Mexico: A Biorrational Turn
Due to the increase in consumer demands for the safety of the products offered, there is a global tendency to shift towards bi-rational management agriculture. At the same time there is more awareness or concern about the resistance that some pests and diseases show to chemical products. This is added to the greater demands of the companies, which, by establishing stricter standards, demand guarantees of safety in the agricultural products they purchase for their consumers.
Currently, neither the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) nor the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are the ones who set the final rules of the countries; it is the companies themselves that buy the products, establishing secondary standards with much higher standards to the official regarding residues of agrochemicals in food.
This is pushing farmers to seek new alternatives, with low chemical residues, because companies do not buy products that do not meet these secondary standards imposed by them. Even the agricultural companies already certified as organic that export to the European Union or the US are aiming to have zero waste results, following the global trend of agriculture in the face of growing demands.
This scenario forces us to turn towards a bio-rational agriculture, whose characteristic is not to depend solely on chemical products, but to encourage the use of natural or organic alternatives to coexist in a sustainable manner.
In Mexico, land ownership is mostly state or social property, with a growing percentage of mixed ownership. Private property represents a minority percentage. According to data from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography of Mexico, Inegi, the 20% of Mexican agriculture has industrial characteristics, which means that around 2 millions of agricultural producers are placed in the commercial and professional field of management agricultural. Of this total, the 20% corresponds to producers who are dedicated to organic agriculture, who in their great majority export their products.
In the immediate future many will migrate to organic agriculture, but those who remain in conventional agriculture must exist under this coexistence, because although 100% of chemical products can not be depended on, it can not be done using exclusively organic products.
The term biorational represents any substance of natural origin or similar that possess a unique mode of action, which are not toxic to humans or the environment, and whose effect is not risky for biodiversity.
It is a concept that includes knowledge related to the biological cycle of pests and their bioregulators, and uses all biological and economic knowledge in the context of sustainable agriculture, which goes beyond the traditional method of Integrated Pest Management IPM.
In a biorational management, the quality of agricultural production is sought in terms of yield, product quality and process profitability. It is also sustainable because its first priority is to permanently recover the balance of natural resources, soil, water and biodiversity at all trophic levels.
Biorational products are identified by EPA as different from conventional ones that are used in agricultural activity and are grouped as biochemicals (hormones, enzymes, pheromones and natural agents, such as regulators of the growth of plants and insects), or microbials ( viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa and nematodes).
The characteristics that distinguish the biorational products from the conventional ones are the low levels of toxicity and generally the dose of use is low and fast, they usually work well in IPM programs and reduce the dependence on conventional pesticides.
Source: Blueberrieschile.cl - Blueberriesconsulting.com
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