The delegation of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, represented by Foreign Minister Yván Gil, committed this Tuesday, at the inauguration of the high-level segment of the United Nations Conference on Biodiversity (COP16) in Cali, Colombia, to promote together with others countries necessary transformations to give opportunity to “humanity” and “life”, while criticizing capitalism and pointing it out as being responsible for the destruction of biodiversity.
Gil, who conveyed a message to COP16 on behalf of President Nicolás Maduro, said that the Venezuelan government assumed the commitment to “promote those necessary transformations to be able to give humanity a chance, to be able to give life a chance.”
In his speech, the chancellor said that the world is experiencing moments in which two economic models are facing each other. He defined the first as one of “exploitation, a model of domination inherited from imperialism and extractivist colonialism, capitalism.”
He described the second model as one of “survival, which is that of our people,” for which he called for configuring a “concrete action plan” in the next two years that addresses issues that affect biodiversity.
He said that in the capitalist model, large corporations want to dominate biodiversity to continue making enormous profits.
He added that these food and pharmaceutical corporations “try through different means to privatize our forests, privatize our waters, privatize our actions and displace communities from our physical spaces.”
The Venezuelan delegation urged the implementation of radical changes in decision-making to protect biodiversity, because otherwise, “surely within two years we will find ourselves in this same situation again, regretting and resorting again to speeches, rhetoric, evaluation, to the diagnosis that we have already made,” Gil warned.
