Brazilian agribusinesss Agricola looks to Mozambique for expansion

SLC Agricola turned the tables on the wave of foreign interest in Brazilian farmland by seeking farms outside the South American country, probably in Africa, in a drive to expand its empire.

The farm operator, based in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, unveiled an "internationalization plan" which will see it acquire, and plant, foreign farmland by 2015-16.

"The initial focus will be the African continent," SLC Agricola said, adding that it was to study Mozambique "in depth."

The foreign quest will supercharge a drive to increase its farmland by 2020-21 to 700,000 planted acres, of which 20% will be abroad, implying 140,000 hectares in foreign acquisitions. SLC's current land bank spans 300,000 hectares, including conservation areas, all in Brazil.

The move contrasts with a scramble for South American land by many foreign investors, particularly in countries such as China and Saudi Arabia which are large food importers.

Both Argentina and Brazil, South America's top two farming nations, have drawn up restrictions on foreign ownership of land, although such reforms have provoked controversy. Brazil is still, 18 months after issuing interim restrictions, in reaction to talk of Chinese plans for large-scale land purchases, to unveil definitive rules.

However, the growing expense of South American farms is prompting many Brazilians to join the throng of investors seeking foreign plots, relying on agricultural expertise, as well as money, for success in what can be a politically-charged process to win deals.

Mozambique has appeared particularly welcoming to Brazilian farmers, with Mozambican farm minister José Pacheco raising the topic on a visit to the South American country last year.

Pinesso Group, based in the major Brazilian agricultural state of Mato Grosso, has unveiled plans to expand its African operations, centered in Sudan, into Mozambique.

In September 2011, farmland investment company Agrifirma Brazil – whose backers include Lord Rothschild, which is advised by commodities investor Jim Rogers? revealed it was to place most of its Brazilian farm operations into a joint venture and seek "attractive opportunities elsewhere.”

full article...Agrimoney

Can Brazilian agribusiness create prosperity in Africa?

by Paul Gayle*

Brazil’s booming agribusiness may have found greener pastures. The government of

Mozambique has offered a 50 year concession to Brazilian farmers to plant soy, corn and cotton in the northern part of the impoverished African nation.

This follows Mozambique’s launch last year of a $13.4 million program called PROSAVANA, in conjunction with Brazil’s agricultural research group "Embrapa" and the Japanese government, which is meant to promote industrial farming for export together with small family farming.

Brazil’s  agricultural industry sees Mozambique as a being a potential new Mato

Grosso. That’s the sprawling Brazilian state almost as large as Venezuela that is the country’s biggest producer of cash crops. The region is far more productive than the US farm belt because farmers can produce two harvests per year compared to one in North America.

So will the people of Mozambique benefit from the expansion of Brazil’s agricultural frontier into eastern Africa? Or will big agribusiness run roughshod over local farmers as foreigners have done for centuries in Africa?

I think it would be unfair and unwise to overlook the potential for technology transfer and economic development that Brazil could provide its African counterpart. But turning agribusiness into a sustainable creator of jobs in a nation with rampant poverty is going to be a real challenge – and the outcome will likely depend on clear vision and careful regulation by Mozambique’s government.

To begin with, it’s not easy to maintain small-scale family farms alongside large-scale

 agriculture. This was made clear in Brazil’s experience with palm oil plantations in the Amazon, where families who originally planned to grow dende palm alongside their existing subsistence crops but found they had to abandon food crops because of the time they had to dedicate to the cash crops.

A recent story in Folha de Sao Paulo (translated here from Portuguese) quotes a Brazilian farm industry official who suggests that some farm companies may see the move to Mozambique as a way to escape Brazil’s environmental rules:

‘‘Mozambique is a Mato Grosso in the middle of Africa, with free land, without

environmental impediments, and with much cheaper freight to China. Today, in addition to land being exceedingly expensive in Mato Grosso,

it’s impossible to get a license to deforest and clean an area,” said Carlos Ernesto Augustin, President of the Mato Grosso Cotton Producers’ Association.

A bit of history is in order here. Mato Grosso literally means “thick plants,” because the area was once heavily vegetated pasture and forest at the southern end of the Amazon.

Brazil’s military dictatorship during the 1970s, spurred by a paranoid fear of a foreign invasion, recruited farmers from the south of the country and offered them free land if they would promise to cut down what vegetation did exist. The place did not always look like Iowa.

Times have changed of course, and now there are rules about how much area must be planted with native species. A dizzying number of permits are required for farmers who want to expand their holdings. So it’s hard not  to note a hint of nostalgia for the old days in Augustin’s comments.

It may not be a coincidence that farmers in Mato Grosso this year have been the country’s leading Amazon deforesters. And it also may not be by chance that the deforestation has for the first time in recent memory been driven by the expansion of soy crops, rather than by the cattle ranching that had previously been responsible.

The cotton association says it does not yet know which of the farming companies

would participate in the Mozambique project. One would likely be Grupe Andre Maggi,  the powerful soy conglomerate owned by former Mato Grosso governor

Blairo Maggi. Other firms could include the Grupo Bom Futuro conglomerate, which has operations ranging from grains production to cattle ranching and fish farming, or publicly listed soy, cotton and corn giant SLC Agricola.

But just like it’s unfair to pass off environmentalists as elitists opposed to job creation, it’s similarly problematic to lump all agribusiness into the category of environmental predators. The possibility for technology transfer that would give

farmers in Mozambique new skills is an appealing one for a poor African country with few industries. The idea of PRO-SAVANNA focusing on both small-scale farming for local consumption and agribusiness for export suggests the idea is more well-rounded that the 1970s dictatorship-backed expeditions in land reclamation.

