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| Top crop: Soybeans being loaded into a truck in Castrolanda, Brazil, this spring. Rodolfo Buhrer/AP |
Farming superpower Brazil spreads its know-how
It is bringing the technologies of tropical farming to other parts of Latin America, and to Africa and Asia.
from the November 12, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 3
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Reporter Sara Miller Llana outlines her three-part series on Brazil's growing influence not only in Latin America, but the rest of the developing world as well.
Today, the cerrado accounts for 63 percent of soybean production in Brazil, the nation's largest and most successful crop.
"It was the first entity to bring vegetable or plant sources of protein to low-latitude regions," says Peter Goldsmith, executive director of the National Soy Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois. It is on a par with the "Green Revolution," he says, which refers to work started in the 1940s in the US to develop more types of wheat to feed growing populations.
In 1973, when Embrapa was founded, only a handful of employees had PhDs. Today about 1,600 have their doctorates, mostly from the US and Europe, and the agency is undergoing an expansion that will make it one of the largest agricultural centers in the world.
But research alone could not have transformed this vast savanna, which represents one-quarter of the entire landmass of Brazil. The military government of the 1970s made a calculated decision to inhabit the region by turning it into fertile farmland, giving credits and incentives to farmers in the temperate south to relocate, and inciting a mass migration of people.
That decision still remains controversial, and has grown more contentious as commodities prices have boomed over the years, spurring farmers to expand into undeveloped areas. Environmentalists have accused soy producers and cattle ranchers of degrading the cerrado and encroaching on the Amazon.
Embrapa says the challenge is real: Of all land deforested in South America, 73 percent is in Brazil, and today the fringes of the Amazon are of great concern, says Denis Minev, the secretary of planning and economic development for the state of Amazonas. But Embrapa maintains that production in the cerrado can increase on existing lands with greater efficiency, not needing expansion. Grain production in the cerrado, for example, increased 129.7 percent from 1991 to 2007, but the area harvested increased by only 25.9 percent.
That productivity will be crucial for the world, as demand from China and India grows. During the recent global spike in food prices, which incited riots around the world, the ethanol craze took much of the blame. Most was placed on the US method using corn. But some said that Brazil contributed to the problem by expanding sugarcane production for ethanol on fields that could be harvested for food crops.
Mark Lundell, the sector leader for sustainable development at the World Bank in Brasilia, disagrees. He says that because of its productivity, Brazil has actually helped keep the market supplied, and thus prices down. "In the recent crisis I don't think there is any [reason] to accuse Brazil of having contributed to world prices; they've helped to limit prices by continuing to export the main commodities," he says.
Pioneer farmers
Farmer Paulo Roberto Bonato says he's proud of the role he plays in supplying the world, even if his is just a small part. Like so many others in the cerrado today, his family hailed from the south, from the state of Rio Grande do Sul, in 1977, lured by the promise of uninterrupted space and government support. The family sold their 60-hectare farm and moved onto 300 hectares in the middle of nowhere. At the time, there were neither roads nor electricity.
Since then their operation has grown to 6,000 hectares – 10 times what they once owned – where they cultivate soy, wheat, and beans. On a recent day, Mr. Bonato drove along his farm in the state of Goias, where wheat is being harvested. "My father thought, if we stay in the south, my brothers and I will never have the chance to farm one day," he says.
Their pioneering has helped turn Brazil into one of the world's greatest agricultural success stories. Last year, agribusiness overall represented $298 billion – about 25 percent of Brazil's gross domestic product, according to the Center for Advanced Studies in Applied Economics at the University of São Paulo.
While Bonato's farm is vast, it is tiny compared with the ranches in neighboring states such as Mato Grosso, the epicenter of soy production. Last year, 5.6 million hectares were cultivated there, and the state, as well as other frontier regions, are drawing investors from around the globe. In 2000, Brazil exported $20 billion in agricultural products. Last year the number reached $58 billion. Soy exports accounted for $11.4 billion. In the state of São Paulo, the heart of sugarcane production, investors interested in the ethanol market are also swarming in. Today Brazil produces 17 billion liters of ethanol fuel, or 33 percent of worldwide production.
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