Brazil Is the New America: How Brazil Offers Upward Mobility in a Collapsing World (33 page)

Geographical factors other than glaciation, moreover, may be determinant in this general grouping of modern, virile peoples around the North Atlantic, and historical considerations may not be wholly set aside. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that France, Italy, New Zealand and Australia, to name examples without the glaciated regions, are also in the van of modern progress.
7

Of course, von Engeln erred in stating that France, Italy, and New Zealand and Australia were without glaciated regions. According to
U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1386–E.–1
, “Glaciers of Europe,” France has 350 square kilometers of glaciated territory and Italy 608 square kilometers under glacier. While only a small area of Australia in the vicinity of Mount Kosciuszko was glaciated in the past, the whole of the Southern Alps in New Zealand were covered by a sheet of ice. Presumably, von Engeln meant to say that these “virile nations” did not feed themselves on formerly glaciated lands.

Putting aside the somewhat sloppy iteration of the facts, the implications of this line of analysis were not overtly bullish for Brazilian agriculture. Just about the only limited potential that could have been envisioned for Brazil joining the van of modern progress where farming is concerned was confined to the potential for growing wheat and other cereal crops in the temperate climate in the south of Brazil, below the Tropic of Capricorn (23° 27′ S. latitude), which crosses Brazil at the latitude of the city of São Paulo. This is the South region, known for its cattle-raising gaucho culture. Uncharacteristically of Brazil, it is subject to frosts and snowfall during the austral winter, from June through September.

Azorean settlers who came to Rio Grande do Sul after 1752 introduced wheat farming there, and it remained the main export of the state until well into the nineteenth century. Today, approximately 90 percent of Brazil's 5.3 million metric tons of wheat is produced in the states of Parana and Rio Grande do Sul. The three southernmost (and coldest) states of Brazil, Parana, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul, comprise 576,409 square kilometers—an area larger than France, but only 6 percent of Brazil's total territory of 8,514,877 square kilometers.

The received opinion of experts until the very end of the twentieth century was that farming in the tropics was a losing proposition. In part, this was a simple matter of precedent. Before the emergence of Brazil as, in the words of
The Economist
, “the first tropical food-giant,” the leading farming locales were all temperate producers.
8
Even at the turn of the millennium, it was difficult for skeptics to see that Brazilian farm production was destined to increase in the dramatic way it has. Agronomists, thoughtful observers, and official bodies relying upon production statistics compiled through the mid-1990s would have had to look very closely to see a reason to alter the conventional wisdom indicating that temperate farming was approximately 50 percent more productive than farming in the tropics.

A part of this difference, as von Engeln implied, was attributable to soil conditions. In addition to lacking the advantages of glacial deposition, tropical soils are notoriously fragile and subject to rapid leeching of organic compounds. Unlike soils in temperate zones where winter frosts contribute to the buildup of richer topsoils over time, tropical soils tend to be rapidly depleted of nutrients.

Another factor that has tended to weigh against the productivity of farming in the tropics is the rich array of pests and parasites that contribute to post-harvest food losses. Christopher Wheatley and fellow experts at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, known as CIAT (after its Spanish initials), estimate tropical harvest losses of food grains, “from mishandling, spoilage and pest infestation at 25 percent; this means that one-quarter of what is produced never reaches the consumer for whom it was grown, and the effort and money required to produce it are lost forever.”
9
Meanwhile, fruit, vegetables, and root crops tend to suffer even greater losses. “Some authorities put losses of sweet potatoes, plantain, tomatoes, bananas and citrus fruit sometimes as high as 50 percent, or half of what is grown.”
10

Economist Jeffrey D. Sachs analyzed the enhanced vulnerability to spoilage in the tropics in his December 2000 paper, “Tropical Underdevelopment”:

B. Pests and parasites. A second major feature of tropical ecosystems is the high prevalence of crop pests and parasites. Tropical ecosystems generally are characterized by a high degree of biodiversity, which in a very general sense resists the monoculture systems that characterize temperate-zone food production. Monocultures in the tropics are prone to devastation through plant diseases, pests, and other forms of competition with highly biodiverse ecosystems. Just as with human diseases, the year-round high temperatures of the tropics, and the absence of freezing winter months to kill parasites and pests, are the root of the high-burden of plant diseases and crop losses due to spoilage. The high prevalence of tropical animal diseases, such as trypanosomiasis, has long hindered animal husbandry and the mixed crop-cattle agricultural systems characteristic of temperate ecozones.
11

The factors that Jeffrey Sachs cites as contributing to high losses of the crops in the tropics to pests and parasites are real. They are not figments of the temperate-centric imagination. Equally, as Sachs was shrewd enough to recognize in his analysis from the year 2000, there are ecological barriers to technological diffusion. He proposed the convincing hypothesis,

that the rate of technological innovation in the temperate-zone economies was much higher than in the tropical-zone economies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while the rate of technological diffusion between the two zones was very limited because key technologies could not cross the ecological divide.
12

Sachs astutely framed the issues. Yet, I believe that his lucid analysis draws the wrong conclusion because at the very time when he was writing a fundamental change was taking place that has continued to gather momentum.