The Nacala region of Mozambique, the area that could be offered to Brazilian

companies, is similar to the savanna known as the cerrado that is typical of Mato Grosso. That area was identified by Nobel Peace Prize winner and Green Revolution leader Norman Borlaug as one of the last remaining frontiers available for agricultural expansion.

There’s nothing to say this partnership can’t work for both sides. But there is quite a lot to be said for avoiding the creation of another Mato Grosso in the middle of sub-Saharan Africa, where the socioeconomic conditions would likely create a region with problems much more complex than the Mato Grosso of central-western Brazil.

 

Sustainable Business Forum 

  

*‘Paul’ is an American journalist who lives in  Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with a strong interest in sustainability. His employer would prefer that he not blog under his real name.

He maintains his own blog, called "Lungs of the Earth"  (http://lungsoftheearth.blogspot.com/) about environmental issues in Brazil.

Zimbabwe to acquire farming equipment from Brazil

by Martin Kadzere

Zimbabwe is set to acquire irrigation equipment and various farm machinery from Brazil.

A source close to the deal said Brazil would supply Zimbabwe with farm equipment which include tractors, combine harvesters and irrigation equipment worth US$98 million. The farm equipment will be earmarked for both small scale and commercial farmers.

The two countries are now finalising the repayment period and rate of interest.

The Herald

Mozambique government provides land to Brazilian farmers

The Mozambican government is providing large tracts of land at a symbolic price to Brazilian farmers to produce soy, maize and cotton, Mozambique’s agriculture minister, José Pacheco told Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo.

“Brazilian farmers have accumulated experience that is very welcome,” said Pacheco, adding that, “we want to repeat in Mozambique what they managed to do in the Brazilian cerrado 30 years ago.”

The minister also said that Brazilian farmers would be provided with 6 million hectares (60,000 square kilometres) in four province of northern Mozambique to be farmed under concession for a period of 50 years, renewable for a further 50 years against payment of an annual rent of 37.50 meticals (21 reals) per hectare.

The president of the Cotton Producers Association of the state of Mato Grosso in Brazil, Carlos Ernesto Augustin, told Folha de São Paulo that Mozambican land was very similar to that of the interior of Brazil, with the advantage of the price and the ease in obtaining environmental licenses.

“Mozambique is like Mato Grosso in the middle of Africa, with free land, without so many environmental obstacles, with a much cheaper shipment cost to China (…) Nowadays, as well as land being extremely expensive in Mato Grosso, it is impossible to get a license to clear the area,” Augustin told the newspaper.

China is the main world customer for the soy produced in Brazil and is an important buyer of other agricultural products from the South American country.

According to the Sao Paulo newspaper, a delegation of 40 Brazilian farmers plans to travel to Mozambique in September to analyse the land available in Niassa, Cabo Delgado, Nampula and Zambézia provinces.



Macauhub

Brazil's Graziano elected chief of Food and Agriculture Organization

by Nicole Winfield

Brazil's one-time food security minister, Jose Graziano da Silva, was elected Sunday director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, the U.N. agency tasked with reducing world hunger at a time of near-record high food prices.

Graziano, currently FAO's regional representative for Latin America and the Caribbean, won on the second ballot in a 92-88 vote of the 180 member states voting.

He beat out Miguel Angel Moratinos of Spain, his main challenger, and four other candidates to replace Jacques Diouf of Senegal, whose 18-year tenure prompted a change in the agency's rules to set term limits.
Graziano takes over the agency at a time when high food prices are putting the lives of millions of already hungry and malnourished people at further risk and raising fears of a repeat of the high-price-driven social unrest of 2007-2008.
The FAO's food price index hit an all-time high in February. It has since decreased slightly, but experts warn that food prices remain far too high for many poor communities. The agency put the number of hungry people in 2010 at 925 million, the overwhelming majority living in developing countries.

The Rome-based FAO is the largest U.N. agency, with an annual budget of about $1 billion. It has faced long-standing calls from top donors like the U.S. for bureaucratic reform, budget cuts and better prioritizing of projects.

In his final campaign pitch to delegates Saturday, Graziano noted that no Brazilian heads a top-level position in the U.N. system and that no Latin American had ever headed the FAO. He said he had the credentials, citing his tenure as FAO's regional representative for Latin America and the Caribbean since 2006.

Prior to that, he served as food security minister under former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. In that capacity, he helped implement the "Zero Hunger" initiative that helped dramatically decrease malnutrition among Brazil's 190 million people.

In his acceptance speech, Graziano said that while he was Brazil's candidate going into the election, he was now "a director-general elected by all the countries."

He drew particular applause in thanking African and other developing nations that saw in him a candidate who favored "south-south cooperation," a reference to the common issue in U.N. bodies about the north-south divide between industrialized and developing countries.

In his final campaign speech Saturday, Graziano promised to deliver on FAO's reform plans and said Africa should remain a priority for the agency, with FAO playing a central role in water and marine resources management.

But Graziano's emphasis was mostly on the need for a shared vision and bridging gaps between different positions to improve the organization's decision-making — saying the consensus surrounding his candidacy shows he's the right man to bridge those gaps.

True to this notion, he ended his pitch quoting John Lennon: "A dream you dream alone is only a dream; a dream you dream together is reality."

Businessweek

Brazil plans curbs on farmland speculators

by Joe Leahy

Brazil is preparing rules that will block foreign governments, state-owned companies and speculators from buying agricultural land while allowing in “genuine” private sector investors.

Brazil, one of the world’s most important agricultural powers, last year severely restricted all new farmland investment from abroad amid fears that foreign governments, led by China, were snapping up land in emerging markets to boost their food security.

But with global food prices hitting a record in February, Brazil is eager to attract new capital to the sector to increase its share of world agricultural exports while continuing to screen out unwelcome “sovereign investors” – or foreign government-owned entities, according to Wagner Rossi, the agriculture minister.

