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Brazil Provides Lesson In Feeding The World

published: September 1st 2010
source: The Economist

By 2050, the world's population will hit 9 billion—so how will we feed everyone? The answer, according to a recent article in The Economist, is that we will have to become more like Brazil. In "The Miracle of the Cerrado," the publication examines the giant farms that have transformed Brazilian agriculture over the last 30 years, and how other countries might be able to learn from them to become more productive:

    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.

    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. 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 six-sevenths. 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.