There are a few things that would make Brazil a lot more stable economically (and even socially and politically) if we achieved self-sufficiency:
Fossil fuels: Currently, Brazil is self-sufficient in oil, but we export petrol to buy back refined fuels (gasoline and diesel). If we were self-sufficient in fossil fuels we would be much more immune to inflation every time OPEC decides to reduce oil output.
Wheat: We are the top of the world exporting foods. We produce 6x our current need. Nevertheless, we still need imported wheat. Ukraine war and dollar variations literary affect our bread.
Fertilizers: The largest world food producer needs imported fertilizers. The irony: our main supplier is Russia. This basically prevents Brazil taking any side in the conflict and affects our (and our buyers) food prices as much as wheat.
Achieving self-sufficiency in these three areas would be like a second independence for us (first was when we got free from Portugal).
> Nevertheless, we still need imported wheat. Ukraine war and dollar variations literary affect our bread.
This would happen imports or not. So long as wheat exports are allowed, the local price will settle on the world price as the product is able to flow to the highest bidder. An event like the Ukraine war will impact someone and that will drive the world price up.
Only under a perfectly free market system. A great many countries have export controls in place specifically for wheat and other vital commodities. States can also set price ceilings and floors. The US, for instance, passed the temporary Wheat Price Guarantee Act during WWI.
Brazil government runs a company called Conab that acts as a "buffer stock" for grains. It buys, stores and sells grains in large quantities in a continuos fashion, so the government can soften market fluctuations for those commodities over time.
> Fertilizers: The largest world food producer needs imported fertilizers. The irony: our main supplier is Russia. This basically prevents Brazil taking any side in the conflict and affects our (and our buyers) food prices as much as wheat.
No, it means you can’t take a position without paying a cost. A lot of countries used to depend on Russia for various things, and they have paid a price to change this.
Brazil is not Europe. It’s not going to be some minor inconvenience like having people to take cold showers and virtual signal on the internet. There will be famine and the poorest people will die.
> Wheat: We are the top of the world exporting foods. We produce 6x our current need.
What? Source? Just some rough Google search results seem to consistently show China as #1 in production and the US being #1 in exports (and in the top 3 for production.) The first result I found showed Brazil as #4.
Maybe you're ultimately correct, but you should show a source when making those claims (I'm not trying to make a claim.)
"Brazil produces food for 1.6 Billion" [1] Our population is 250 million; that's probably where the 6x comes from. I don't have a source saying 6x but the "Brazil produces food for 1.6 Billion" is easy to find from many reliable sources; just a google search away.
With regards to "largest food exporter", I stand corrected. The correct is "the largest net exporter in the world" [2] of "of agricultural commodities and related food products".
Hum... Nope, Brazil is not really self-sufficient in oil. It was for a while, but the production did not keep up with the domestic consumption. Anyway, Brazil exports its oil and imports some slightly more expensive one because the existing refineries weren't built to process the relatively recently discovered kind of it that consists on most of the production. And there is little sense in upgrading them.
About wheat, yeah, nobody ever place any priority on being self-sustaining. That's because it's not really important. Brazil has a couple of neighbors that produce enough wheat for supplying it, and need quite a bunch of stuff Brazil produces. The only reason anybody is going for self-sustainance now is because it's profitable, and things will change once it's not.
On fertilizers, well, Brazil can not produce enough of the material for the fertilizers it imports.
It's not like Brazil want to take sides either, so this might be a excuse, not a reason. And there is the BRICS, so taking side is not a good idea.
BTW, unlike Europe, there is no consensus here that the side to be taken is with Ukraine.
I gope you guys are not going to copy USA & Europe in term of bread consumption, it's not worth! eat more vegetable, like peas, even quinoa, fruit, they're adapted to your climate and much more nutritive and healthy
Bread is and has always been a staple in Brazil. Quinoa is a fairly recent development over there, and is quite expensive. Definitely not adapted to Brazilian climates although it can be made to work. Wheat OTOH is very adapted and cheap.
It might be a net benefit, but distributing that wealth from oil producers to oil users within Brazil isn't easy. And when oil users see the price of their oil going up, that's what triggers inflation.
> Achieving self-sufficiency in these three areas would be like a second independence for us (first was when we got free from Portugal).
Every country in the world is dependent on trade, which is saves a lot of money over self-sufficiency. North Korea is the only country that tries self-sufficiency.
