38 The Economist April 30th 2022
The Americas
AgriculturePulling its wheat
W
hen marize porto’shusband died
suddenly in 2002, she was left with
three small children and a failing cattle
ranch that she had no idea how to run. Des-
perate, she turned to Embrapa, the Brazil-
ian government’s agricultural research in-
stitute, for help. Today her farm in the state
of Goiás is a model of technical know-how
and productivity. Corn grows tall in the
dry, red earth, planted upon the remnants
of last season’s soyabeans. Once the corn is
harvested, cattle come in to graze.
The practice Ms Porto uses—which
combines livestock, crops and forestry—
requires less land and can make a farm five
times more productive than the average
Brazilian holding. It restores degraded pas-
tures, making it ideal for use in the cerrado,
the unwieldy savannah which covers a
quarter of the country. Yet it has been slow
to catch on. Despite the system’s advantag-
es, it has been adopted on only 18.5m hect-
ares, or around 5% of farmland.
This is worrying. In the past four de-
cades Brazil has transformed itself from a
net importer into the world’s fourth-big-gest food exporter. In 2022 it is expected to
produce 285m tonnes of grain, six times
the amount it harvested in 1977. Still, the
world is hungry for more. Stretched supply
chains and shortages caused by Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine have piled pressure on
food markets. Even before the war, Brazil
exported more wheat in the first two
months of this year than it did in the whole
of 2021. But extreme weather and soaring
prices of fuel and fertiliser are making it
harder for farmers to meet demand.No rain, no grain
South America’s breadbasket is also bal-
ancing on precarious ecosystems. Cattle
and soya farms are destroying parts of the
Amazon. Advances in tropical agriculture
have also come at the expense of half of the
cerrado’s trees. The cerrado, known as the
“birthplace of waters”, feeds eight of Bra-
zil’s 12 major river basins. But it depends on
moisture in the air from the rainforest for
its water supply. So deforestation not only
adds to climate change. It also undermines
the conditions required to grow food.Responding to these challenges re-
quires innovation. In an executive order
on April 22nd President Joe Biden said that
the United States would try to reduce the
import of food produced on illegally defor-
ested lands, such as the Amazon. In polls,
around half of consumers in rich and mid-
dle-income countries say that they consid-
er sustainability when buying food and
drink. But can Brazilian agriculture re-
spond to this demand by becoming green-
er, while also ramping up food supply?
Jair Bolsonaro, the populist president,
has overseen rapidly rising levels of defor-
estation and weakened laws protecting na-
tive vegetation. Yet on paper at least, his
government’s plan for agriculture is ambi-
tious. It aims to reduce emissions in the
sector by the equivalent of 1.1bn tonnes of
carbon dioxide by 2030. Part of the plan in-
volves developing standards for what con-
stitutes “low-carbon”, “carbon-neutral”, or
“negative-carbon” for ten commodities. In
2017 Brazil became the first country in the
world to create a label for “carbon-neutral”,
or zero-net-emission, beef.
Beef production alone accounts for
around 8.5% of the world’s greenhouse-gas
emissions. Brazil, as the world’s largest
beef exporter, has a big incentive to label
its goods “carbon-neutral”. Not all are con-
vinced. Such claims of neutrality rest
largely on the metric of carbon sequestra-
tion: that the grass cattle graze on, or for-
ests they slumber in, can act as a sink for
carbon dioxide. But such calculations doI PAMERI
Can Brazil help with food shortages around the world?→Alsointhissection
39 GangsinElSalvador
40 Paraguay’srivalto the Panama Canal
— Bello is away