Published online on July 28, 2010, in Nature.

With its plentiful sun, water and land, Brazil is quickly surpassing other countries in food production and exports. But can it continue to make agricultural gains without destroying the Amazon? Jeff Tollefson reports from Brazil.

Mateus Batistella used to be a vegetarian, but Brazilian cuisine has worn him down. At lunchtime, virtually all the restaurants offer a classic dish of thin-cut beef with salad, rice and beans, served with a cooked-flour dish called farofa. In cities and towns, traditional butchers and supermarkets alike sell every cut of beef imaginable. “It’s everywhere, and it’s cheap,” says Batistella, who heads a satellite-monitoring research centre in the southern city of Campinas for Embrapa, the research arm of Brazil’s agriculture ministry. “Today I eat beef all the time.” 

Mateus Batistella used to be a vegetarian, but Brazilian cuisine has worn him down. At lunchtime, virtually all the restaurants offer a classic dish of thin-cut beef with salad, rice and beans, served with a cooked-flour dish called farofa. In cities and towns, traditional butchers and supermarkets alike sell every cut of beef imaginable. “It’s everywhere, and it’s cheap,” says Batistella, who heads a satellite-monitoring research centre in the southern city of Campinas for Embrapa, the research arm of Brazil’s agriculture ministry. “Today I eat beef all the time.”

That isn’t the most politically correct course of action in a country in which cattle ranching is often linked with destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Batistella even has a satellite image on his office wall, showing the world’s largest tropical forest under siege from the south by agriculture. Nonetheless, the world, like Batistella, is consuming more and more beef each year.

All that meat has to come from somewhere, and increasingly it is coming from Brazil. This rising agricultural powerhouse has quadrupled beef exports over the past decade, and in 2003 it vaulted past Australia as the world’s largest exporter. Capitalizing on its vast natural resources and a booming economy, Brazil is competing with the United States for the title of world’s largest soya exporter. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organizationforecasts that Brazil’s agricultural output will grow faster than that of any other country in the world in the coming decade, increasing by 40% by 2019.

There was a time when such figures would have spelt doom for the Amazon. In the past, when demand for commodities such as beef, maize (corn) and soya went up, trees came down. But the opposite has happened in recent years. Despite rising production and persistently high commodity prices since the height of the global food crisis in 2007–08, Amazon deforestation plunged to a historic low last year, nearly 75% below its 2004 peak, and some expect more good news this year. This trend fuels hopes that Brazil is establishing a sustainable agricultural system that will help to feed a growing world in the decades to come — and lower the environmental cost of beef habits like that of Batistella.

“We broke the paradigm in the past five years,” he says. “There is no longer a direct correlation between food and deforestation.”

Brazil has managed that feat through policy, improvements in agricultural science, better enforcement of environmental laws and pressure from consumers. But the country still faces numerous challenges as it seeks to boost food production. Conflicts over land-use policies are common, and climate change will take a bite out of many important crops unless plant breeders can keep up.

Fields of soya

Brazil’s rise as an agricultural giant began with soya beans, the country’s largest food crop, which had a value of nearly US$17 billion in 2008. In the 1960s, soya’s range was largely limited to the south of Brazil, but since then breeders have developed varieties that can grow across most of the country. Agricultural scientists tamed the highly acidic soils of the Brazilian savannahs with applications of lime and other nutrients, and reduced fertilizer costs by developing methods to inoculate seeds with rhizobia, bacteria that colonize the roots of plants such as soya and fix nitrogen. Brazilian farmers are now competing with the United States to set the record for soya-bean yields.

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