Brazilian agriculture The miracle of the cerrado Brazil has revolutionised its own farms Can it do the same for others The Economist Aug 26th 2010 CREMAQ PIAU IN A remote corner of Bahia state in north eastern Brazil a vast new farm is springing out of the dry bush Thirty years ago eucalyptus and pine were planted in this part of the cerrado Brazil s savannah Native shrubs later reclaimed some of it Now every field tells the story of a transformation Some have been cut to a litter of tree stumps and scrub on others charcoalmakers have moved in to reduce the rootballs to fuel next other fields have been levelled and prepared with lime and fertiliser and some have already been turned into white oceans of cotton Next season this farm at Jatob will plant and harvest cotton soyabeans and maize on 24 000 hectares 200 times the size of an average farm in Iowa It will transform a poverty stricken part of Brazil s backlands Three hundred miles north in the state of Piau the transformation is already complete Three years ago the Cremaq farm was a failed experiment in growing cashews Its barns were falling down and the scrub was reasserting its grip Now the farm which like Jatob is owned by BrasilAgro a company that buys and modernises neglected fields uses radio transmitters to keep track of the weather runs SAP software employs 300 people under a ga cho from southern Brazil has 200km 124 miles of new roads criss crossing the fields and at harvest time resounds to the thunder of lorries which day and night carry maize and soya to distant ports That all this is happening in Piau the Timbuktu of Brazil a remote somewhat lawless area where the nearest health clinic is half a day s journey away and most people live off state welfare payments is nothing short of miraculous These two farms on the frontier of Brazilian farming are microcosms of a national change with global implications In less than 30 years Brazil has turned itself from a food importer into one of the world s great breadbaskets see chart 1 It is the first country to have caught up with the traditional big five grain exporters America Canada Australia Argentina and the European Union It is also the first tropical food giant the big five are all temperate producers The increase in Brazil s farm production has been stunning Between 1996 and 2006 the total value of the country s crops rose from 23 billion reais 23 billion to 108 billion reais or 365 Brazil increased its beef exports tenfold in a decade overtaking Australia as the world s largest exporter It has the world s largest cattle herd after India s It is also the world s largest exporter of poultry sugar cane and ethanol see chart 2 Since 1990 its soyabean output has risen from barely 15m tonnes to over 60m Brazil accounts for about a third of world soyabean exports second only to America In 1994 Brazil s soyabean exports were one seventh of America s now they are sixsevenths Moreover Brazil supplies a quarter of the world s soyabean trade on just 6 of the country s arable land No less astonishingly Brazil has done all this without much government subsidy According to the Organisation for Economic Co operation and Development OECD state support accounted for 5 7 of total farm income in Brazil during 2005 07 That compares with 12 in America 26 for the OECD average and 29 in the European Union And Brazil has done it without deforesting the Amazon though that has happened for other reasons The great expansion of farmland has taken place 1 000km from the jungle How did the country manage this astonishing transformation The answer to that matters not only to Brazil but also to the rest of the world An attractive Brazilian model Between now and 2050 the world s population will rise from 7 billion to 9 billion Its income is likely to rise by more than that and the total urban population will roughly double changing diets as well as overall demand because city dwellers tend to eat more meat The UN s Food and Agriculture Organisation FAO reckons grain output will have to rise by around half but meat output will have to double by 2050 This will be hard to achieve because in the past decade the growth in agricultural yields has stalled and water has become a greater constraint By one estimate only 40 of the increase in world grain output now comes from rises in yields and 60 comes from taking more land under cultivation In the 1960s just a quarter came from more land and three quarters came from higher yields So if you were asked to describe the sort of food producer that will matter most in the next 40 years you would probably say something like this one that has boosted output a lot and looks capable of continuing to do so one with land and water in reserve one able to sustain a large cattle herd it does not necessarily have to be efficient but capable of improvement one that is productive without massive state subsidies and maybe one with lots of savannah since the biggest single agricultural failure in the world during past decades has been tropical Africa and anything that might help Africans grow more food would be especially valuable In other words you would describe Brazil Brazil has more spare farmland than any other country see chart 3 The FAO puts its total potential arable land at over 400m hectares only 50m is being used Brazilian official figures put the available land somewhat lower at 300m hectares Either way it is a vast amount On the FAO s figures Brazil has as much spare farmland as the next two countries together Russia and America It is often accused of levelling the rainforest to create its farms but hardly any of this new land lies in Amazonia most is cerrado Brazil also has more water According to the UN s World Water Assessment Report of 2009 Brazil has more than 8 000 billion cubic kilometres of renewable water each year easily more than any other country Brazil alone population 190m has as much renewable water as the whole of Asia population 4 billion And again this is not mainly because of the Amazon Piau is one of the country s driest areas but still gets a third more water than America s corn belt Of course having spare water and spare land is not much good if they are in different places a problem in much of Africa But according to BrasilAgro Brazil has almost as much farmland with more than 975 millimetres of rain each year as the whole of Africa and more than a quarter of all such land in the world Since 1996 Brazilian farmers have increased the
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