“We need to distinguish properly on the one hand between speculators and sovereign funds, which are a threat to our sovereignty, and on the other side, foreign investors who come with good projects,” Mr Rossi said.

Brazil is one of the few countries with the capacity to ramp up food production to feed an increasingly hungry world, but its agricultural sector will need enormous domestic and foreign investment to realise its full potential.

Brazil is already the world’s largest exporter of coffee and sugar, the second largest grower of soyabeans and the third largest exporter of maize. But the need for additional production from the country to help alleviate global food shortages is urgent.

The International Monetary Fund warned last week that global food prices were set to remain high for a prolonged period amid rising demand from emerging markets. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s index of global food prices rose to a record high in February, the eighth consecutive monthly increase.

The Brazilian government, under the previous president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, last year reinterpreted the law to restrict foreign investment in agricultural land after watching foreign governments including China, South Korea and the Gulf states buying land in Africa and elsewhere to increase their food security.

The trend gained notoriety after Daewoo of South Korea attempted to purchase a large chunk of land in Madasgascar, which helped to trigger a coup d’état in the African island country.

Mr Rossi said he planned to submit a technical paper to the cabinet as early as this month that would refine Brazil’s restrictions on foreign land ownership. He declined to name any foreign countries that were of concern, but analysts said the main target was clear.

“‘Sovereign funds’ means the Chinese,” said André Pessoa, director of Agroconsult, a consultancy.

Mr Rossi said Brazil’s output of grains – soyabeans, rice, wheat and other crops – was expected to be a record in 2010 and would be even larger this year after rains linked to the periodic Pacific cooling known as La Niña were less destructive than feared. Brazil’s grain yield this year was expected to reach 150m-155m tonnes compared with 149m last year, Mr Rossi said. This would include a bumper soyabean crop of about 70m tonnes.

Financial Times

Africa farmland has potential of Brazil

African farmland investment has the potential to match the exponential growth of Brazil's agricultural industry, the head of business development at privately owned agricultural operator Quifel said.

"The best benchmark is really Brazil. What took the Brazilians around 30 years, one should try to do it in 10-15 years," Pedro Marques dos Santos, head of business development at Quifel said, referring to how Africa could emulate Brazil's dominance in global agricultural investments.

Quifel operates in Africa, Latin America and Southern Europe and began operations with a palm project in Brazil.

"In 2007, Quifel also embraced the Sub-Saharan Africa land development opportunity," Marques dos Santos said, noting higher land prices in Brazil as one driver.

Investors poured $26 billion in foreign direct investment into Brazil in 2010 and around one-third of all funds and companies investing in farmland globally have committed funds to Brazil, the OECD said in a report.

But anyone interested in buying up Brazilian land may find it tough as last year the attorney general issued a ruling that limited the area of land foreigners were able to purchase.

The effect has been to cap at 12,350 acres the amount of land that can be bought by a foreign investor or a company that's more than 50 percent foreign-owned, prompting some investors to look to alternative regions.

This, combined with rising food prices, has spurred global interest in African farmland.

Global food prices are at record levels and are likely to remain so in the months to come, according to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization.

Africa has lower production costs than Latin America due to cheaper land and labour yet could offer similar yields, Marques dos Santos said.

There's a bigger need to invest in infrastructure and logistics in Africa but, "The end result is to expect high returns if farm talent is able to overcome everyday operational difficulties."

Brazil, Latin America's largest country, is one of the world's leading exporters of agricultural commodities including coffee, sugar and soybeans.

Quifel, which runs African farms in Mozambique, Sierra Leone and Angola, chose these countries based on their coastal locations and expectations of high economic growth, Marques dos Santos said.

Coastal West African countries were attractive for fruits and vegetables, while Mozambique appealed "for oilseeds, thus avoiding transhipment within the continent and by being closer to Asian markets for potential exports," he said.

Many African countries are net food importers, raising questions about food security and whether production should go to feeding the local community.

"Quifel's projects are Greenfield and for the foreseeable future our production will be bought by local players - mainly processors or crushers - as the countries need that production for domestic consumption," Marques dos Santos said.

Beyond the food security issue, investing in Africa has other challenges, which helps explain why its agricultural potential has not yet been fulfilled.

"Companies which can't cope with the long-term horizon are slowly leaving the region," he said.

Quifel has a long-term expansion plan within Sub Saharan Africa, he said, adding that its immediate focus will be on the development of the areas it already has under management.

Reuters

Brazil has revolutionised its own farms. Can it do the same for others?

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 the cerrado (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 a gaúcho 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. 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.


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. 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.

Embrapa is short for Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária, or the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. It is a public company set up in 1973, in an unusual fit of farsightedness by the country’s then ruling generals. At the time the quadrupling of oil prices was making Brazil’s high levels of agricultural subsidy unaffordable. Mauro Lopes, who supervised the subsidy regime, says he urged the government to give $20 to Embrapa for every $50 it saved by cutting subsidies. It didn’t, but Embrapa did receive enough money to turn itself into the world’s leading tropical-research institution. It does everything from breeding new seeds and cattle, to creating ultra-thin edible wrapping paper for foodstuffs that changes colour when the food goes off, to running a nanotechnology laboratory creating biodegradable ultra-strong fabrics and wound dressings. Its main achievement, however, has been to turn the cerrado green.

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. 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 braquiarãowhich 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.

Like almost every large farming country, Brazil is divided between productive giant operations and inefficient hobby farms. According to Mauro and Ignez Lopes of the Fundacão Getulio Vargas, a university in Rio de Janeiro, half the country’s 5m farms earn less than 10,000 reais a year and produce just 7% of total farm output; 1.6m are large commercial operations which produce 76% of output. Not all family farms are a drain on the economy: much of the poultry production is concentrated among them and they mop up a lot of rural underemployment. But the large farms are vastly more productive.

