Brazilian farmer Rodrigo Pozzobon drives his pickup truck toward his giant corn and soybean fields at the edge of the Amazon rainforest where, COVID-19 pandemic or not, business is booming thanks to surging demand from China.
Pozzobon has been racing to keep up with Chinese orders for chicken and pig feed, like many farmers in the greater Sorriso region, in the western state of Mato Grosso — a vast expanse of farms considered the capital of Brazil’s booming agribusiness industry.
“When this whole pandemic is over, I need a vacation,” said Pozzobon, an agricultural engineer, as he headed up the red dirt road to Jacana, his 2,350 hectare farm.
Photo: AFP
Latin America’s biggest economy is facing a record 6 percent recession this year because of the novel coronavirus, which has infected and killed more people in Brazil than in any country except the US.
Yet agribusiness, which accounts for more than one-fifth of the Brazilian economy, looks strikingly healthy, on track for revenue growth of 2 percent this year.
China is turning to Brazilian farmers more than ever because of its trade dispute with the US, not to mention a plunge in Brazil’s currency that has slashed the cost of its exports.
Battered by the economic fallout of the pandemic, the Brazilian real has fallen 25 percent this year against the US dollar.
That is bad news for consumers, but good news for exporters in places such as the Sorriso region, which is home to 1.5 million hectares of farmland — about half the size of Belgium.
This is a land of industrial farming and genetically modified crops, which are sold to big distributors such as Cargill Inc, Bunge Ltd and China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corp (COFCO, 中糧集團).
Those corporations then sell them around the world, mainly to China, the destination for 72.6 percent of the region’s output so far this year, but there is a big blemish on that bright picture.
Brazilian agribusiness faces accusations of razing the Amazon, where there has been record deforestation in the first seven months of the year.
Flying over Mato Grosso farm country, the destruction of the rainforest is easily visible as scarred patches of bare land interrupt the lush vegetation.
Environmentalists say that farmers and ranchers are responsible for much of the destruction.
The issue has grown even more tense since the election of far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, an advocate of opening up the world’s biggest rainforest to agriculture and industry.
Last year, in Bolsonaro’s first year in office, deforestation soared 85 percent in the Brazilian Amazon, to 10,123km2 of forest.
That loss — nearly the size of Lebanon — fueled worldwide alarm over the future of the rainforest, seen as vital to curbing climate change.
The destruction was driven by huge fires that raged across the Amazon from May to October, sending a thick haze of black smoke all the way to Sao Paulo, thousands of kilometers away, and triggering worldwide alarm.
Pozzobon, whose family arrived in the region with a wave of settlers in the 1970s, said that increasing agricultural production does not have to mean destroying the forest.
Millions of hectares of already deforested land being used to pasture livestock could be converted to crop land, he said, by way of example.
He also pointed to a recent regulation requiring large farms to leave 80 percent of their land fallow each year to reduce pressure on the environment.
“I admit, we have a past of sin. We’ve destroyed forest land. Some landowners cut down more trees than they were supposed to, but that’s been fixed, and we’ve paid the bill for harming the environment,” he said.
Facing international pressure to protect the forest, Bolsonaro has banned the use of fires to clear land.
Yet the practice is still occurring, as Agence France-Presse correspondents saw near the town of Sinop, where fires had burnt several fields and spread into the surrounding forest.
The ongoing problem has fueled fears that fires during this year’s dry season, which started last month, will be even worse than the ones that triggered global outcry last year.
DAMAGE REPORT: Global central banks are assessing war-driven inflation risks as the law of unintended consequences careens around the world, spiking oil prices Central banks from Washington to London and from Jakarta to Taipei are about to make their first assessments of economic damage after more than two weeks of conflict between the US and Iran. Decisions this week encompassing every member of the G7 and eight of the world’s 10 most-traded currency jurisdictions are likely to confirm to investors that the specter of a new inflation shock is already worrying enough to prompt heightened caution. The US Federal Reserve is widely expected to do exactly what everyone anticipated weeks ahead of its March 17-18 policy gathering: hold rates steady. The narrative surrounding that
PRICE HIKES: The war in the Middle East would not significantly disrupt supply in the short term, but semiconductor companies are facing price surges for materials Taiwan’s semiconductor companies are not facing imminent supply disruptions of essential chemicals or raw materials due to the war in the Middle East, but surges in material costs loom large, industry association SEMI Taiwan said yesterday. The association’s comments came amid growing concerns that supplies of helium and other key raw materials used in semiconductor production could become a choke point after Qatar shut down its liquefied natural gas (LNG) production and helium output earlier this month due to the conflict. Qatar is the second-largest LNG supplier in the world and accounts for about 33 percent of global helium output. Helium is
About 1,000 participants, including more than 200 venture capitalists, joined the Taiwan Demo Day in Silicon Valley on Saturday, the largest iteration to date of the event held ahead of Nvidia Corp’s annual GPU Technology Conference which runs from today to Thursday. Taiwan Demo Day, co-organized by the Taiwan Next Foundation and the Startup Island Taiwan Silicon Valley Hub, took place at the Computer History Museum in California, showcasing 12 teams focused on physical artificial intelligence (AI) and agentic AI technologies. Katie Hsieh (謝凱婷), founder of the Taiwan Next Foundation, said the event highlighted the strength of the Taiwan-US start-up ecosystem, with
DOMESTIC COMPONENT: Huang identified several Taiwanese partners to be a key part of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin supply chain, including Asustek, Hon Hai and Wistron Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), addressing crowds at the company’s biggest annual event, unveiled a variety of new products while predicting that its flagship artificial intelligence (AI) processors would help generate US$1 trillion in sales through next year. During a two-and-a-half-hour keynote address, Huang announced plans to push deeper into central processing units (CPUs) — Intel Corp’s home turf — and introduced semiconductors made with technology acquired from start-up Groq Inc. The company even said it was developing chips for data centers in outer space. At the heart of Huang’s speech was the message that demand for computing power
RSS