Under the title ‘Strategies and instruments to promote sustainable livestock farming in the EU and LAC’, the I EU-LAC Agri-Food Dialogue was held, organised by AL-INVEST Verde, in collaboration with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA). The event, in an online format, brought together almost 300 people from Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean.

The webinar, opened by Emilio Calvo, director of AL-INVEST Verde, was attended by representatives of the European Commission, as well as strategic actors and support agents linked to the cattle farming chain in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. It analysed sustainable livestock farming in the framework of the European Regulation on supply chains free of deforestation and forest degradation (EUDR). The representatives of the institutions on both sides of the oceans highlighted the importance of livestock farming in regional economies.

Josefina Eisele, regional director of the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (GRSB), gave a presentation entitled ‘Synergies and objectives for the reduction of GHG emissions from the global agenda’. In her presentation, she stressed the importance of the private sector working with the public sector and ‘being able to discuss how to contribute to a national agenda’.

There was also a block on ‘Lessons and perspectives in the construction and implementation of policies to promote sustainable livestock farming in LAC’, in which representatives of the Federal Public Ministry (MPF) of Brazil and the Brazilian Association of Meat Exporting Industries (ABIEC) presented the Legal Meat Programme, which is supported by AL-INVEST Verde.

Verónica Durán, director of the Office of Programming and Agricultural Policy of the Ministry of Livestock, Agriculture and Fisheries, presented experience and lessons on public policies for sustainable livestock farming.

Finally, the presentation ‘Mitigation of methane emissions from livestock farming in the EU’ was given by Valerio Abadessa, policy officer at DG AGRI, for whom ‘solutions towards an environmental transition must be realistic from a technical and socio-economic point of view. Otherwise, any progress may not be accessible to all farmers’.

Sustainable livestock farming

Livestock is one of the main sub-sectors of relevance at the agri-food level, contributing 40% to the overall value of agricultural production. It is therefore essential to generate, promote and understand sustainable policies that can be implemented at regional level. Livestock has undergone significant development, driven mainly by population growth, rising per capita incomes in countries of the South and changes in eating habits that increasingly demand greater consumption of animal protein, according to data from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) and IICA.