Can Brazil help with food shortages around the world?
In the first two months of this year it has exported more wheat than in the whole of 2021
WHEN MARIZE PORTO’S husband died suddenly in 2002, she was left with three small children and a failing cattle ranch that she had no idea how to run. Desperate, she turned to Embrapa, the Brazilian government’s agricultural research institute, 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 pastures, 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 advantages, it has been adopted on only 18.5m hectares, or around 5% of farmland.
This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "Pulling its wheat"
From the April 28th 2022 edition
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