The statement from GPS, a group that includes the main private agro-industrial entities of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, was released at the House of Sustainable Agriculture of the Americas, the pavilion that IICA and its strategic partners set up in the AgriZone during COP30.
Belém do Pará, Brazil, November 14, 2025 (IICA) – The only sector that can capture carbon economically is agriculture, said Marcelo Regúnaga, general coordinator of the Group of Southern Producer Countries (GPS) in a note released at COP30.
O GPS é uma rede da qual participam as principais entidades agroindustriais privadas da Argentina, Brasil, Paraguai e Uruguai, e que mantém uma estreita aliança com o Instituto Interamericano de Cooperação para a Agricultura (IICA).
The GPS network is a constant generator of scientific knowledge, which has made significant contributions to demonstrating that agriculture can be an important part of the solution to environmental challenges, through different productive alternatives such as the recovery of degraded soils, afforestation, silvopastoral production systems and direct seeding.
“The countries of the Southern Cone of America have a high potential to attract investment and implement solutions aimed at carbon sequestration in agro-industrial activities, based on their enormous endowment of natural resources and the technological developments that are already evident in their agribusinesses,” said Regúnaga in a statement released at the House of Sustainable Agriculture of the Americas, the pavilion that IICA and its strategic partners set up in AgriZone during COP30.
Financing
Regúnaga drew attention to the fact that, in order to advance solutions of great global importance, mechanisms must be found to finance, with public and private sources, the investments that allow the full potential of the agricultural sector to be deployed.
“Global warming affecting the planet is the result of greenhouse gas emissions that accumulated in the atmosphere for almost two centuries, due to industrialization processes, especially in developed countries,” he explained.
Regúnaga, an agronomist and agricultural economist with extensive experience as a consultant to international organizations, said that scientific studies and simulation models of the evolution of emissions from different economic sectors show that the only sector that can sequester carbon economically is agriculture or other nature-based solutions.
“In other words, agriculture is not a problem, as has been suggested in some previous COPs, but rather, it is part of the solution to the global challenges of food security; the reduction of carbon in the atmosphere; the energy transition—through biofuels and other bioeconomic and circular economy initiatives—and economic and social development in the least developed countries,” he concluded.
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