In the name of making a quick buck, the race has already served suspicious purposes. In 2016, at the height of anti-politics and the beatification of the saints-do-pau-oco of Curitiba, the “I Don’t Accept Corruption” test appeared in São Paulo.
Events of this gross marketing still survive in Brazil today. João Pessoa sent a 10 km in December with the name “Race against Corruption”. There was even a “kids” race against corruption.
But this is the counterpoint, fortunately a minority, to the evidence that helps serious institutions and highlights causes that deserve society’s attention. One of the most traditional in the São Paulo calendar with this cut is the race at Graacc, the reference hospital in the fight against cancer in children and adolescents.
This Sunday (26), invited by the sports nutrition company Bio2, I participated in Piranguçu, about 50 kilometers from Campos do Jordão, in a mountain race sponsored by the company. It was the first event of its kind in the city of Minas Gerais, although the Mantiqueira region in which the small municipality of 6,000 inhabitants is located is rich in events of this type.
The choice of Piranguçu, a very modest location in front of neighboring Campos do Jordão, São Bento do Sapucaí and Itajubá, was not accidental. Leandro Farkuh, founder of Bio2, is a vegan businessman and activist, and at Bio2, whose bars and other synthesized protein and carbohydrate compounds are necessarily of vegetable origin, he tries to do what the corporate world calls “walk the talk” – actually doing what his company communicates.
This means not playing to the audience, not claiming to be green and sustainable, for example, just to take advantage of a wave and a market segment. Leandro understood that one of the country’s biggest problems is deforestation, and engaged Bio2 in an attempt to show the scale of this.
Before the pandemic, he bought a large farm with low dairy production in Piranguçu, which was then completely deforested for pasture, to let the native Atlantic forest regenerate. The project, called Floresta Bio2, has the technical support of SOS Mata Atlântica, which has already planted more than 100 thousand seedlings of native species there. The difference in vegetation cover in just five years is remarkable.
Holding the race in Piranguçu was also a way of showing the city that there are other economic outlets other than low-productivity livestock farming, such as rural tourism; and, furthermore, that plant regeneration can be not only important for the health of the planet, but also a financially rewarding business.
He does not like to include the still incipient carbon sequestration market in the calculation, but he does account for how much agriculture and livestock farming lose due to prolonged droughts or extreme events, consequences of rampant deforestation in different biomes, such as the Amazon.
Today he works to convince his neighbors to regenerate areas of their properties, normally strips of unproductive land, to recreate a green corridor of native forest in Mantiqueira. And, in the future, try to replicate the idea in other Brazilian biomes.
It’s a difficult job in a country where agribusiness, which sells itself as modern, but uses outdated practices, such as rampant deforestation and the use of pesticides long banned in less permissive markets, maintains enormous economic and, above all, political weight.
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