02 September 2010

Brazilian agriculture


Excerpts from an interesting article at The Economist this week:
In less than 30 years Brazil has turned itself from a food importer into one of the world’s great breadbaskets. 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...

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...

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...

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...
When Embrapa started, the cerrado was regarded as unfit for farming. Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist often called the father of the Green Revolution, told the New York Times that “nobody thought these soils were ever going to be productive.” They seemed too acidic and too poor in nutrients. Embrapa did four things to change that.

First, it poured industrial quantities of lime (pulverised limestone or chalk) onto the soil to reduce levels of acidity. In the late 1990s, 14m-16m tonnes of lime were being spread on Brazilian fields each year, rising to 25m tonnes in 2003 and 2004. This amounts to roughly five tonnes of lime a hectare, sometimes more... So although it is true Brazil has a lot of spare farmland, it did not just have it hanging around, waiting to be ploughed. Embrapa had to create the land, in a sense, or make it fit for farming. Today the cerrado accounts for 70% of Brazil’s farm output and has become the new Midwest...

Second, Embrapa went to Africa and brought back a grass called brachiaria. Patient crossbreeding created a variety, called braquiarinha in Brazil, which produced 20-25 tonnes of grass feed per hectare, many times what the native cerrado grass produces and three times the yield in Africa. That meant parts of the cerrado could be turned into pasture...
Much more at the link.  Very eye-opening for me - especially the revelation that the farming district is separate from Amazonia.  You learn something every day.

13 comments:

  1. Wayne, for additional terraforming, see this BBC article -

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11137903

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow again! I had no idea. The royal navy had cheek, didn't it?

    ReplyDelete
  3. No less astonishingly, Brazil has done all this without much government subsidy.

    I wonder if this is really true, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't. However, if it is, it flies in the face of our own contorted policies on agriculture.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yes , we can...
    We go to the Top.....of world...I hope.

    My first comment
    but I´m here every day.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Greetings, Binho. TYWKIWDBI gets about 1000 visis a month from readers in Brazil, mostly from Sao Paulo of couse, but also from up in Manaus and down in Pelotas. Glad to have your expertise on board.

    ReplyDelete
  6. No less astonishingly, Brazil has done all this without much government subsidy.

    This is astonishing only to those without an at least passing familiarity with economics. The reporter should have written:

    Brazil accomplished this in large part due to its lack of government subsidies.

    ReplyDelete
  7. My husband tells me that Brazil generally uses excellent permaculture/sustainable techniques, as well, Good on them. I'd love to read more about it.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Texan99

    Could this help you?
    http://www.permacultura-bahia.org.br/

    always translate from Portuguese(our language) to English

    sorry,my english

    ReplyDelete
  9. From moita (also brazilian)

    Yeah it is true about that most of the farms are far from the amazon. MOst of Brazil agriculure (and my father is a research from embrapa) comes from the cerrado, indeed, and in the rain florest (known as mata atlântica). Rain florest is been destroyed since the first portuguese, so there is really not much else to destroy (and is the region most populated also). Cerrado is an tipical bioma, that is huge. It is the new hot spot. The sad part of this history is that part of pantanal, in states of Mato grosso and mato grosso do sul, is been devasted to make more cattle farm. The other sad part of each is the amazon, although is been reduced the velocity of degradation, it is been taken down by lame reasons. I once visited a farm, that had a huge part of it as a naive florest, and the owner have been taken down the trees to make make charcoal. Acient trees and also valuable trees (economically and biologically). Just because of misery and misinformation. At the time that i went to the farm, it as turned into a an embrapa experimental farm and the owner told me that now they preserve most of his farm and they can still see sometimes onças (which is an indicative that the florest was not that damaged yet). Can tell the same about his nighbors. Cheers from Brazil

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  10. I think the graph of land used for 'farms' may be a bit misleading. The FAO (cited in the article as the data source) and the World Bank both indicate that cattle and grain farming (along with transportation, development etc for the same) are, in fact, major drivers of Amazon Rainforest depletion. Here are some sources:
    http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2004/02/02/000090341_20040202130625/Rendered/PDF/277150PAPER0wbwp0no1022.pdf

    ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/a0701e/a0701e.pdf

    http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/02/06/brazil-rainforest.html

    There are hundreds, if not thousands of other peer reviewed articles indicating that, in fact, Brazilian agriculture - for human consumption, for feed, and as an energy source - is responsible for large scale rainforest destruction.

    -maggie

    ReplyDelete

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