If it costs you $100/bushel to produce wheat and you can buy it for $60/bushel (I'm fabricating numbers), why produce it?
Its nice when you can buy $60/bushel wheat. Its not so nice when your dealer cuts you off.
The extra $40/bushel you pay to produce in-house, thats your insurance policy against having your supplies cut off. In a world where geopolitical lines are shifting, it's a matter of national security and optionality to have your own food production capacity. Risk management.
It is nice to be self-sufficient on survival staples like grains if that is an option. If your competitors are driving a hard bargain and the downside is that you don’t get video game consoles, it isn’t the end of the world, you can call their bluff. If the downside is starvation, it is a bit tougher.
> If it costs you $100/bushel to produce wheat and you can buy it for $60/bushel (I'm fabricating numbers), why produce it?
“Certain countries” are well known for subsidizing domestic grain production and dumping it on overseas markets which ends up hurting the local farmers as they can’t compete on prices. Given enough time these countries become totally dependent on the imported grains and their entire farming industry goes away.
You make the choice on if you’re comfortable depending entirely on foreign production of foodstuffs.
according to al gore - who became a multi millionnaire if not billionaire thanks to his fake prediction - we are already dead so we might be living in a simulation.
Watch this space.. Green Ammonia is going to be a big new development for Brazil soon... or at least there are a couple of green hydrogen companies that trying very hard to get that up and running in Brazil right now.
"would make Brazil a lot more stable economically (and even socially and politically) "
It's the other way around.
Brazil and Argentina especially should be rich, what's lacking is coherent social organization from top to bottom. Obviously it matters more at the top, but it has to be borne by regular people as well.
Same could be said of other Central/South American nations, but geographic factors and natural resources do give a material advantage that can be leveraged into a lot.
Consider that Canada, unlike most other so called 'advanced nations' - does not actually have lot of advanced industry. Research, yes, but 'applied' - no. And yet, because it has a 'free export card' with natural resources, it can import the equipment and materials necessary to support the rest of the regular domestic economy, which benefits from ultra boring politics, 'functional' bureaucracy, low levels of corruption.
Innovations can only be leveraged by organizations that have the coherent ability to make use if them.
The 'low hanging fruit' in Brazil is governance, though I hope this Wheat helps.
Why don't the states there organize into a southern United States? It feels silly to talk about self-sufficiency and all when the analog at country level is the USA states. Nobody would expect e.g. Rhode Island to feed itself, but thankfully there is the Midwest. Maybe Bolivar's dream could come true one day.
This sounds amazing, but at the same time, I am concerned about the rain forest. Obviously more economically useful crops would accelerate repurposing the rain forest. Maybe the world would need to subsidize Brazil more to keep the rain forest? And could Brazil be expecting more subsidy with this development?
I'm sure some actual Brazilians will comment since many are active on HN.
I remember being asked in elementary school to help "buy a piece of the Amazon to stop it from being cut down". I mentioned this years later to some Brazilian friends, and they found it amazing, saying first that it almost certainly wasn't a specific plot of land, and second that enforcement of property rights and anti-poaching laws in spread-out rural areas has been spotty, and also hindered by violence and corruption.
So I guess it's a thorny question, if someone in Brazil accepts such a subsidy, how that ultimately translates into physically stopping people from making illicit uses of Amazon lands.
Edit: In theory, stopping an illicit farm (which takes time to grow and has to be tended and harvested) would be easier than stopping someone with a pickup truck and chainsaw from just grabbing a bunch of trees for lumber. On the other hand, the U.S. has spent tons of money trying to eradicate poor people's coca farms in the Andes and it doesn't seem to have had the level of success the government hoped for (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca_eradication).
Meanwhile, some people are apparently still maintaining wildcat marijuana farms on U.S. Federal lands. Wheat farms aren't as profitable as coca or marijuana, but even suppressing certain kinds of farms in remote enough areas seems like it can be non-trivial!
I wouldn't worry about the rain forest since. Not only it's likely too wet and hot for the new wheat cultivars, but AFAIK deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is driven mostly by cattle-ranching and land speculation.
I'd burn that entire jungle down if it brought us industry, development and prosperity in exchange. Why is it that only developed countries got to exploit their natural resources?
It happened 100-200 years ago in developed countries, we know better now that it isn't something to be replicated. Or are you also willing to have child labour working 12-16 hours/day to achieve industrialisation? Burning that entire jungle down to achieve short-term economical development will doom future generations, you achieve development and prosperity for 20 years while leaving a bleak future for the next 50-200 years. For what? Making some cars? Mining some ore?
