South America Seeks to Fill the World's Table

[HuckleB]

South America Seeks to Fill the World's Table

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/international/americas/12brazil.html?hp&ex=1102827600&en=1cfe75ac77a1b499&ei=5094&partner=homepage

"Almost overnight, South America has driven a historic global shift in food production that is turning the largely untapped frontier heartland of the continent into the world's new breadbasket.

One of the last places on earth where large tracts are still available for agriculture, the region, led by Brazil, has had an explosion of farm exports over the past decade. The growth has been fueled by a combination of market-friendly economic policies and advances in agronomy that have brought formerly unusable tropical lands into production and increased productivity levels beyond those in the United States and Europe, challenging their traditional dominance of the global farm trade.

Sometime over the next decade or so, Brazil, which Secretary of State Colin L. Powell described as "an agricultural superpower" during a visit in October, hopes to pass the United States as the world's largest agricultural producer. But the trend is far broader and can be felt also in parts of Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay, with a deep impact on the region's economy and environment. And it has spurred a debate that has mainly focused on expansion into areas where the Amazon rainforest is thought to be jeopardized.

...The global effect has been powerful. In June, the United States imported more in farm products than it sold abroad, further evidence of its eroding position. Alert to the challenge, the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation even has a presentation for its members called "Should Brazil Give You Heartburn?" The answer is a not-so-qualified yes.

..."

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[TheFarseer]

1. Another example of corporate America screwing us over

Brazil could have never developed into anything agriculturaly without corporate America selling them infrestucture, making a fast buck, but eventually destroying the agriculture industry back home. Just like everything else, they can make it cheeper than us by breaking all the rules and using cheep or slave labor. This year was the first year that the USA imported more ag products than it exported. I heard that and thought, are you kidding me? If we're not even showing a trade surplus there, we are truely lost. We all might as well, get used to it, we're all going to be flipping burgers and selling each other insurance.

[Bono71]

2. I'm not sure how this is corporate america's fault...if it is simply

a matter of technology, Brazilians would have 1) eventually developed it on their own, or 2)bought the technology from europe.

The US (also Europe) has formidable subsidies for is own agriculture. Third world countries in South AMerica, Central America, and Africa all complain about them.

I am not sure what the answer is.

[TheFarseer]

5. It is because...........

Brazil has always had the land but never had any way to get the crop out of the interior. So we(and the Japanesse too) built them roads and rails and a nice barge system on the Amazon and now we're only too happy to sell them all the latest tech so they can grow corn and beans really well. It's not illegal I suppose, but it's really hurting farmers in the USA.

There are two possible answers - either some of these people stop growing corn and beans or someone buys it and sends it to places with famine like Africa and so forth. Right now there is an oversupply and I blame the new guy.

[imenja]

9. The British built the first railroads in Brazil

The British build the first railroad in Brazil during the nineteenth century, as they did in most of Latin America. I don't think railroads run into the Amazon areas. To reach Manaus, you must travel by air or river. Certainly new roads have been laid to many parts of the country, but can you point me to something that shows the "US built them"? Getulio Vargas convinced the US to finance the construction of the great steel mill at Volta Redonda, in exchange for Brazilian forces entering WWII on the side of the allies. During the dictatorship especially World Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank funds financed projects like roads and dams, but that's not the same as US corporations. Much of that construction, however, was financed through loans rather than direct grants. Before the neo-liberal period of the 1990s, the overwhelming majority of corporations were Brazilian-owned, even under the right-wing pro-US military dictatorship. I expect Brazilians still dominate their own marketplace, but legal restrictions prohibiting foreign majority ownership in companies have been lifted.
I'd appreciate any links to articles that discuss what you suggest and may contradict or correct my own understanding of the subject.

When you say you blame the new guy: do you mean Lula? Why?

[TheFarseer]

11. Sounds like you know what you're talking about

Embarassingly, my source is my dad. I'm going to do some research on this but I don't think it's too far fetched to think that American companies have helped them in some way to set up their ag economy with roads and waterway transportation, pivits, machinery, and genetically engineered seeds.

"I blame the new guy" refers to Brazil getting into the ag game in a big way recently and helping cause the gross overproduction and extremely low prices we are seeing now.

