Piero Ghezzi, Former Minister of Production, argued that, among the main potentialities of the Amazon region, timber production could emerge as the main contributor to the development of its citizens and local companies, provided that they are carried out with total respect for the environment and with the integration of the public and private sectors.
During the III Amazon Business Congress: “The urgent challenge of sustainable and inclusive development of the Peruvian Amazon”, the economist stressed that the installation of industrial development poles, through anchor companies, is essential to bring development to one of the regions with the highest informality index in the territory.
“There is no way to transform softwood on the coast and make it profitable. No matter the level of productivity, if we do not achieve industrial development in the Amazon region itself, there is no way to be competitive. This implies having anchor companies ”, Ghezzi remarked.
These companies are known as anchors, as they are large and have an effect on local economies as engines of growth and attraction of investment, thus generating competitiveness where they decide to settle.
Parallel to this, Ghezzi explained that actions by the State are required in the region, such as greater advances in zoning and regulation for the effective availability of land, tax incentives, articulation with the private sector, legal security, interconnection at all levels for move the wood, and support the growth of local mypes.
However, he warned that all these mechanisms should be delineated without decompensating the environmental security of the Amazonian territory, with the aim of reaching 2050 with a high profitability of the biological wealth of the region, 2 million hectares of forest plantations and 8 of BPP concessions, the technological insertion of small producers in the formal value chain, and zero deforestation.
“It would be a failure if we were able to promote forest plantations, but this implies that the forest is deforested more. That would be terrible. What is sometimes not well understood is that the areas that are well under concession are the ones that are less deforested, as there are 20-year operations, with reasonable extraction of the wood, ”he indicated.
Likewise, on the issue of promotion for mypes and small producers, he stressed that measures are urgently needed to access concessional financing with rates lower than 5% and, as in other countries in the region, a direct subsidy to plantations associated with the percentage of the invested.
“One issue that the mypes have is the issue of quality, and in the case of the Amazon there is the legal origin of the wood, which makes many buyers from the public and private sectors choose not to buy it,” said the former head of Produces.
“Without a budget nothing will be possible. Likewise, it cannot be the objective of a single government, but rather a shared vision, with the political decision to start in earnest and be persistent; strengthen the public-private cooperation process to solve the problems we face ”, he remarked.
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