It's the second moronic take I came across from you in this comment chain, you're parroting Bolsonaro's demagogy, it feels like you haven't thought yourself about the consequences of "burn that entire jungle down". I don't believe you are that stupid so please, give it a deeper thought than this knee-jerk angry reactionary take. It sounds extremely moronic.
You got it reversed, developed countries have stopped to use their forest when they industrialized and start to use coal/oil instead of wood and when increase in food production make the use of less productive land unnecessary. Thinking you can be richer by destroying Amazonia is pure delusion.
They claim the current wheat yield is 3.3 tons/hectare while the new variety has yield 10 tons/hectare, about a 3x difference.
What impact does this have on the micronutrient profile of the harvested crop? And does this result in faster depletion of those micronutrients from the soil, i.e. is it sustainable to harvest this crop?
Yields of most plants are higher in the tropics: there is more sunlight, more water, and no frost. Wheat, historically, hasn't been able to benefit from this as it wasn't adapted to the climate.
Most minor minerals are present in plants to the tune of 0.001% by weight or less. We extract many times as much manganese, chromium, copper etc as the metal as we would from the soil. Selenium is generally postulated as the limiting element for life on Earth, but we're not yet at the point of needing to supplement it in soil. Brazil nuts are supposedly a particularly Se-avid crop, yet they haven't destroyed the ecosystem of Brazil so far.
Soil depletion more generally consists of changes in texture (less water holding) and reduced ability to slow-release the nutrients we already add (NPK). It has been addressed by adding clays — chiefly aluminosilicates — which are predominantly composed of elements not utilized by living things (mostly). In other words, it's usually not the nutrients themselves being removed from a "depleted" soil, at least in the modern day.
Of course it’s not sustainable. No modern farming is.
They’ve probably come up with some stupid technique like diverting the entire amazon river in order to pull this off. And then a few years down the line they’ll be asking where all the water went and why the forest is gone.
In the 80's, Embrapa (same research agency) discovered a way to grow Soy in the Midwest/cerrado... And that's how today Brazil is the largest soy exporter in the world.
Before the 80's, soy was only grown in the South of Brazil (and Brazil imported soy at the time as I recall).
Currently, wheat is also only grown in the South as well.
Now, things are not simple. The wheat prices will need to be competitive to make farmers plant wheat instead of only soy. Soy currently totally dominates Brazilian farming. Everywhere you look you only see soy.
PS: Embrapa is also developing several varieties of grapes for Cerrado/Midwest region. Currently it's basically only grown in the South as well.
Anyone familiar with the governmental policies of Brazil? They mentioned deforestation twice to say that it's not a problem because this will be done on existing farmland. But, how long that will hold when there's money to be made?
Since, according to the article, wheat should be planted on already existing crops, I don't think it will be a big issue in the near future. However, soybeans are already a major cause of deforestation, especially in the Midwest, and this extra productivity may boost these activities.
I'm not an expert, but working with multiple crops in the same year can also further deplete soil resources, decreasing the overall productivity and increasing deforestation.
Brazilian politics is extremely messy right now, and it's hard to tell how we're going to face environmental issues in the near future. The recently-elected president has a strong environmentalist agenda, but is fighting with the Congress and may lose support for pushing forward such legislation.
> They mentioned deforestation twice to say that it's not a problem because this will be done on existing farmland.
I'm skeptical of this reasoning. Wheat may be planted on existing farmland. But then where will the previous crops on that farmland be planted? If one changes a bean farm to a wheat farm, but then somebody else slashes and burn Amazon Forest or Pantanal to plant the displaced beans, then we have a net loss.
> But then where will the previous crops on that farmland be planted?
From the article:
In the cerrado, wheat is planted from March to June. Soybeans and corn are the main crops from October to February. So, tropical wheat represents an extra source of income for the farmer.
If Bolsonaro were still in charge I'd be concerned but Lula is an advocate of indigenous communities so I'm not as worried. There is still plenty of corruption and schemers who will poach land but they won't have a bright green light like they would have before Lula was elected.
This is a massive development for the world, not just Brazil. Tropical wheat would fix the constant food insecurity issues in all the tropical countries in the world.
Peter Zeihan has a lot of interesting POVs. I'm half way through his first book 'The Accidental Superpower' and he makes convincing arguments all around so far.
