Sustentabilidade da produção agrária e o Direito

The need to develop an agricultural activity that is sustainable in order to not only provide food and essential goods for everyone, but also allow it to be done indefinitely, benefiting future generations, is one of the biggest challenges of the contemporary world. The Law cannot remain indifferent to this need, as it is a useful tool in imposing treatments and the establishment of the new ethical paradigm that overcoming this challenge entails. Therefore, this article aims to verify how the Law is dealing with the idea of sustainability in the sense that the imposition of legal rules may influence the practice of farming activities to become closer to this sustainable ideal. To meet this goal, we discuss a general notion of sustainability, verifying what is its role in the legal world. The second part seeks to relate the sustainability specifically with agricultural production, establishing its approach with the Agrarian Law, and investigating the consequences of adopting a sustainable paradigm directly applicable to the development of agricultural production. It is concluded that sustainability involves numerous changes of paradigms, including more complex objectives on agricultural production, requiring an approach that far exceeds the usual one, going through ideas such as eradicating poverty and hunger, mitigating climate change effects, biodiversity conservation, multifunctionality of land uses and production diversification.