From the point of view of the rest of the world, however, these faults in Brazilian agriculture do not matter much. The bigger question for them is: can the miracle of thecerrado be exported, especially to Africa, where the good intentions of outsiders have so often shrivelled and died?

There are several reasons to think it can. Brazilian land is like Africa’s: tropical and nutrient-poor. The big difference is that the cerrado gets a decent amount of rain and most of Africa’s savannah does not (the exception is the swathe of southern Africa between Angola and Mozambique).

Brazil imported some of its raw material from other tropical countries in the first place.Brachiaria grass came from Africa. The zebu that formed the basis of Brazil’s nelorecattle herd came from India. In both cases Embrapa’s know-how improved them dramatically. 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 thesertão), 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

The Economist

Critics slam EU-Brazil African biofuel plan

by Andrew Willis


EU and Brazilian leaders are set to announce a new "triangular co-operation" initiative, under which they will aim to work together in some of the world's poorest countries, but NGOs say the duo's scheme is self-centred and will simply make conditions worse.

At a bilateral summit in Brasilia on 14 July, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy, European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva were expected to agree to co-operate on a range of different projects in Portuguese speaking parts of Africa, Haiti and East Timor in the coming years.

The development of renewable energy is likely to be a central theme, and a first step will see the EU and Brazil sign an agreement with Mozambique to develop bioelectricity and biofuels projects, EU sources have indicated.

Brazilian companies are world leaders in the production of biofuels and are looking to expand their operations both internally and abroad, while the EU is looking to increase its biofuel use at home in order to meet its target of sourcing 20 percent of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2020.

But as EU and Brazilian officials prepare to start studies on how best to develop bioethanol, biodiesel and bioelectricity projects in Mozambique – already a leading African producer of biofuels – environmental groups say the initiative will simply serve to displace people from their land and exacerbate food shortages.

"In a country that suffers persistent hunger, using millions of hectares of agricultural land to grow crops to power European cars is immoral and perverse," said Adrian Bebb, a biofuels expert with Friends of the Earth. "European biofuels targets are what is driving this global expansion," he added. "Instead of doing deals to grab more land in the South, the EU should be scrapping its biofuel policy."

NGOs such as ActionAid have also criticised the EU's biofuel target which demands that 10 percent of transport fuel come from renewable energy by 2020.

Studies suggest that a third of the land sold or acquired in Africa, some five million hectares or an area greater than the size of Denmark, is intended for fuel crops.

The gains for both sides as a result of the new deal are clear however. By teaming up with Brazil in Africa, the EU stands to create a new and cheaper supply of biofuel, while Brazilian companies could make considerable savings on EU import tariffs.

Biofuel produced in Brazil is currently subject to high tariffs when entering the EU, while duties on African-produced biofuels are much lower.

Reports suggest that Cosan and Copersucar are among the Brazilian ethanol producers that stand to gain the most from setting up new production bases in Africa.

As part of his trip to Brazil, Mr Van Rompuy is set to visit a Cosan production line and meet with senior company officials.

Business Week

Brazil offers to help Africa boost food output

by Diadie Ba

Brazil is ready to provide its experience and technology free of charge to African nations seeking to improve food production and develop biofuels, its minister for development, industry and trade recently said.

Brazil, a major food producer and the world's leading ethanol exporter, is expanding links with Africa, where initial tests with biofuels have had mixed results and spikes in food prices have accelerated calls for development in agriculture.

"Our country is the most important producer of food in the world and we can help Africa, free of charge, to transfer the technology of food processing," said Miguel Jorge, Brazil's minister for development, industry and foreign trade.

Brazil is the world's top sugar, beef and chicken exporter, the second largest shipper of soya and the No. 3 maize exporter.

Jorge, who is leading a Brazilian trade delegation visiting Africa to promote agricultural technologies, said Brazil could help the world's poorest continent boost food production, without giving any further details.

The Brazilian Africultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA) said the focus should be on helping African countries add value to the products that they grow.

"West African countries require a lot of technologies for processing cashew nuts, casava and for adding values to the products, and we are ready to help," said Claudio Bragantini, EMBRAPA's Africa representative.

Escalating food and fuel prices in recent years have led to social unrest in many African countries, which are now under pressure to increase and improve investments in agriculture.

Many in biotechnology industry see Africa as a destination for future investments as the continent has perhaps the greatest need as well as the most to gain from it.

Alongside developing food production, Brazil, which accounts for 95 percent of global ethanol exports, is keen to see African nations extend efforts made in biofuel development.

"We develop the most important biofuel technology in the world and we can transfer it for free to African countries," Jorge said, adding the nations could produce bio-diesel as well as ethanol.

EMBRAPA's Bragatini said Brazil was working on a programme to improve the volumes of oil recovered from jatropha plants.

Social unrest in African nations was exacerbated by last year's escalating fuel prices.

The Brazilian delegation will visit Ghana, which is already receiving assistance in developing biofuel technology, Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea.

Reuters

Rhetoric surpasses reality on Africa-Brazil biofuels collaboration

Brazil, along with China and the European Union, has identified sub-Saharan Africa as a region with ideal agro-climatic conditions, and the socioeconomic potential needed to become a large-scale biofuel feedstock provider over the next decade.

Through Petrobras , the state-controlled oil company, the Brazilian government has proposed a series of long-term investments across the continent--offering African governments the financial, technical and agronomic assistance needed to get their industriesoff the ground. This assistance at the same time serves Brazilian interests by diversifying sources of feedstock supply and augmenting global demand for biofuels.

However, many of Brasilia's ambitious foreign policy pronouncements have not moved far beyond the rhetorical stage:

--While the government is keen to develop Brazil's weight as a global player, in particular in terms of South-South relations, in practice any investments are likely to be modest in the foreseeable future: Petrobras' investment budget for the period 2009 to 2013 includes only $2.8 billion for biodiesel and ethanol, of which only 9% will be invested abroad.

