Proposals of Peasant Agriculture for Climate Change

Introduction The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), signed in 1992, brings together countries in a worldwide commitment to contain global warming. With the Paris Agreement, signed in 2015, this commitment is renewed and takes on an emergency character, challenging the legal field to think of strategies that establish, in the connection of national and international spaces, the duty to act to guarantee the continuity of all forms of life on the planet. The transformations required on an emergency basis to contain the advance of global warming are structural and lead to the need to rethink the entire production process. The context used in this chapter portrays Brazilian rural development in the face of the climate emergency. In agricultural production, there is a clear contradiction between the emergence of climate change and the continued exploitation of export-oriented monocultures, known as agribusiness. The history of the word ‘agribusiness’ began in the 1940s at the Harvard Business School, with Donald K. Davis and the intention of creating a disciplinary area of studies on agriculture and business, based on liberalism and aimed at reducing the role of the state in regulation and opening up to private initiative (Pompeia 2021, 43–46). The expression appeared in the Brazilian public arena between the 1950s and 1960s (Pompeia 2021, 87). This period was marked by the debate between conservative and progressive forces about development and was interrupted by the military coup of 1964 (Pompeia 2021, 90).