The brake of customs to incorporate sustainable agriculture in the Mexican fields
As the population grows and the global climate changes, the need of more efficient and more sustainable agriculture is necessary all over the world. Particularly in Mexico, the additional need to improve the application of the technology of the labs into the fields gets more and more urgent. This is why in Mexico, public institutions together with private universities and companies are starting to recruit people, ideas, and resources to accelerate this process. On August 19th, 2021, a webinar was celebrated discussing the particular topic of making more sustainable agriculture in Mexico, where the speakers were representing specific and very different backgrounds: the governmental instance for agriculture development (SADER), the private university Tec de Monterrey, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) and the beer company Heineken. This is a summary of the topics that were talked about in the meeting.
From the point of view of the speakers the biggest challenges -and if we look at the bright side: the biggest opportunities- are the possible low yield of certain varieties, the efficiency of the use of space, of water and fertilizers, together with the better exploitation of residues. Very importantly is the adaptation of the plants and practices from farmers, to the new realities that global warming and the current pandemic are bringing and making visible.
In Mexico, there are some public institutions working in parallel with the biotechnological needs that the farmers and the fields for human consumption demand, such as the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), The National Institute of Forestry, Agricultural and Livestock Research (INIFAP) and public universities. However, one of the reasons for the biotechnological gap observed in our country is due to the insufficient channels to set a consistent and efficient communication between academia and the real problems in the field: academic institutions are very interested in the release of more and more important papers but not so much in the put into practice of their discoveries. Additionally, the economic model supports more new foreign big companies interested in applying technology within their own facilities, which perpetuates the big biotechnological gap. It becomes again visible the important need for collaboration between public and private instances.
The best part is that the understanding of what is necessary is getting clearer and further steps are approaching to set new collaborations and new infrastructure. Luckily for the new (and not so new) generations here lies an important job niche. As usual, the biggest and most important part to incorporate new changes is breaking with the so daily costumes that does not allow us to accept a new beginning in sustainable agriculture but that it has already started to happen precisely with these types of talks which also work as platforms for new future collaborations
