From leadership to abandonment

Agriculture is one of the main economic activities in Brazil, a major producer and exporter of food. However, the high rate of food insecurity among the national population persists, and this rate has worsened even further in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, an event that posed challenges for the governments worldwide, as well as for global geopolitics. In addition, global climate change, a phenomenon projected by the IPCC, is causing and will continue to cause significant impacts on agricultural production. In this paper we ask: has the management of the pandemic by the Jair Bolsonaro government (2019-2022), combined with the impacts of climate change on food production in the country, led the country to the status of an international pariah, putting its role at risk as a global power in the field of food geopolitics? Our methodology involves a bibliographic review on the subject to define the main concepts we are approaching, such as food and nutritional security, global climate change, food geopolitics and leadership; and then we carried out our analysis on the position of the Brazilian government at the national and international level during the administration of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), in order to verify whether the dialogue between these spheres corroborates the hypothesis that government management in relation to pandemic and agriculture, disregarding the phenomenon of global climate change, led the country to an international pariah situation.