[TahitiNut]

6. At the same time, they have a dirt cheap peasant/rural workforce.

Brazil's Gini Index is up around 0.61 (that's HUGE) ... but, at about 0.45, we're closing in on them.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0908770.html

[imenja]

10. not peasants

Brazil doesn't have a traditional peasantry. It was a slave society, where large plantations were the principal means of land tenure. Some nineteenth-century European immigrants established themselves as a peasantry in the South of Brazil, but much of that land was taken over in the first couple of decades of the 20th century by railroads, lumber companies, and large agricultural holdings .
Labor costs far less in Brazil, true, but it is more expensive there than in some other parts of the world--Africa, and probably China as well.
Brazilians have a right to build up their economy. Americans have no God given right to dominate global markets forever.

[TahitiNut]

14. Only in Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, and Swaziland is the ...

... distribution of income more inequitable than in Brazil. Brazil's "top 20%" collect thirty times as much income per person as the "lowest 20%". The wealth collected by the "top 5%" is even more lop-sided. Brazil is the epitome of Plantation Economics ... where the rich get richer on the broken backs of the laboring poor. At a Gini Index of about 0.50, Mexico looks like a "worker's paradise" in comparison to Brazil with a Gini Index above 0.61. The deforestation of the rain forest and the building of roads has been done without the slightest shift in economically enfranchising the poorest labor. The interior lands aren't being distributed to the working poor; they're 'owned' by agribusiness. The economy is only a hair's breadth away from outright slavery - and some might say that 'hair' is of no breadth.

[imenja]

15. Brazil has terrible distribution of income

but it also has a socialist president who is trying to do something about it. It's an uphill battle, particularly in the rural areas, where the landed elite have ruled there for centuries. Lula's election in 2002, with the support of key members of the economic elite, suggests that wealthy Brazilians have come to recognize that a horribly skewed distribution between rich and poor undermines their own economic potential. For decades, Brazilian manufacturers produced for a small section of the population.
A point about slavery: desperate poverty, what the Brazilians call "miseria" should not be equated with slavery or described as a "hairs breath from slavery." Slavery was a level of exploitation far more profound than economic misery. It meant complete ownership, the possibility of having one's child, wife, or husband sold away at any time. There are still instances of slavery in Brazil as their are in the United States (warehouses that lock immigrant laborers, keep them imprisoned rather than pay wages). That is not to say there is anything remotely acceptable about poverty rates in Brazil; there clearly is not.
I don't know the numbers of poverty distribution in recent years. I accept your numbers as accurate. Some changes, however, have improved the lives of Brazilians. When I lived in Brazil, inflation was 50% a month. Consider what that means. The minimum salary at that time was about $100 a month. By the end of the month, that same check would be worth only $50. That kind of inflation was devastating for the poor. As inflation has been improved, beginning in the mid 1990s, the poor have benefited since their very meager wages don't evaporate before their eyes. Friends of mine--middle class, committed leftists--feel their lives have improved over the past 12 years.

[imenja]

20. Question?

Do you know how the statistics for Brazil relate to other years? Was 2003 worse than 2000 or 1993, for example? Also, do you know specifically what this measures? Would it account for things such as the decline in inflation I mentioned in my post below?
Thanks very much

[imenja]

7. Breaking which rules? Whose rules?

Brazilian agriculture isn't subsidized by the government the way American agriculture is. What rules do they break? That labor is cheaper in cost does not break "rules." It's unfortunate for Brazilian agriculture workers, but it works according to free market principles. I for one am tired of subsidizing agri-corporations with my tax dollars--and that is wear the vast majority of farm subsidies go. Those subsidies do nothing to benefit the average American. If the subsidies were structured in such a way that only small farmers were helped, but that's not how they work now. I'm fed up with corporate welfare.

[TheFarseer]

12. If we didn't have ag subsidies........

Family farming in the USA would be over. It would simply not be possible. I don't even think corporate farming would be possible unless they vertically integrated so that it was only a part of the entire food production chain. I couldn't agree more that corporate farms should be cut out of subsidies. I personally DO NOT want corporate farms around. Some people ask me why we even want any agriculture in the US if someone else can do it cheaper and my answer is: you see how we have to go to war and get gouged in price because we can't support our needs for oil without importing? Why do you think it will be any different with food if we outsource that?

