I reread the article about innovation that I wrote in 2018 and realized that innovation continues to be one of the greatest needs in Brazil. Possibly in a slightly different context. Innovations are not limited to new products and processes. We also need organizational and communication innovations, which I will cover in this article.

While dealing with new products and processes, more easily recognized as innovations, our agriculture has been extremely effective in producing them. I call “agriculture” all production of food, fiber, bioenergy and ecosystem services. There are countless examples of new technologies to cite. We learned, like no other nation, to carry out biological control; use pesticides and fertilizers rationally; symbiotically fix nitrogen; mechanically harvest annual crops, coffee and sugar cane; combine biotechnology and classical genetic improvement; vegetatively propagate various crops; do direct planting and minimum cultivation.

But I would like to highlight the development of production systems, using perennial crops or annual crops in sequences, which allows the land to be kept occupied at practically all times of the year when water and light are available to support plant growth.

In annual crops, it is common to carry out two cultivation cycles without using irrigation. In terms of perennial crops, sugar cane and eucalyptus possibly correspond to the most efficient alternatives ever developed by humanity to capture and store solar energy in their biomass. Furthermore, they have contributed to making the Brazilian energy matrix one of the most sustainable in the world, but this fact is little known in our society.

When it comes to organization, Brazil is a country with high State participation, at its three levels, in the economy and in practically all of our daily activities. Most Brazilians are unaware of this fact, but the public budget in Brazil corresponds to approximately two thirds of our Gross Domestic Product. And the execution of this budget occurs 65.3% at the federal level and only 19.4% and 15.3% at the state and municipal levels, respectively.

Of the total budget in 2022, 52.2% was dedicated to paying debt charges and social security, totaling 3.4 trillion reais. This information is easily accessible and appears in public documents, produced annually by the National Treasury, entitled Balanço do Setor Público Nacional. It is worth studying them to better understand how our country is organized. And why do I start this text with this information? For two main reasons:
1) on many occasions the State's logic is not to promote development, but to increase revenue;
2) we urgently need to discuss the size and model of the State we want, which would involve an administrative reform that, in my humble opinion, is very far from occurring.

We also live in an extremely regulated country. All of our activities are impacted by some standard. Some are modern and efficient and others are outdated and obsolete. Our Biosafety Law, the Forest Code and the Regulatory Frameworks for Innovation and Sanitation are examples of functional legislation that contribute to the organization of sectors of the economy, even though there are criticisms.

Considering that tax reform is underway, we can cite as examples of old legislation that needs to be reformed, the Pesticides Law of 1989 and the Public Procurement Law of 1993. The Pesticides Law predates the routine use of nanotechnology, biotechnology and precision agriculture, for example. And the bidding law does not prioritize quality or sustainability and is limited to establishing rituals that also do not guarantee that the expenditure objectives will be achieved. Updating and harmonizing standards should be a constant activity in a young democracy like ours. Unfortunately it hasn't been.

Now dealing with the need to innovate in communication, I have participated in several events linked to agriculture in which the observation that we need to improve our communication with society has been recurring. Even among those who work in agriculture or agribusiness, communication is poor. There is fundamental information about the sector that is not shared or disseminated on the scale it should be. The lack of knowledge that currently strikes me most is about our energy matrix and the contribution of biomass to its sustainability.

Even professionals who work with bioenergy are totally or partially unaware of this information.

Regarding energy sources, we recommend consulting the National Energy Balance Summary Reports that are published annually. The latest available is the 2022 National Energy Balance, which provides information from 2021. That year, we observed that renewable sources contributed 44.7% of all energy production in Brazil, vastly exceeding the world average (14.15%) and the average for member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (only 11.5%). Sugarcane is the main responsible for the production of renewable energy, having contributed 16.4% of the total. Firewood, charcoal and eucalyptus bleach, mainly, contributed 9.2%. Biodiesel corresponded to 0.44%. The total share of biomass and its products was 27.63%. For reference, the shares of hydraulic, wind and solar energy (thermal and photovoltaic) were 11%, 2.32% and 5.5%, respectively. The production of hydraulic and solar energy, combined, is equivalent to the production of energy from sugar cane. This culture produces a lot of energy.

It is important to emphasize that developed countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development are not examples in terms of renewable energy production. On the other hand, Brazil has become an example on a global scale in terms of renewable energy production, with a significant and growing participation of biomass, solar energy and wind energy. This fact needs to be widely publicized and known nationally and internationally. We need and deserve to be recognized for this.

Returning to the roles of agriculture in Brazil, if the contribution to energy production is notable, equally notable is the ability to employ, generate income and surplus. commercial, produce food, fiber and ecosystem services, such as carbon assimilation. We do all this using approximately 7.5% of our territory and with the possibility of increasing our production, without having to deforest new areas. We have a Forest Code and inspections that guarantee this. The increase in our production has been based on the use of technology to increase productivity.

But to remain competitive, Brazilian agriculture and agroindustry urgently need to update several standards. The review of these standards must be based on knowledge and have sustainable development and the good of our people as objectives.