Alysson Paolinelli, the mentor of modern Brazilian agro, dies

Died this Wednesday, June 29, the former Minister of Agriculture Alysson Paolinelli, aged 86. He had been hospitalized for a month at the Hospital Madre Tereza, in Belo Horizonte, and had health complications after surgery to implant a prosthesis in his hip.

Paulinelli, still a young agronomist, led the transformation of Brazilian agriculture in the 1970s, which until then had a deficit and depended on imports, into an international power, which today feeds more than 1 billion people in about 180 countries. For his work, he was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2021 and 2022.

As Minister of Agriculture under Ernesto Geisel, Paolinelli was one of those responsible for structuring the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), with units spread across the country. It was his idea to bring together 1500 of the best agronomy students and send them abroad with master’s and doctoral scholarships, in order to learn about the most modern technologies and tropicalize them on their return to Brazil. So, ahead of his time, he “invented” benchmarking in agriculture.

Conquest of the Cerrado changed the game in Brazilian agriculture

Thanks to Paolinelli’s visionary action, the Brazilian Cerrado, until then considered unusable for agriculture, was transformed into one of the largest food production centers in the world. Recalling the Polocentro project, which aimed to incorporate part of the Cerrado into agricultural production, Paolinelli said, in an interview with Embrapa, in 2021: “The producers showed that they wanted to be influenced by the innovations that worked in their neighbors. When we left the government, there were already more than 3 million hectares of Cerrado in use in Brazil, which guaranteed the country the balance of trade, because in five years we became almost self-sufficient”.

The work developed by Paolinelli impressed even the agronomist Norman Borlaug, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for the so-called “Green Revolution”, which multiplied the production of grains and cereals through genetic improvement, saving millions of people from hunger. On one of his visits to Brazil in the 1990s, Borlaug stated that the cultivation of the Brazilian cerrado was as or more important than the Green Revolution itself.

For former Minister of Agriculture Roberto Rodrigues, Paolinelli was the greatest Brazilian still alive. In the preface to the book “Alysson Paolinelli, the visionary of tropical agriculture”, Rodrigues wrote that as a result of his strategic actions, “Brazilian families were able to spend much less on food, allocating resources to items such as education, health, culture and consumer goods durable”.

Brazilians owe a debt to Paolinelli

“It was the greatest revolution in assisted tropical agriculture on the planet. It is sustainable, which makes a huge difference in the current competitive scenario of the global agribusiness market. There is not a single Brazilian who does not owe a huge debt to Paolinelli: rural producers, who from him they received the technology and the modern agricultural policy that made them internationally competitive; and the consumers, who began to feed themselves more and with better quality and economy. And the whole of Brazil, which changed from the bitter condition of importer to a proud provider of food to the world”, said Rodrigues.

Last year, in an interview with Gazeta do Povo – “Brazil will kill the world’s hunger, if stupidity and ideology don’t get in the way” – Paolinelli expressed satisfaction at his international recognition as the leader of the so-called “sustainable tropical agricultural revolution”. For him, using only the already anthropized areas of the Cerrado, without touching 54% of the still preserved native vegetation, “Brazil can supply the world with available technologies”. But he warned of the danger of being inspired by leftist models from Venezuela and Argentina. “It is not for lack of resources that the people will starve. It’s really stupid. Ideology leads to it,” he stated.

The governor of Minas Gerais, Romeu Zema (Novo), mourned the death of the former minister. “We lost a great miner today. Former minister Alysson was certainly one of the biggest names that agriculture in Brazil has ever had and if agro today in Brazil is this power, which feeds almost everyone, that is due to him. I had the satisfaction of living with him and learning a lot from him”, said the governor to Itatiaia radio. Paolinelli’s wake will be in Belo Horizonte, at the Palácio da Liberdade, seat of the state government.