiness and agribusiness is added the environmental and social part that can give certainty from certifications and traceability of its low footprint.

💡 The concept of the bioeconomy then incorporates the scientific breakthrough to sustainably produce from triple whammy increasingly complex products, not only better food, but also bioenergies, bioinputs, bioplastics, medicines to replace and improve those that have got us this far but which, if we continue to use them, will make us extinct.

🎯 For all the above reasons, one of our 5 pillars (the others are mining, knowledge economy, tourism and energy), in Plan País Argentina we do not call it agro, agro-industry, agrobioindustry or similar, but rather we combine economy, environment, science, innovation, technology and progress in one synthesis, in one and only one word: Bioeconomy.

💪🏼 A word that all Argentines must know, defend and advocate as a factor in growth for our homeland.

🙌🏼 Let us work together in the elaboration of a State Policy Plan that transcends political cycles and allows us to develop economically to become a prosperous, inclusive and sustainable country.

🤝 A Citizen-supported plan massively; a cultural change that will allow us to inhabit a Federal Argentina, republican, participatory, productive, integrated y regenerative that includes all of us.

Citizens: let's set the agenda.

Join us at www.planpaisargentina.org

#YoIWantAPlanforMyCountry 🎯

#PlanCountryArgentina 💙

#5Pillars 📌

#FixTheAgenda 📒

#Bioeconomics 🌿

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