Jaime Breilh, consecuencias de los agronegocios en la salud

Jaime Breilh is an internationally renowned Ecuadorian physician and director of the Center for Research and Laboratories for the Evaluation of Impacts on Collective Health at the Andean University of Ecuador. His studies focus on the social, environmental, and health consequences of agribusiness. During his visit to Buenos Aires, he appeared on Canal Abierto and shared profound insights on the importance of science combined with the needs of populations, and on the negative impacts of systems that massively extract natural resources for commercial purposes. “We observe that societies reproduce themselves around capital and its accumulation. This means the concentration of resources and massive social exclusion, and this has health consequences because it imposes ways of life that are pathogenic, that are unhealthy,” he explains. “Extractivism is the defining characteristic of our time. The acceleration of the capitalist system of the fourth industrial revolution,” he says, “imposes producing quickly, living quickly, and dying quickly. This is what has dramatically exacerbated its flaws,” Professor Breilh concludes. Furthermore, regarding ways to understand and develop tools to counteract these effects, he explains: “There is a science that is useful and functional to the power of capital, that hides the context, that erases the roots and presents only the effects of what happens. The best research is that which is carried out together with its people, working to build knowledge about what we want to transform. This is not just a matter of goodwill, nor an ethical relief, but an epistemological problem of knowledge: the deepest, most powerful, and transformative knowledge is that which is produced by a critical academy alongside a people mobilized for their lives. And if it has the backing of a democratic government, it is wonderful; there, a platform is completed for working toward profound change.” Follow us: www.canalabierto.com.ar www.facebook.com/CanalAbierto   / canalabiertoar   instagram.com/canalabierto WhatsApp: http://bit.ly/WhatsAppCanalAbierto #jaimebreilh #agribusiness #health