Brazil develops tropical wheat and predicts self-sufficiency in 5 years
ukragroconsult.com
ukragroconsult.com
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).
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.
Ukraine is/was the world's bread basket. Supporting Russia jeopardizes the world's access to food. Brazil's actions don't exist in a vacuum.
Sure, even the poorest countries in the EU are significantly richer than Brazil, but it's not like we didn't get significant food price inflation either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
I don't get your point. Where do you see this fundamental difference between Brazil and Europe? Europe was highly dependant on Russia for it's energy supply, to the point that Putin was hoping to leverage that to conduct his genocide of Ukraine unopposed, and Europe successfully shed that dependence on a dime.
In your opinion, what stops Brazil from finding alternatives to Russia imports?
There are some recent photos that show the result of accumulated inflation and unemployment during the pandemic:
People scavenging bones to eat: https://f.i.uol.com.br/fotografia/2021/09/29/16329448496154c...
People scavenging garbage to eat: https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-b...
Alternative fertilizer suppliers might not be available.
And now they depend on US for the same things paying a much bigger price.
Some countries never learn.
What? Germany is now reporting record drops in it's energy prices.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/energy-costs-german-hou...
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.
One of reason why food inflation in Brazil rise in the latest years is exactly because of CONAB stopped stocking it.
Even milk and peanut they stocked before.
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 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.
South American is already mature. The countries there have different political situations and relationships. Trying to bring them into one federal republic is a non-starter -- it ain't gonna happen.
A better model would be the EU where you have mature countries removing trade barriers between them, allowing free immigration, and a single currency. This was anchored by a few large countries that had relatively low corruption, peaceful relations and strong economies.
South America... doesn't quite have a strong set of low corruption and strong economies. There are regular coups and a number of ongoing civil wars that would make trying even for a loose coalition of countries in South America difficult.
I misremembered it as San Martin's opinion while old and dying in France, but it appears to be the description given by Karl Marx to Engels (apparently on a letter sent on 1858-02-14, though I can't find that letter right now). This article [0] on the Metapedia explains a bit of the history on why Marz was talking about Bolivar, but also says that modern marxists don't share this view.
[0] https://es.metapedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx_contra_Sim%C3%B3n_Bo...
On the cultural level, they have some similarity but not to the extent that they view each other as part of the same “nation” or “people”. One shouldn’t exaggerate the effect of speaking the same language: consider the fact that the US, Singapore, and Zimbabwe are all English-speaking officially (or de facto officially in the case of the US). Also Brazil does not even speak the same language as the rest.
Some differences do of course exist between the various US states but to a much, much lesser extent.
Germany and France (and the UK at the time) dominate. Poor nations like Poland and Greece with rich ones like Norway. Conservative countries like Hungary alongside progressive social democracies like France and Sweden.
I doubt there will ever be even an EU-like structure encompassing Latin America, but even if there is, that would be a far cry from becoming a united sovereign state.
Again - internal self sufficiency is not the basis of development.
S. America has relatively free trade for things they need, and there are no hugely relevant issues there.
The wheat innovation is going to be nice for Brazil, but more as a function of expansion of industry, not really on the basis of 'self sufficiency'.
Brazil's path to wealth lies through the reform of civic and social institutions, not through some kind of magic grain.
The same could be said of most places.
It’s hard to bring people together when they speak different languages and have to take a plane or cross difficult terrain to meet each other.
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?
Though they were able to find alternative foreign sources to make up the difference and redevelop domestic production.
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.
Nationalism makes you poor.
Your solution is the short-term one, maybe not even that. In the long run, your community is much better off producing what it does best and trading with others for what they produce best, rather than everyone trying to do everything at some mediocre level.
Your solution is like Microsoft building its own furniture and cars and flying its own planes, rather than making software and buying the furniture, cars, and air travel from those who are expert in it.
Let's use your example, Microsoft. Companies have different incentives than communities or countries, but I think we can make this work.
For many years, Microsoft only sold software, and let others who were experts in hardware make the hardware and install microsoft on it. Later, they realised that it was strategically important to manufacture their own consumer hardware, and now you have the Surface lineup. Maybe in the near future, they will decide they need to start manufacturing their own chips. If they do that, it's not going to be cheap, especially in the short term. In fact, Microsoft might never be able to produce chips more cheaply than Intel. But they still could choose to do it in-house (or just buy Intel) if the alternative is to lose their dominant position in the market.
What a bizarre things to say. First of all, are you an economist who can comment on other people's sophistication? Second, who cares? The merits are what matters, and you agree it's "broady speaking, correct".
The world is three meals away from anarchy, being dependent on the caprice of global markets for food is a great recipe for getting regime-changed by starving people.
The evidence shows that vastly overstates the risks: It hasn't happened or even come close to happening yet. In fact, name any place that has turned anarachic due to food shortages.
The modern global markets are not capricious, but the most efficient, effective distributors of resources in the history of the world.
“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…
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 is
> the largest country in terms of arable land
> a top-5 producer of 34 agricultural commodities
> the largest agricultural net exporter
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...