Thanks to research conducted over the last quarter of the twentieth century by Embrapa (Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaria), the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, a technical firm affiliated with the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture, Brazil is now capitalizing on innovations unprecedented in the history of tropical farming. Dr. Silvio Crestana, the director-general of Embrapa, confirmed Sachs's perspective on the difficulty of transporting key technologies across the ecological divide. He recounts, “We went to the U.S. and brought back the whole package [of cutting-edge agriculture in the 1970s]. That didn't work and it took us 30 years to create our own.”
13

Yes, there are ecological barriers to the diffusion of agricultural innovations between temperate and tropical regions. Heretofore, most of these have tended to favor producers in the temperate zone. And, yes, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the rate of innovation was much higher in the temperate zone. But no longer.

What Jeffrey Sachs and few others apparently suspected was that as the twenty-first century opened, a remarkable surge of technical innovations in tropical farming was poised to make Brazil the new bread-basket of the world. The innovations include the following:

As
The Economist
declared in “Brazilian Agriculture: The World's Farm”:

Over the past 35 years Brazil has transformed itself from a food importer into one of the world's largest exporters. It is the first tropical country to join the big farm-exporting ranks (the rest have temperate climates). The country is now the world's biggest exporter of five internationally traded crops, and number two in soy beans and maize. None of the other big exporters has anything like this degree of diversification. Perhaps the most striking achievement has been the growth of soybeans: soya is a temperate crop and Brazilian research scientists had to breed new varieties that would grow in the tropical Cerrado, the savanna-like land where the farm miracle has taken place.
16

This is evident in a 132 percent increase in Brazilian soybean production from 2000 to 2010. During that time in the state of Mato Grosso, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the cost of producing soybeans fell to about $6.23 per 60 kilogram bag, just 53 percent of the U.S. level of $11.72. Furthermore,

In 2002, for the first time in history, the overall average yield of soybeans in Brazil (2.6 t/ha) was higher than the average yield in the United States of America (2.4 t/ha). It is reasonable to state that in the Centre West region, Brazilian farmers are practicing one of the most advanced and sustainable agricultural systems in the world.
17

The FAO and other experts are effusive in their estimates of the potential for farming in Brazil.

In a world suffering from declining marginal returns along a broad horizon, it is notable that Brazil's surge in productivity exemplified by a 3,000 percent increase in soybean output over the past 35 years is overwhelmingly attributable to rising returns. According to the prominent Brazilian economist, Antonio Delfim Netto, over 90 percent of the increase in Brazilian agriculture over the past three decades has been due to improvements in total factor productivity with less than 10 percent attributable to increased use of land, labor, and capital.

Remarkably, Brazil produces a quarter of the world's soybean exports on just 6 percent of the country's arable land. Brazil has ample room to expand production. According to the FAO, Brazil has more potential farmland than any other country—up to 400,000,000 hectares, of which only 50 million are currently in use. As canvassed earlier in this chapter, Brazil also has more fresh water than any other country: 8,000 cubic kilometers (1,919 mi
3
) of renewable water each year, more than the whole of Asia.

In
Pillar of Sand: Can the Irrigation Miracle Last?
Sandra Postel argues that irrigation miracles cannot last. She states that a key lesson from history is that most irrigation-based civilizations fail. Postel writes:

One out of every five hectares of irrigated land is losing productivity because of spreading soil salinization. And as water becomes scarce, competition for it is increasing—between neighboring states and countries, between farms and cities, and between people and their environment. . . . Water scarcity is now the single biggest threat to global food production.
18

While irrigation in many areas is drawn from rapidly depleting fossil aquifers, Brazil enjoys more freshwater than any other country. One of Brazil's great strengths as a growing agricultural power is that most of the country's crop production is rainwater fed. Brazil has more than a quarter of all the farmland in the world that gets 975 millimeters or more of rain annually. Long after the fossil aquifers underpinning production in China, India, and the American Midwest have been depleted, Brazil will continue to be bathed in an average of 1,919 cubic miles of renewable freshwater annually. If, as projected, the world's population reaches 9 billion by 2050, the main hope of avoiding a Malthusian crisis will lie with the farmers of Brazil.