Bolivia’s president proposes creating the “economy of Mother Earth” to fight climate change

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The president of Bolivia, Luis Arce, this Friday, April 23, proposed creating the “economy of Mother Earth” as an alternative to fight climate change and a better distribution of resources among all peoples.

In the forum “Re-encounter with the Pachamama,” Arce cited several data on global warming and poverty in the world and again blamed “the forces of the West and capitalism” for causing “that human beings have broken the relationship of balance with nature.”

For Arce, the “severe” health crisis is one more among the “multiple crises” such as climate, social, and food crises which, in his opinion, are the product of an “excessive system of savage capitalist development”.

In this sense, he pointed out that the “efforts have to be oriented to strengthen an economy of Mother Earth” to “generate wealth to distribute it among all”.

With his proposal, the Bolivian president seeks to counterbalance the “solution of the rich countries to the environmental crisis based on the deepening of green or ecological capitalism (…) to produce wealth has to produce poverty.”

“We have to implement the solution of the peoples of the South (…) an important part of the solution is to recognize and implement the rights of Mother Earth,” concluded Arce.

The event was attended by the presidents of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, the foreign minister of Cuba, Bruno Rodríguez, and the Venezuelan foreign minister, Jorge Arreaza as well as several Bolivian authorities.

In his speech, President Maduro said that U.S. President Joe Biden “has repositioned the issue of climate change on the world agenda. It is an opportunity that should be seized by the revolutionary forces of the world, by the social and environmental movements of the world.”

For his part, President Ortega affirmed that “we are fighting the battle with what we can do in our countries to recover a little of the nature that has been plundered, that has been destroyed.”