Readit News
Fossil fuels: Currently, Brazil is self-sufficient in oil, but we export petrol to buy back refined fuels (gasoline and diesel). If we were self-sufficient in fossil fuels we would be much more immune to inflation every time OPEC decides to reduce oil output.
Wheat: We are the top of the world exporting foods. We produce 6x our current need. Nevertheless, we still need imported wheat. Ukraine war and dollar variations literary affect our bread.
Fertilizers: The largest world food producer needs imported fertilizers. The irony: our main supplier is Russia. This basically prevents Brazil taking any side in the conflict and affects our (and our buyers) food prices as much as wheat.
Achieving self-sufficiency in these three areas would be like a second independence for us (first was when we got free from Portugal).
This would happen imports or not. So long as wheat exports are allowed, the local price will settle on the world price as the product is able to flow to the highest bidder. An event like the Ukraine war will impact someone and that will drive the world price up.
No, it means you can’t take a position without paying a cost. A lot of countries used to depend on Russia for various things, and they have paid a price to change this.
And now they depend on US for the same things paying a much bigger price.
Some countries never learn.
What? Source? Just some rough Google search results seem to consistently show China as #1 in production and the US being #1 in exports (and in the top 3 for production.) The first result I found showed Brazil as #4.
Maybe you're ultimately correct, but you should show a source when making those claims (I'm not trying to make a claim.)
With regards to "largest food exporter", I stand corrected. The correct is "the largest net exporter in the world" [2] of "of agricultural commodities and related food products".
[1] - "Brasil produziu comida para 1,6 bilhão" - https://brazillab.org.br/noticias/brasil-produziu-comida-par...
[2] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2022/september/brazil-s...
> Brazil is
> the largest country in terms of arable land
> a top-5 producer of 34 agricultural commodities
> the largest agricultural net exporter
About wheat, yeah, nobody ever place any priority on being self-sustaining. That's because it's not really important. Brazil has a couple of neighbors that produce enough wheat for supplying it, and need quite a bunch of stuff Brazil produces. The only reason anybody is going for self-sustainance now is because it's profitable, and things will change once it's not.
On fertilizers, well, Brazil can not produce enough of the material for the fertilizers it imports.
Not at all. President Lula sided with China and Russia already. Dude loves communists. He even had Venezuelan dictator Maduro over for lunch.
I’d thought refineries would be hungry for oil when opec decreases production and therefore be a net benefit for oil producers outside opec.
Deleted Comment
Every country in the world is dependent on trade, which is saves a lot of money over self-sufficiency. North Korea is the only country that tries self-sufficiency.
If it costs you $100/bushel to produce wheat and you can buy it for $60/bushel (I'm fabricating numbers), why produce it?
Its nice when you can buy $60/bushel wheat. Its not so nice when your dealer cuts you off.
The extra $40/bushel you pay to produce in-house, thats your insurance policy against having your supplies cut off. In a world where geopolitical lines are shifting, it's a matter of national security and optionality to have your own food production capacity. Risk management.
“Certain countries” are well known for subsidizing domestic grain production and dumping it on overseas markets which ends up hurting the local farmers as they can’t compete on prices. Given enough time these countries become totally dependent on the imported grains and their entire farming industry goes away.
You make the choice on if you’re comfortable depending entirely on foreign production of foodstuffs.
—edit—
Actually, you don’t get to make the choice…
Watch this space.. Green Ammonia is going to be a big new development for Brazil soon... or at least there are a couple of green hydrogen companies that trying very hard to get that up and running in Brazil right now.
I also find the take on decoupling from russia weak and cowardly.
It's the other way around.
Brazil and Argentina especially should be rich, what's lacking is coherent social organization from top to bottom. Obviously it matters more at the top, but it has to be borne by regular people as well.
Same could be said of other Central/South American nations, but geographic factors and natural resources do give a material advantage that can be leveraged into a lot.
Consider that Canada, unlike most other so called 'advanced nations' - does not actually have lot of advanced industry. Research, yes, but 'applied' - no. And yet, because it has a 'free export card' with natural resources, it can import the equipment and materials necessary to support the rest of the regular domestic economy, which benefits from ultra boring politics, 'functional' bureaucracy, low levels of corruption.
Innovations can only be leveraged by organizations that have the coherent ability to make use if them.
The 'low hanging fruit' in Brazil is governance, though I hope this Wheat helps.
