Agriculture in Brazil
This morning I am recording a Brazilian podcast, and here is the preparatory information I received from the host about Brazilian agriculture.
I thought I would present you with some information about Brazil, in case you are curious about broader cultural and economic patterns.
- 0.9% of rural properties are large farms (over 1000 hectares) using a chemical package for agribusiness. These 0.9% own nearly 50% of productive land in Brazil.
- Compared to the 1990s, Brazil uses 5 times more chemical fertilizers and 8 times more agrochemicals (herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides), which currently cost 4 times more than in the 1990s.
- From 1985 to 2019, Brazil lost over 87 million hectares of native vegetation, with 70% of the area attributed to the chemical package for GMO agribusiness.
- Just below 70% of all available water is used for irrigation (within the agribusiness model).
- The agribusiness model receives over 400 billion[76 billion USD] reais annually in federal subsidies (we are talking about agency takeover here!).
- The situation varies across states, but generally farms smaller than 50 hectares are considered family farms (they receive about 13 billion[2.4 billion USD] in subsidies annually). However, while this is quite romantic in Brazil, family farming essentially operates as a microcosm of the agribusiness model, with GMOs and chemicals, just on a smaller scale.
- Organic production is usually politicized and typically (but not always) falls under the purview of farmers associated with agroecology and Via Campesina.
- I believe the biggest challenges for small organic farmers are: agency takeover (laws are created with large players in mind), bureaucracy related to processing and direct sales (overhead costs are too high for most small farmers to handle the paperwork), lack of marketing and accounting skills, a sort of inferiority complex in rural areas, and nearly 500 years of primary production aimed at meeting the needs of foreign economies.
Reading this while preparing for the podcast, it strikes me how many times in the last two weeks I have heard about the "crisis in American agriculture." I remember the crisis of the 1980s when hotlines for farmers contemplating suicide became popular. I sense a similar hysteria from the conventional farming community today.
These Brazilian statistics are strikingly similar to American ones and show the difficult situation of farmers. One sentence about five times greater use of chemical fertilizers and eight times greater use of agrochemicals speaks for itself. The main culprit in all the reports about the crisis in conventional agriculture I have read is the higher input costs without a proportional increase in sales revenue.
A few years ago, an older farmer from our area told me that in the 1960s, when he was a young boy starting work on the family farm, one could load cattle onto a (single-axle) truck and take them to the sales hall, and with the proceeds, buy the largest new tractor available from one of the few agricultural equipment dealers in the county. Today, for the load of that truck, you can buy at most a tire.
Please consider this. Over the last 80 years, the share of farms in retail value has dropped from about 50% to about 8%. The USDA budget is now larger than the value of all goods produced in the USA.
The most important thing farmers need to do is break free from everything conventional. They should fertilize with compost (and its many derivatives) instead of chemicals. Stop filling out grant reports and start growing something other than what the government pays you for. Stop exporting and start selling directly here in our own country.
If farmers wait for the government to change their situation, they will fall out of the market. Farmers must stop assuming that someone from the government will save them. As Kit Pharo says, be a "Herd Quitter" (someone who breaks away from the herd). In other words, stop following the crowd and do something different. Radically different.
So should the USDA exist?