For the farmers in Mato Grosso, prosperity has been hard to come by lately. Growers in the state amassed US$14.5 billion in debt the last two years. Farmers say they can no longer afford storage space, forcing them to sell their crops as soon as they are harvested, rather than wait for higher prices.
"You do all the work, you plant the right crops," Salles, the local farmer, said. "But even when you do everything right, you still lose."
The growers' desperation has allowed the major grain traders to tighten their grip. Brazilian farmers say they are paying up to 25 percent more for material like fertilizers provided by the traders, which are paid back with the crop. "We are becoming slaves of the big trading companies," said Ricardo Tomczyk, another farmer in Rondonopolis.
Jose Luiz Glaser, the general manager for grains and oilseeds at Cargill Brazil, said Cargill stopped financing several farmers in Mato Grosso last year after they failed to pay their bills.
Such orphaned farmers could soon find new Chinese benefactors, who are looking to make inroads in the clubby world of Brazilian agriculture, said Charles Tang, president of the Brazil-China Chamber of Commerce.
Brazilian farmers say they would welcome Chinese investment. But they worry about China's growing clout as a soybean buyer. Memories are still fresh of the 2004 "red beans" incident, when China rejected several shipments of Brazilian soybeans after claiming they were contaminated.
To try to counter growing Chinese influence, Brazilian producers are working with American growers to diversify their buyers. American soybean producers organized a joint trade mission with Mato Grosso farmers in December to India, another huge potential growth market.
The Chinese want to connect directly with Brazilian farmers, bypassing the multinational grain merchants. While they have yet to make a major purchase of cropland in Brazil, they are looking to invest in improved facilities and upgrade the antiquated rail system, which has not undergone significant improvement since the 1930s.
China began looking overseas for more soybean supplies in the mid-1990s when the scope of its land and water problems became clearer. Beijing has also chosen to use more of its arable farmland to grow fruits and vegetables, crops that make better use of China's cheap labor and scarcer water supplies to generate higher returns on the export market.
In northern China, where soybeans traditionally have been grown, water tables are dropping at a rate of 91cm to 3m a year, according to Wu Aimin, a researcher with the China Groundwater Information Center in Beijing.
"It takes a thousand tonnes of water to produce one tonne of grain," said Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, an environmental research and advocacy group. "So the most efficient way to import water is in the form of grain."
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