The Miracle of the Cerrado: Brazil has Revolutionised its
own Farms. Can it do the same for others? - Cremaq, Piauí
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 thecerrado (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, charcoal-makers 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
Jatobá 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 Piauí, 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 Jatobá, 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 agaúcho 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 Piauí—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 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.
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. Piauí 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 amount of
land under cultivation by a third, mostly in the cerrado. That is quite
different from other big farm producers, whose amount of land under the plough
has either been flat or (in Europe) falling. And it has increased production by
ten times that amount. But the availability of farmland is in fact only a
secondary reason for the extraordinary growth in Brazilian agriculture. If you
want the primary reason in three words, they are Embrapa, Embrapa, Embrapa.
At the 20,000-hectare Cremaq farm, 5,000
hulking 30-tonne lorries have disgorged their contents on the fields in the
past three years. Embrapa scientists also bred varieties of rhizobium, a
bacterium that helps fix nitrogen in legumes and which works especially well in
the soil of the cerrado, reducing the need for fertilisers. 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. “We changed the
paradigm,” says Silvio Crestana, a former head of Embrapa, proudly. 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,
making possible the enormous expansion of Brazil's beef herd. Thirty years ago
it took Brazil four years to raise a bull for slaughter. Now the average time
is 18-20 months. That is not the end of the story. Embrapa has recently begun
experiments with genetically modifying brachiaria to produce a
larger-leafed variety called braquiarão which promises even bigger
increases in forage. This alone will not transform the livestock sector, which
remains rather inefficient. Around one-third of improvement to livestock
production comes from better breeding of the animals; one-third comes from
improved resistance to disease; and only one-third from better feed. But it
will clearly help. Third, and most important, Embrapa turned soyabeans into a
tropical crop. Soyabeans are native to north-east Asia (Japan, the Korean
peninsular and north-east China). They are a temperate-climate crop, sensitive
to temperature changes and requiring four distinct seasons. All other big
soyabean producers (notably America and Argentina) have temperate climates.
Brazil itself still grows soya in its temperate southern states. But by
old-fashioned crossbreeding, Embrapa worked out how to make it also grow in a
tropical climate, on the rolling plains of Mato Grosso state and in Goiás on
the baking cerrado. More recently, Brazil has also been importing
genetically modified soya seeds and is now the world's second-largest user of
GM after the United States. This year Embrapa won approval for its first GM
seed.
Embrapa also created varieties of soya that are more
tolerant than usual of acid soils (even after the vast application of lime, the cerrado is
still somewhat acidic). And it speeded up the plants' growing period, cutting
between eight and 12 weeks off the usual life cycle. These “short cycle” plants
have made it possible to grow two crops a year, revolutionising the operation
of farms. Farmers used to plant their main crop in September and reap in May or
June. Now they can harvest in February instead, leaving enough time for a full
second crop before the September planting. This means the “second” crop (once
small) has become as large as the first, accounting for a lot of the increases
in yields. Such improvements are continuing. The Cremaq farm could
hardly have existed until recently because soya would not grow on this hottest,
most acidic of Brazilian backlands. The variety of soya now being planted there
did not exist five years ago. Dr Crestana calls this “the genetic
transformation of soya”. Lastly, Embrapa has pioneered and encouraged new operational
farm techniques. Brazilian farmers pioneered “no-till” agriculture, in which
the soil is not ploughed nor the crop harvested at ground level. Rather, it is
cut high on the stalk and the remains of the plant are left to rot into a mat
of organic material. Next year's crop is then planted directly into the mat,
retaining more nutrients in the soil. In 1990 Brazilian farmers used no-till
farming for 2.6% of their grains; today it is over 50%. Embrapa's latest trick is something called forest,
agriculture and livestock integration: the fields are used alternately for
crops and livestock but threads of trees are also planted in between the
fields, where cattle can forage. This, it turns out, is the best means yet
devised for rescuing degraded pasture lands. Having spent years increasing
production and acreage, Embrapa is now turning to ways of increasing the
intensity of land use and of rotating crops and livestock so as to feed more
people without cutting down the forest. Farmers everywhere gripe all the time and Brazilians,
needless to say, are no exception. Their biggest complaint concerns transport.
The fields of Mato Grosso are 2,000km from the main soyabean port at Paranaguá,
which cannot take the largest, most modern ships. So Brazil transports a
relatively low-value commodity using the most expensive means, lorries, which
are then forced to wait for ages because the docks are clogged. Partly for that reason, Brazil is not the cheapest place in
the world to grow soyabeans (Argentina is, followed by the American Midwest).
But it is the cheapest place to plant the next acre. Expanding production in
Argentina or America takes you into drier marginal lands which are much more
expensive to farm. Expanding in Brazil, in contrast, takes you onto lands
pretty much like the ones you just left.
Could they be
taken back and improved again? Embrapa has started to do that, though it is
early days and so far it is unclear whether the technology retransfer will
work. A third reason for hope is that Embrapa has expertise which
others in Africa simply do not have. It has research stations for cassava and
sorghum, which are African staples. It also has experience not just in the cerrado but
in more arid regions (called the sertão), in jungles and in the vast
wetlands on the border with Paraguay and Bolivia. Africa also needs to make
better use of similar lands. “Scientifically, it is not difficult to transfer
the technology,” reckons Dr Crestana. And the technology transfer is happening
at a time when African economies are starting to grow and massive Chinese aid
is starting to improve the continent's famously dire transport system. Still, a word of caution is in order. Brazil's agricultural
miracle did not happen through a simple technological fix. No magic bullet
accounts for it—not even the tropical soyabean, which comes closest. Rather,
Embrapa's was a “system approach”, as its scientists call it: all the
interventions worked together. Improving the soil and the new tropical
soyabeans were both needed for farming the cerrado; the two together
also made possible the changes in farm techniques which have boosted yields
further. Systems are much harder to export than a simple fix. “We
went to the US and brought back the whole package [of cutting-edge agriculture
in the 1970s],” says Dr Crestana. “That didn't work and it took us 30 years to
create our own. Perhaps Africans will come to Brazil and take back the package
from us. Africa is changing. Perhaps it won't take them so long. We'll see.” If
we see anything like what happened in Brazil itself, feeding the world in 2050
will not look like the uphill struggle it appears to be now.
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