I remember being asked in elementary school to help "buy a piece of the Amazon to stop it from being cut down". I mentioned this years later to some Brazilian friends, and they found it amazing, saying first that it almost certainly wasn't a specific plot of land, and second that enforcement of property rights and anti-poaching laws in spread-out rural areas has been spotty, and also hindered by violence and corruption.
So I guess it's a thorny question, if someone in Brazil accepts such a subsidy, how that ultimately translates into physically stopping people from making illicit uses of Amazon lands.
Edit: In theory, stopping an illicit farm (which takes time to grow and has to be tended and harvested) would be easier than stopping someone with a pickup truck and chainsaw from just grabbing a bunch of trees for lumber. On the other hand, the U.S. has spent tons of money trying to eradicate poor people's coca farms in the Andes and it doesn't seem to have had the level of success the government hoped for (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca_eradication).
Meanwhile, some people are apparently still maintaining wildcat marijuana farms on U.S. Federal lands. Wheat farms aren't as profitable as coca or marijuana, but even suppressing certain kinds of farms in remote enough areas seems like it can be non-trivial!
Dead Comment
then go buy some rain forest, and pay at least as much property tax on it as someone converting it to farmland would.
It's the second moronic take I came across from you in this comment chain, you're parroting Bolsonaro's demagogy, it feels like you haven't thought yourself about the consequences of "burn that entire jungle down". I don't believe you are that stupid so please, give it a deeper thought than this knee-jerk angry reactionary take. It sounds extremely moronic.
For example, the forest is bigger in France now that is was 1000 years ago : http://geoconfluences.ens-lyon.fr/geoconfluences/images/arti...
Destroying forest is a short term low-productivity cash grab. It will not make any country rich.
are you a business man? https://thestorytellers.com/the-businessman-and-the-fisherma...
enjoy your life without pollution, drought etc, instead of money
What impact does this have on the micronutrient profile of the harvested crop? And does this result in faster depletion of those micronutrients from the soil, i.e. is it sustainable to harvest this crop?
Most minor minerals are present in plants to the tune of 0.001% by weight or less. We extract many times as much manganese, chromium, copper etc as the metal as we would from the soil. Selenium is generally postulated as the limiting element for life on Earth, but we're not yet at the point of needing to supplement it in soil. Brazil nuts are supposedly a particularly Se-avid crop, yet they haven't destroyed the ecosystem of Brazil so far.
Soil depletion more generally consists of changes in texture (less water holding) and reduced ability to slow-release the nutrients we already add (NPK). It has been addressed by adding clays — chiefly aluminosilicates — which are predominantly composed of elements not utilized by living things (mostly). In other words, it's usually not the nutrients themselves being removed from a "depleted" soil, at least in the modern day.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/08/20/341884706/wh...
The only adequate source of nitrogen is ammonia manufactured from petroleum.
So Brazil's chief challenge will be obtaining adequate ammonium fertilizers.
They’ve probably come up with some stupid technique like diverting the entire amazon river in order to pull this off. And then a few years down the line they’ll be asking where all the water went and why the forest is gone.
Currently, wheat is also only grown in the South as well.
Now, things are not simple. The wheat prices will need to be competitive to make farmers plant wheat instead of only soy. Soy currently totally dominates Brazilian farming. Everywhere you look you only see soy.
PS: Embrapa is also developing several varieties of grapes for Cerrado/Midwest region. Currently it's basically only grown in the South as well.
Since, according to the article, wheat should be planted on already existing crops, I don't think it will be a big issue in the near future. However, soybeans are already a major cause of deforestation, especially in the Midwest, and this extra productivity may boost these activities.
I'm not an expert, but working with multiple crops in the same year can also further deplete soil resources, decreasing the overall productivity and increasing deforestation.
Brazilian politics is extremely messy right now, and it's hard to tell how we're going to face environmental issues in the near future. The recently-elected president has a strong environmentalist agenda, but is fighting with the Congress and may lose support for pushing forward such legislation.
I'm skeptical of this reasoning. Wheat may be planted on existing farmland. But then where will the previous crops on that farmland be planted? If one changes a bean farm to a wheat farm, but then somebody else slashes and burn Amazon Forest or Pantanal to plant the displaced beans, then we have a net loss.
From the article:
In the cerrado, wheat is planted from March to June. Soybeans and corn are the main crops from October to February. So, tropical wheat represents an extra source of income for the farmer.
Ironic, isn't it?
[0] https://www.embrapa.br/en/international
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKvT7OS-lbU