The 68-year-old Vilella was a Professor in the Faculty of Agronomy at the University of Buenos Aires for 48 years, also serving as Dean and occupying several other positions. He used these roles to champion the potential of the bioeconomy for production development.

The presentation was made jointly by IICA and the Fund for the Development of the Indigenous Peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean (FILAC), which promotes the development in harmony with the environment of the region’s indigenous peoples, communities and organizations.

The institution, which has members in Canada and Mexico, as well as the United States, has been working assiduously to develop greenhouse gas inventories and other tools to provide precise and verifiable information about the environmental footprint of meat production and industry. In this way it is demonstrating its commitment to the climate change mitigation and adaptation goals assumed by the international community under the 2015 Paris Agreement.

During a panel organized by the Business Council for International Understanding (BCIU) of the United States, Bayer and IICA, Vilsack capitalized on the presence of the other ministers of Agriculture of the Americas to underscore the importance of the region for the planet’s food and nutrition security.

In many areas of South America, flooding can be taking place in one region at the same time that droughts are affecting another. Some production ecosystems could of course benefit from an adequate water supply following long periods of scanty rainfall.

As they did at the United Nations Food Systems Summit in 2021 and at COP27, held in Egypt in 2022, the ministers of Agriculture, alongside IICA, presented a united position to guarantee global food security and defend common interests.