Brazil's Rise as Farming Giant Has a Price Tag
RONDONOPOLIS, Brazil — This Amazon nation's drive to become the world's breadbasket hinges on farmers such as Carlos Augustin, who grows cotton and soy in an area that would cover more than half of the San Fernando Valley.
Augustin's giant agricultural complex houses a cotton gin, dormitories for 300 migrant laborers and a $3-million fleet of cotton harvesters.
Such complexes are designed with one goal: to outproduce rivals from Australia to America. The strategy appears to be working.
In the last five years, Augustin and other large farm owners have turned their nation into an agricultural superpower, making it the world's biggest exporter of many agricultural products.
The South American nation now supplies sugar for Nigeria's bakeries, chicken for Hong Kong's restaurants, tobacco for Germany's smokers and coffee for Japan.
Soaring demand in China has fueled much of Brazil's growth. More than 60% of China's orange juice imports now come from Brazil, which also supplies a third of the Asian nation's soybean and tobacco purchases.
Brazil exported $27.6 billion in agricultural products last year and imported goods worth $3.2 billion. That agricultural trade surplus of $24.4 billion was the biggest in the world and is crucial to Brazil's efforts to pay foreign debts and keep its economy humming.
"Agribusiness is a matter of survival for Brazil," said Carlo Lovatelli, president of the Brazilian Assn. of Agribusiness in Sao Paulo.
Brazil's focus on creating large farms to grow crops for export is not without cost. Many smaller farmers are being pushed out of business. And some Brazilians worry that the country is focusing too much on commodities such as cotton and oilseeds for the global market, rather than the "foodstuffs that can actually be consumed by the local people," said Vicente Puhl, a leader of a coalition of social organizations.
The agricultural boom also is responsible for much of the deforestation occurring in the environmentally sensitive Amazon region.
Government officials acknowledge that loggers, ranchers and farmers gobbled up 10,088 square miles of Amazon rain forest in the 12-month period ending last August, an area about the size of Massachusetts.
"Their ambition is destroying nature," said Jose Tadao, a representative of Brazil's Landless Workers Movement and an advocate for small-scale farming.
