30 years is not a long run:

an approach to environmental policies in Uruguay

Abstract

Three decades have elapsed since the creation of an explicit environmental policy in Uruguay. The issue was assigned ministerial rank in a State Secretariat with shared powers in 1990, in the run-up to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. In 2020, a Ministry of the Environment was created, with the reassignment of some of the powers of previously existing ministerial departments. In the same period, the country has materialized a productivism vocation, based on the promotion of agriculture and forestry. This article compiles some of the environmental policies -in particular environmental impact and nature protection- describing the main characteristics of the current environmental institutional context and its relationship with productive policies, both in a specific region (east of the country) and in a specific activity sector (agricultural irrigation). The recent legislative debate during the amendments to the legal framework for the use of water for irrigation, extending the water frontier by means of the financialization of the activity, is analyzed. The final discussions return to the relationship between public policies, environment and agricultural production from a sustainable intensification insight.