--Moreover, 49% of Petrobras is in the hands of private investors, limiting the government's ability to use the company to advance its political aims, in particular given heavy demands on its investment capacity domestically.

Lusophone focus. While Brazil is pursuing biofuel initiatives across the continent, it is the development of the Lusophone axis which appears to be Brasilia's key strategic objective:

Mozambique. The bilateral biofuel cooperation agreement signed between Brazil and Mozambique in September 2007 came after Maputo had already attracted more than $700 million of foreign investment in the sector--for both biodiesel (jatropha) and sugar cane (ethanol). That agreement seeks to replicate Brazil's ethanol production model by transferring Brazilian technologies and expertise in plant science, plantation management, as well as refining, distribution and marketing.

Neither party has yet produced figures on the scale of sugar cane plantation or investment in refining capacity envisaged. Mozambique has about 10% of its available arable land (precise data is poor) currently under cultivation. Estimates suggest that somewhere between 10 and 30 million hectares of land would be suitable for growing food and biofuel feedstocks--particularly sugar cane. Early indications are that Mozambique has the potential to produce about 11.3 million liters of ethanol per day by 2015. Rather than undermining food crops, investment in the biofuel sector --including irrigation and transport links--could help boost food crop production.

Angola. Like Mozambique, Angola is large, with a relatively low population density, and a vast amount of land suitable for biofuel crop production--particularly soybean-based biodiesel. It also has one of the largest expanses of non-forest agricultural land in the world--even excluding the substantial areas still littered with landmines from the civil war.

Luanda has also signed a biofuel development cooperation agreement with Petrobras, similar to that agreed with Maputo, although development plans are still at the embryonic stage. In addition, Petrobras recently signed a partnership agreement with Eni of Italy to build biofuel plants in Angola, Mozambique and Brazil to serve the Italian market. After years of inaction, Angola now appears intent on investing in developing its own agricultural potential, including biofuels. However, while Mozambique is likely to become a hub for ethanol production, Angola seems destined to become a hub for biodiesel production.

Brazil's proposals for developing Africa as a source of biofuel feedstock are unlikely to be matched by concrete investments, in particular in light of the recent fall in oil prices, although Petrobras may seek to expand its presence in countries where it also plays a role in the oil sector. However, the biofuels sector could benefit substantially if, as anticipated, the new U.S. administration throws its weight behind the development of low carbon energy supplies.

Forbes

Ghana and the sugar cane trap

by Emmanuel Kwablah

A Brazilian delegation called on Ghanian Vice President John Mahama last month. The purpose was to discuss that country’s planned investment in bio-fuel production in Ghana. Mahama’s body language, as captured by national television, depicted great excitement.

Of course, no one frowns on such an offer at a time when the global economy has gone bonkers, reeling under the effects of a credit crunch which last year followed immediately on the heels of a yet-to be-resolved food supply crunch and an unprecedented skyrocketing crude oil price that spiked at US$147 in July but has since dipped and now hovers just above US$40.

The Brazilian visit was the follow up to another by President Lula da Silva’s last year, after which he bragged: “In Ghana, we are developing a project that will result in growing 27,000 hectares (of sugar cane) for the production of 150 million litres of ethanol per year that is destined for the Swedish market.”

We seem to be very fortunate in attracting such massive direct foreign investment (FDI), given the current global financial crisis wherein hitherto cash-flushed countries are resorting to “financial protectionism”. And to think that it is in bio-fuel, too, at a time when a crashing crude oil price ensures that it doesn’t make economic sense to put money into that.

So we are very fortunate. Or we could be sleepwalking into a big trap.

What’s the worry?

Oil and food are special commodities. They differ from other commodities because they are indispensable for the functioning of society. The behaviour of both commodities over the past year has created new situations that are prompting a rearrangement of relationships between nations.

Recent forecasts indicate the world has passed its peak of crude oil production and henceforth demand will outstrip supply (the current slump in demand due to a global economic downturn is a temporary quirk), thereby prompting heightened interest in renewable energy sources, with bio-fuel gaining serious attention. Food shortages in recent times are being partly blamed on the increasing use of food crops for bio-fuel production.

Ghana has been seeking to create a bio-fuel industry for some time now, and the worry is that, naturally, as we convert more of our arable land into that activity rather than for food production, we could be seriously exposing ourselves to increasing self­ insufficiency in staple food production.

Additionally, with the Brazilian project, there is a serious possibility of turning a number of northern smallholder food-crop farmers into landless, dependent, plantation farmhands.

But perhaps most revealing about the Brazilian project is what critics of that country’s bio-fuel industry at home are saying.

The authoritative German­ Foreign-Policy.com quotes Brazilian critics as saying that the rich industrial states are getting “a full tank in return for empty stomachs.” They complain that hundreds of thousands of sugar cane plantation farm workers working for Brazilian ethanol industry are being “held like slaves”: their “working conditions are cruel, their pay ridiculous, and their children are starving”. According to a recent study, sugar cane slaves were better nourished before slavery was abolished in 1888, than farm workers are today.

Could Ghanaian farmhands on such Brazilian projects here fare any better, than their counterparts in Brazil? It has been estimated that as crude oil prices fell below US$70 per barrel, bio­fuels became uncompetitive. The consequent cost reductions needed to make bio-fuels production viable would naturally be borne, mostly, by the plantation farmhands.

As Brazil’s bio-fuel industry matures, with labour costs becoming a problem, it is seeking to shift the low value-end to Africa, while it maintains its control over the trade in the product.

It is now being argued that as such arrangements are put in place, the former European colonies on the continent are again reduced to the status of suppliers of raw materials.