As for Brazil breaking the rules, if you don't count burning down the rainforest, there is always the fact that they replant seeds grown from genetically engineered seeds purchased from US seed corn companies, which is a violation of copyright laws. I think it's likely there are others but that's the only one I know of at the moment.

[imenja]

19. the rain forest

I support agricultural subsidies for small family farmers. My objection is that the majority of those subsidies go to agri-corporations.
As for the Brazilian rain forest, I'll share a story with you. I lived in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil for a year and a half (93-94). One day I stopped in a small shop that sold cokes and snacks. As I left, the owner called to me: "Tell Sting the Amazon is ours." My initial response was irritation: "Sure," I thought, "all of us gringos know each other. I'll give Sting a call tomorrow."
As I later thought about it, I realized the man made an important point. The industrialized nations like the US and Britain have destroyed their wilderness, uses the overwhelming majority of oil and other natural resources in the world, and then insists Brazil conserve it's forests for global benefit. Many Brazilians view it as a matter of survival. Developing the Amazon area, they believe, provides essential jobs and income for their great masses of unemployed. Some of the innovations have been in the area of sustainable development--they use Amazon areas in ways that create income but don't level it. Of course, that is not always, or I expect usually, the case. It is a complex issue, however, and is understood in Brazil in the context of Western Imperialism.
From your posts, I'm assuming you yourself are a farmer. I respect your frustration, but I would respectfully suggest that the foe of the American farmer are agri-corporations here at home rather than Brazilians. Brazil is trying to compete in the international economy and is starting to have some success. I don't think we should begrudge them that. They need markets badly. I hope Lula will oversee that economic growth in such a way that Brazilians across the income spectrum will benefit from it. As a long-time socialist who has come to accept the realities of globalization and the international capitalist marketplace, he ran for president on a platform promising shared economic development. I believe he is genuinely trying to do that, though he clearly faces great obstacles from the rural oligarchy.
There is also a rural movement in Brazil called "Movimento sem terra"--a landless movement that demands rights for agricultural workers and insists on land reform. Lula has begun to address some of those reforms.

[American Renaissance]

16. uhh... right.

If Brazil can build the Embraer 190, I think they can build a tractor and dig irrigation canals. Fifty years from now Brazil is going to be a south-american super power.

[trotsky]

3. Beef from S.A. is much leaner.

Because the cows are grass-fed, while here we grain-feed them to fatten them up more quickly.

I read an article a couple of years ago about American farmers who are moving to Brazil, buying up a bunch of land - cheap - and farming. With the lack of roads & communication, it's almost identical to the conditions pioneers faced in the 1800s while settling the United States midwest. Rather interesting.

[HuckleB]

17. Not to mention tastier and more tender. -eom-

[madrchsod]

4. the big problem is that the soil

in the land they are clearing after a few years turns to shit. here in the united states most of our crops are planted in soil that can be found in only few places on earth. our problem is the misuse of our soil by not using different crops and soil conservation. someday we may decide to to really conserve our soil for the generations ahead. we should never be hungery in this country.

[imenja]

8. that's only true of the tropical land

Brazil is a vast country with a wide array of climates and soil. There are pampas, mountains, dry areas, as well as dense tropical areas. Cattle and much of the large scale agricultural production is not produced in the areas with the weak soil to which you refer. That Brazilians have used technological innovation to make some of that tropical land arable is great for their economy and the prospects of ordinary Brazilians who badly need income. The wages are terribly low, but much of the population (perhaps half)) has lived entirely outside the monied economy. Having daily wages is a benefit to them.


Another point, the meat and produce tastes indescribably better than our own. When I read that Brazil was filling in gaps filled by the US mad cow scare, I thought American farmers might not gain back those markets given the far superior quality of Brazilian beef.

[HuckleB]

18. Exactly. -eom-

[AP]

13. I bet part of the problem is that in US we're trying to figure out ways to

make agricultural production more expensive. We want a few large corps to own all the farmland so they can monopoly price on a retail level. We want as many pesticides involved in the process as possible. We want to spend a lot of money figuring out ways to gentically modify plants so they don't produce seeds and so you have to buy a certain pesticide along with the seed to make them work.

In the US it's about seeing how expensive everything can be made so that consumers spend as much money as possible on food.

I suspect that in Brazil especially, it's more about just getting a lot of food out of the land as possible at competitive prices.

It's just a hunch. I really have nothing to back this up.