The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, also known as Embrapa, operates under the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture and has the goal of providing solutions for sustainable agriculture in its 43 research centers.
Celso Moretti is the current president of Embrapa, and he's been with the corporation for 25 years as a researcher.
"Basically, our mission is to provide solutions to the problems of Brazilian agriculture. We work basically from A to Z, from alfalfa to zucchini. Embrapa was established back in 1973 when Brazil was a food-insecure country," said Moretti.
Initially, Brazil was a net food importer, importing beef from Europe, milk from the US, and beans from Mexico. As a result, rural food poverty was widespread.
"We didn't have the technology for tropical agriculture back then," said Moretti.
"We hired and sent 1,000 researchers abroad so they could get their masters at the best universities. They came back, and they are now developing what we call tropical agriculture," said Moretti.
Moretti has been traveling the world, bringing his sustainability talks to share the idea and show how Brazil can actually produce food and protect the environment simultaneously.
"We have been transforming Brazil and its agriculture during these last five decades, and there are three different pillars. Number one, we transformed acidic and poor soils into fertile land. We did that in the Brazilian Savannah. We are talking about an area of 204 million hectares. The second pillar was tropical agriculture that adapts to the tropics, plants, and animals," said Moretti.