That is not to say that Ghana should not go into bio-fuels production, especially as the renewable energy industry is expected to attain a market value of 2.2 trillion euros by 2020 - of which bio-fuels is an important component. The point is that the local industry must be developed with Ghanaians at the high-value end of it.

The question then is: have we made any efforts to develop a policy for guiding development of the industry to the benefit of country and its people?

Definitely yes! However, like all homegrown policies it is not being given the needed serious attention that would allow for its useful application.

Why not jatropha?

In November, 2005, the Energy Commission completed a National Bio-fuels Policy Draft, which was subsequently forwarded to the Cabinet. It still has not been presented to Parliament as a bill to pass into law. Portions of it were, however, incorporated in the 2008 Budget Statement, including fiscal incentives to be provided for investments in the bio-fuel industry such as tax-holidays of up to five years and a reduction of corporate tax from 25 to 20 percent for businesses directly related to the development of the bio-fuel industry.

With the strategic objective of reducing poverty and creating wealth for the well-being of the country’s people, among others, as well as considerations that the bio­fuel industry ought not to compete with human consumers for foodstuff used to produce bio-oil, jatropha curcas was identified as the most suitable energy crop that would be of the greatest benefit to the country’s bio-fuel industry.

And jatropha has the added advantage of doing well on marginal lands that are unsuitable for food crop cultivation, thereby not taking up too much of the country’s food crop land. That cannot be said for sugar cane.

Perhaps developing and sticking to our own policies for our industrial development and then getting others to buy into them is a far better way of ensuring our proper development rather than going after any offer that is dangled in our faces. Otherwise, we are likely to be kept as hewers of wood and drawers of water far longer than necessary.

Ghana Business News

Brazil protects home rice supply, limits exports

Brazil announced April 23 it has temporarily halted rice exports to ensure domestic supply amid rising world prices for the grain.

Brazil grows more rice than it consumes and has a reserve that will safeguard the country's supply, Agriculture Minister Reinhold Stephanes said in a statement. Sales abroad will nevertheless be blocked to make sure the country has enough of the grain for the next six to eight months.

Several Asian countries recently suspended rice exports to guarantee their own supplies, causing an imbalance in world markets, Stephanes said.

"We will follow the movement of the principal world producers," Stephanes said. "With the favorable price, it's possible that there will be an increase in production and that the supply situation will be resolved next year."

Brazil will not meet recent requests by African and Latin American countries for shipments totaling nearly 500,000 tons of rice, he said.

The grain is a staple of the Brazilian diet

IHT

Brazil's Agriculture Ministry said it has temporarily banned exports of government-owned stocks of rice to guarantee domestic supply amid rising world prices, but other shipments will still be allowed.

The Agriculture Ministry had issued a statement Wednesday suggesting that all rice exports were being halted, but a ministry spokeswoman said April 24 the statement was poorly worded.

Rice farmers have not been asked to stop exporting and the government will "allow the market to follow its course as long as there is no risk of shortages," the spokeswoman said.

The ministry said the decision to ban exports of government rice stocks was sparked by a purchase request from some African nations. "We told them that we could not meet their request because we have to make sure that Brazil will not suffer shortages," the spokeswoman said. She did not know which countries had hoped to buy rice.

The ministry also said that on May 5 the government will auction 55,000 tons of rice from its stocks to keep domestic prices from rising from current levels, about US$17 to US$18 (€10.80 to €11.40) for a 110-lb. (50 kilogram) bag.

The ministry said the 2007-2008 rice harvest totaled 12 million tons, and government rice stocks currently stand at 1.6 million tons.

IHT

Brazil opens regional agricultural research center in Ghana

Brazil on April 20 inaugurated a Regional Office of its Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA) in Accra to spearhead agricultural revolution in Africa.

Ghana’s President John Kufuor and visiting Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva jointly performed the inauguration, with Ghana contributing US$500,000 towards the Office. The Accra Office, among other things, will facilitate technical co-operation activities for agricultural development, technology transfer, ensure availability of research findings to industry and enhance human resource capacity building.

Additionally, it is designed to help to deepen South-South co-operation through collaboration of Ghanaian and Brazilian scientists.

EMBRAPA, established in April 1973, has developed into a major world player in agricultural research and technology development, contributing an estimated US$40 billion to Brazil’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Kufuor said the expectation was that close collaboration with the Brazilian institution would result in the sharing of knowledge, transfer of appropriate technologies and best practices for radical transformation of agriculture in Ghana and other African nations. "The goal is to achieve food security and make Africa a net exporter of agricultural produce," he said. Kufuor said in the past, increase in agricultural production in Africa was achieved by putting more land under cultivation.

However, with the present climatic changes and emerging environmental concerns, maximization of production must come through irrigation, use of fertilizers and application of biotechnology. President Kufuor said the hope of the Government was that EMBRAPA would complement the country’s efforts to stimulate national economic activity through agriculture.

President Lula da Silva said he was confident that with the inauguration, Ghana was going to make a big difference by way of its contribution to the transformation of agriculture in Africa. He described the inauguration of the Accra Office as a fulfilment of his commitment to the Region.

He said their priority was to give technical training and support the Office with the tools to build its own future.

Afrik

Brazil to assist Congo with biofuel projects

Brazil has signed two agreements with Congo Republic to provide the poor central African state with training, technology and financing to produce biofuel from sugar cane and palm oil.

Congolese President Denis Sassou-Nguesso said at a news conference with Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva that his country's oil production would dwindle within years and it was necessary to look to the future.

Lula said Africa had plenty of land to produce biofuel and could provide a solution to the energy deficit of the world's poorest continent. "We are ready to accompany the continent and we are willing to help those countries which want to follow Brazil's example: today we are self-sufficient in energy," Lula said.

Brazil's state oil company, Petrobras, expects ethanol sales in Latin America's largest country to beat gasoline consumption by around 2020.

