Embrapa wants to sell idle land for research

With 106,000 hectares of land across the country and many of them being idle, Embrapa decides that it wants to sell part of this heritage in 2020, but with one condition: that the budget be reinvested in research.

In an interview with Agência Brasil, the company’s president and researcher, Luiz Celso Moretti, said that there is not yet a survey of how many hectares can be offered for sale. At the time of the founding of the company, the assessment is that land was needed, but today, with technology, many experiments are done on the computer. According to him, it is certain that Embrapa wants only what is necessary to “continue conducting efficiently” the research programs it develops.

“These are Union lands, but we need to have a guarantee from the federal government that this resource that we may find may return in part, if not in whole, so that we can reinvest in research. We do not want to buy more land, we want the return of this money in research,” said Moretti, adding that research processes are increasingly modern.

In addition to surveying how many hectares the company wants to dispose of, together with Agriculture Minister Tereza Cristina, Embrapa is also studying what would be the legal mechanism for this transaction to advance in this plan in 2020.

One of the examples cited is in the Federal District. At the Vegetables Headquarters, about 300 of the 1,300 hectares are used for research, the other 1000 hectares are forest reserves. “Everything is protected. We exceed the requirements of the Forest Reserve Code,” said Celso Moretti.

Modernization

The sale of land is part of a general process of modernization and management strategy for the company that Moretti, who took office last week, wants to consolidate.

By June 2020, the incentive dismissal program should be completed at the institution, which had the adhesion of 1,300 employees, about 12% of the staff. With the reduction from 9.5 to 8.2 servers, the new challenge is the redistribution of these personnel throughout the headquarters and 43 research centers across the country. Brasilia, for example, which has four research centers, has the largest concentration in its headquarters, but the idea is to relocate many servers to these centers.

Outsourcing is also in the plans for 2020. The largest adherence to the IDP was of rural workers, who set up experiments such as tractor driver and machine operators, many already with 35-40 years of service. It is now more interesting and cheaper to outsource this workforce through a co-operative and hire people to perform simpler, more manual tasks. “When I say outsourcing we are always thinking about the company’s middle activities, the support activities. We would not do this with core activity that is research and development, that is, we will not outsource researchers or analysts,” said Celso Moretti.

Source: Agência Brasil

Sharing is caring!