Agriculture in South America

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Agriculture in South America

• Breadbasket of the World?

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Emergence of Agriculture

• Historical shift in global agriculture is taking
  place
• Heart of this dominance has long been the United
  States
• But South America is emerging as the worlds
  bread basket
• Why?

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Reasons for Growth in South American Agriculture

• New techniques and technology are being used to
  bring formerly unusable and barren lands into
  productivity
• Part of the Green Revolution- hybrid and disease
  resistant seeds, fertilizers, pesticides
• Economics is a factor new demands from an
  increasingly sophisticated high end market and
  vegetarian habits/organic products
• Demand includes traditional crops (soybeans) as
  well as specialized radicchio, endive,
  asparagus, bok choy, artichokes, avocados and
  citrus
• Demand for meat from protein hungry Chinese
  middle class

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Brazil

• Chief among the producers is the nation of
  Brazil
• Abundant land
• Significant farming population-labor issue

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Mato Grosso, Brazil
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Location of Brazils cerrado
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Brazils cerrado (www.agbrazil.com)

• Brazilian Portuguese word cerrado (tropical high
  plains) translates to "closed, inaccessible
  wasteland
• Brazil's high-plains, the cerrados, cover an
  estimated 207 million hectares, or about
  one-fourth of the country. All but a small area
  lies south of the equator.From a US perspective,
  the cerrados equal 26 of the area of the lower
  48 states--more than 510 million acres--an area
  larger than the US east of the Mississippi River,
  excluding Florida.
• The area that can be cropped is estimated at
  about 120 million hectares.Only about 50 million
  ha, less than one-fourth of the cerrados, is now
  economically used. Of that, dryland and irrigated
  crops cover about 20 million ha. The rest is in
  pasture.The region began to open in the 1960s
  with the building of Brasilia, the new capital
  city

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Brazils cerrado

• First commercial agriculture enterprises to start
  up in the cerrados were extensive livestock
  operations
• Changed dramatically in late 1970s with the
  development of the "tropical" soybean and with
  new techniques for managing cerrado soils
• Viable crop agriculture in the cerrados brought a
  mass population movement into the region. Most of
  the migrants were farmers from southern states of
  Brazil
• Cheap land was the attraction for every hectare
  of land they sold elsewhere, they could buy 10 to
  40 hectares in the cerrados.
• At the outset of the migration in the early
  1980s, a hectare of Western Bahia land could be
  bought for the equivalent of the price of a pack
  of cigarettes. Today, virgin land sells for
  US250 or less per hectare.