Africa produces a range of crops that could be used to make biofuel, including sugar cane, sugar beet, maize, sorghum and cassava -- all of which can be used to make ethanol -- and peanuts, whose oil can be used to power diesel engines.

Engineering News

Green revolution-based intensive farming turns Brazil into agro-industrial power

Joao Venancio Soares is a living example of the the process that turned Brazil into an agricultural powerhouse over the last three decades.

Río Verde is one of the areas that has been the most successful in developing high-productivity agriculture in the surrounding Cerrado region of west-central Brazil. It is a vast tropical savannah that covers approximately 23 percent of Brazil’s surface area in the central part of the country. The low-fertility soil of the Cerrado, which was previously disregarded, is now the scene of the country’s greatest agribusiness expansion, which has had an environmental impact that has drawn little attention.

When Soares, an agronomist, arrived in Río Verde in 1974, rice was the main local crop, with harvests of 740 kg per hectare. Today, yields reach 2,500 kg per hectare. The productivity of corn has also risen more than threefold in the area’s richest soils.

But it was soy, introducedby a group of immigrants from the United States, that played the greatest role in transforming the economy of the Cerrado region, eventually becoming the main farm product of Río Verde, as well as the country’s leading agricultural export product since the 1990s.

A number of Mennonites, a Protestant religious group, came to Río Verde in 1969, drawn by low land prices. Today they form a community of around 50 families in the area. The immigrants initially rejected Soares’ recommendation to rotate soy bean and corn crops to boost productivity, the agronomist recalled. They argued that "corn only grows on fertile land," he said. But one farmer finally decided to take his advice, obtaining record harvests in the region, and others quickly followed suit.

"Soybeans modify the chemistry and fertility of the soil," adding nitrogen from the air and organic matter, explained Soares, as he described his first triumph in promoting local agricultural development. With modern technology, many problems are remedied with the use of fertilisers and pesticides, he said.

The 61-year-old agronomist dismissed environmentalists’ criticism of the so-called "green revolution," and rejected the concept of "agrotoxics." When used correctly, he argued, fertilisers and pesticides protect agriculture and provide benefits, not damages. "It's like medicines: they are necessary, but if used in excess, they become poisons, and nobody calls them ‘toxic’," he said.

Moreover, Río Verde did not yield to the monoculture model, but instead diversified production, growing soy beans, corn, sorghum, cotton, rice, beans and fresh produce. The municipality has also tried to curb the invasion of sugar cane...by limiting cultivation of the crop to no more than 10 percent of the local farmland, in order to prevent the environmental and social damages that it can entail, said Soares.

(Brazil’s fuel alcohol programme depends heavily on sugar cane, and more than 30 percent of the country’s automobile fuels currently come from sugar cane-based ethanol).

Soy first began to be planted in southern Brazil, where summer temperatures are milder. Its expansion northwards, and increased productivity, were made possible by the development of varieties of soy beans adapted to the tropical heat and low humidity of the Cerrado region. Essential to that process was the research carried out by EMBRAPA, the government agricultural research institute, and the work of agronomists who, like Soares, brought innovations directly to the farmers.

Thus Brazil, historically a major exporter of only coffee and sugar, diversified production and became a world leader in sales of soy, beef and orange juice as well. Grain output doubled in just one decade, as the agricultural frontier expanded, and today the farm industry accounts for around 90 percent of the country’s trade surplus of more than $40 billion a year.

The Cerrado region was traditionally relegated to extensive livestock breeding. But in the last few decades it was discovered that by using the latest technology and large amounts of fertiliser, it was suitable for crops, especially soy beans, as well as sugar cane, coffee and grains.

Soares did acknowledge the problem of large-scale deforestation and said the Cerrado ecosystem’s enormous biodiversity had been largely sacrificed. For example, farmers have had to use lime to "correct" the acidity of the soil, which is essential for many native fruits, that have subsequently disappeared from vast areas, he admitted.

One "sin" that he confessed to committing, "following a misguided government policy," was draining swamps to turn them into farmland. In consequence, the streams that depended on these wetlands dried up, he lamented. Now environmental authorities are demanding that landowners restore wetlands on their property.

The prosperity of Río Verde was not only built on modern agricultural techniques. Another point of pride for Soares is that he helped contribute to the creation of the Cooperative of Rural Producers of Southwest Goiás (COMIGO), which was founded in 1975 by 50 members and today has more than 3,800. The cooperative’s enormous agribusiness complex, which includes plants that produce soy bean oil, fertilisers, milk, soap and seeds, as well as stores and other businesses that operate in several municipalities in the region, employs some 1,300 people.

COMIGO is one of the engines of the economy of southwest Goiás, along with a foreign soy bean oil company and a chicken and pork processor that opened in Río Verde in 1997 and employs 7,600 people, besides purchasing the production of hundreds of local poultry and pork farms. But the huge increase in pork and poultry production has also generated environmental problems, caused by animal and chemical waste. Since the area’s sandy clay soil is capable of holding little waste, the runoff ends up polluting water sources. One solution, Soares said, would be to use the waste to produce biogas and biodiesel.

The agribusiness companies also ensure local demand for diversified production and support a large number of small industries and services.

And technical assistance for farmers is no longer a problem, because today the municipality has 400 agronomists, compared to the four that Soares initially trained after moving to Río Verde 33 years ago.

IPS

Benin, Brazil sign biofuel cooperation agreement

Brazil and Benin have signed an agreement to work together to produce, use and commercialize fuels made from crops.

A team of eight Brazilian ethanol experts will establish a presence in the West-African country to help it develop a production capacity.

In his speech at the signing ceremony, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Lula said fuels like ethanol and biodiesel will give more countries the chance to become involved in energy production which serves as a tool to promote development.

Benin President Thomas Boni Yayi described Lula as 'a friend' of Africa and recalled the fact he had surpassed previous Brazilian leaders in the number of African countries visited. Lula has traveled to 17 nations on the continent, paying a visit to Benin in February 2006.

On August 16, the Beninese president was to travel to Sao Paulo, where he wwas expected to visit an ethanol plant and meet biofuel entrepreneurs.o). On Friday, he will visit Salvador, in northeastern Brazil, where there are many descendants of slaves brought from Benin during the colonial and imperial period. There he will sign a Cooperation Protocol between Salvador and Cotonou.

Biopact

Mixed views on success of Brazilian land reform

Brazil's land reform programme has settled nearly one million families on small farms of their own in the last 20 years. But there is no consensus on the effort, which the government touts as a success, the landless movement sees as insufficient, and the opposition criticises as wrongheaded.

During President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's first term (2003-2006), 381,419 families were granted a plot of land, according to the Ministry of Agrarian Development. Credit was made more widely available, price supports (guarantees of minimum prices) were provided, and greater technical education and assistance to small farmers was offered. In that same period, the funding that goes towards financing agriculture was quadrupled to 4.75 billion dollars.

But the agrarian reform plans for Lula's second term (2007-2010) have not yet been defined, nor has the minister of agrarian development been named. "Of the seven promises made, it has fulfilled only one : to distribute food baskets to the families living in camps," said Joao Pedro Stédile, one of the coordinators of the Landless Workers Movement (MST), one of the largest and best-organised social movements in Latin America.

Conflicts over land remain a problem in Brazil. Tens of thousands of families are still living in camps, organised landless families continue to stage occupations of property that they see as unproductive and subject to agrarian reform, and violent clashes periodically occur between landowners, their private militias, and families who have moved onto, and begun to work, fallow private land. People are often injured or even killed in these disputes. However, the problem no longer seems to mobilise the same level of public support as it did in the past.

The landless movement has also expanded its targets. The rural movement now holds protests against the paper pulp industry's monoculture forestry plantations, which have been dubbed "green deserts" because they rob the soil of nutrients and consume enormous amounts of water; genetically modified seeds; mega-hydroelectric dams; free trade treaties; transnational corporations; export agribusiness; and even biofuels, which are displacing food production.

The MST leader was pessimistic with regards to Lula's second term, saying the president, a former trade unionist, was becoming "centre-right" as a result of his "commitments to the agribusiness sector and conservative forces."

Opponents of land reform, who are mainly large landowners, agree with the view expressed by Francisco Graziano, environment secretary in the state of São Paulo, when he predicted that Brazil's agrarian reform would become "the world's biggest failed public programme." He argued that the roughly one million families settled on land through the agrarian reform programme occupy around 60 million hectares, nearly equivalent to the 62 million hectares worked by large agribusiness interests, and that there is no indication of how much they actually produce, while "they have failed to improve on the wealth of the countryside; on the contrary, they have spread poverty around."

It is expected that a new agricultural census, whose results will be released in 2008, will make it possible to effectively assess the contribution of land reform to local economies and rural development.

IPS

Brazilian irrigation company seeks partners in North Africa

Brazilian company Usmatic, a manufacturer of irrigation equipment, is seeking partnerships to assemble a production line in North Africa. This is one of the objectives of the participation of the company's president, Edmilson Marcondes dos Santos, in the business mission that the Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce and the Brazilian Export and Investment Promotion Agency (Apex) will organise to the region late this month. "Our intention is not to export the pivots, but rather to sell technology. We are open to negotiation. We are interested in establishing joint ventures and establishing factories in the region," said Santos. The Brazilian delegation will travel to three countries: Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt.

According to Santos, Usmatic makes two types of automatic pivots for irrigation, the mini and central types, with capacity to irrigate from 1.5 to 150 hectares. The equipment is not exported. The company has a monthly production capacity of twenty 150-hectare pivots. "We are aware that the North African market is very large, and that there is a demand for this type of product in the region. We are also going on the mission to get to know the technical regulations for the products in the region. Usmatic is fully capable of adapting products to the regulations of these countries," said Santos. According to him, the pivots have a rate of effectiveness for distributing and applying water of 90% to 96%, resulting in a large economy of water and energy. "We use state-of-the-art technology, imported from the United States," he explained.

ANBA

Brazil to piggy back on China's investments in Africa

Brazilian state farming research company, Embrapa, has announced it will invest in Africa, precisely in countries where China plans to fund the building of infrastructure. Embrapa plans to accompany Chinese investment in Africa, estimated at US$5 billion over the next five years, in order to gain a slice of the staff training, technical assistance, consulting, associated survey and technology transfer markets in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Embrapa believes that investments by China will lead to a strong increase in demand for food goods in the African market, allowing for entry into the market of Brazilian goods such as agricultural machinery and equipment, seeds, production systems and even raw materials (soy, maize, rice, cotton) and meats.

To begin with Embrapa will focus on Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia, Zambia, Cameroon, Liberia, the Sudan and the Seychelles and at a later stage on Angola, Egypt, Ghana, the Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria and Kenya.

“China is moving into Africa for the mining of copper, iron, manganese, as well as for oil and gas. And we are going after them to step outside Brazil, for the first time in an institutional way,” said the chairman of Embrapa, Silvio Crestana.

In 2006 Embrapa set up a research unit in Accra, the capital of Ghana, where a team of researchers has since December been carrying out surveys of the vast local market. “Embrapa’s technology, which is a world leader in tropical agriculture, covers all of Africa’s eco-systems. Not only with production technologies, but also in terms of management, specific crops, zoning and animal genetics, for example,” said Crestana.

Even with just four months of work in Africa, the demand has been “enormous” he said. "There have been requests of every kind. For example, a Portuguese group has been looking for a partnership to plant 100,000 hectares of soy and set up a biodiesel factory for export to Europe," said Crestana.

Macau Hub