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’d thought refineries would be hungry for oil when opec decreases production and therefore be a net benefit for oil producers outside opec.
Not at all. President Lula sided with China and Russia already. Dude loves communists. He even had Venezuelan dictator Maduro over for lunch.
It's seriously tiresome having to say this stuff over and over every single time.
We can go through the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
"Variants of communism have been developed throughout history, including anarcho-communism, Marxist schools of thought, and religious communism, among others. Communism includes a variety of schools of thought, which broadly include Marxism, Leninism, and libertarian communism, as well as the political ideologies grouped around those."
So I'm confident the South America Communism/Socialism is as Communism as your Life-style left, where you support 300 genders and drug abuse. They are all communism, which as wikipedia describes: "Communism (from Latin communis, 'common, universal')[1][2] is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement"
That he even mentions this marxist class bullshit is bad enough.
> Lula is against the idea of a revolution, with makes him a social democrat on the left spectrum, at most.
If you actually watch the decades old videos where he explains why he's against it, you'd realize it's because he thinks they don't work as a communist regime installation strategy.
His plan is to do it small bits at a time so that nobody notices. Boil the frog slowly so it doesn't jump, as they say. Since he's a cancerous old guy, he's been accelerating his schedule as of late so it's become a lot more obvious.
Please, don't use drugs.
Why do you think he is right? Raised and Educated in the Soviet Union, he tries to revive the soviet union, a socialist/communist dream.
> Aleksander Dugin
The guy that created the National Bolshevik Party, which historically defended Stalinism?
> Please, don't use drugs.
I don't do it, that's for communists ;)
>That's for... Yeah, as cocaine for CEO's in the 70's, very commie like.
These were Capitalists. A progressive capitalist, yes, but Right leaned economically. There's nothing Leftie on being a poshy Californian with the pockets full of bucks even if you don't give a shit on any religion or Conservativism.
The same way you can't call yourself a vegetarian when you eat a weekly BBQ in a Texan rancho.
There's the liberal left, the tankie left, the conservative left (which in the end it's 99% close to the Italian/Spanish Fascism), and the libertarian communism, also known as Anarchist comunes, but you need highly educated people there. No, not rich, just truly educated. In scientific and technological fields.
On Russia, today they're closer to fascism than to Socialism. No one it's Communist in the Putin/Dugin circle. No one. Just thugs, corporate mafias and a right wing nationalism with an homophobe discurse against the West, influenced by the Russian Orthodox church.
Not so different to the Evangelican Neocon from the USA. Switch the American flags on a Neocon for the Russian one, change a little bit its Christian branch and you'll get the Russian Ivan full of hate against Western progress since the 1789's revolution and Human Rights. It probably listens to the Orthodox Pope and he listens to the Russian equivalent of Fox News. Oh, they have their version of Alex Jones, too. With the same conspiranoic crap.
Check this out: " LGBT themes and issues faced increasing official government censorship and a uniformly harsher policy across the entire Soviet Union. Homosexuality was officially labelled a disease and a mental disorder in the late 1920s (specifically over a period from 1927 to 1930)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_history_in_Russia. People keep trying to avoid call Left by their name. You cannot simply start to call everything bad Right and the Heaven Left. Its absurd.
As of today, Russia is no longer even superficially left-wing in its state ideology, but the old personal and political ties to the far left in the rest of the world are still there. That is one of the reasons why "tankies" support the invasion of Ukraine and even cloak their support in the same "peace movement" jargon recycled straight from the Cold War era. That is also why countries such as Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua are sympathetic to the Russian imperial project.
Another reason is shared anti-Americanism, of course. The US has a much worse record track in Latin America than in Europe, no wonder that systemic competitors try to exploit it.
I liked your explanation, but this part - I agree with you, thats the sentiment there - BUT it just doesnt make sense at all. Europe exploited much more the Latin America, than US did. US was actually one of the first countries that fought this exploitation.
Russia still represents itself as the successor of the Soviet Union, and hardline communist parties still hold onto the (whitewashed) history of the Soviet Union to validate their existence. Russia's armed forces in Ukraine still fly the Soviet union flag, and Putin's propaganda still holds onto Soviet leaders like Lenin to push their propaganda.
To the eyes of hardline communist parties throughout the world, Russia represents the heir of the Soviet Union thus communism, and that's by Putin's design.
Are we there yet? My assumption was the political climate of Brazil was primarily pushing oil dependence
Thus their move will likely be to somehow dictate prices to Petrobras, profitability be damned. Petrobras stock has already taken several nosedives since this guy took office.
I also find the take on decoupling from russia weak and cowardly.
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!
A better analogy with the drug war would be to copy a country that manages meth by managing addiction.
Offer better alternative and employment to the farmers and loggers. Obviously this isn’t easy.
Most people with chainsaws are trying to feed their family. They may be “bad actors” at one scale, but they are “good actors” to the people whose opinion matters to them.
It is this kind of language, and indeed this kind of problem, that makes resolving it so complicated.
Also, bad actor is usually used in cybersecurity contexts. It could be a scammer or your CTO testing you - shouldn't really matter.
“Bad actor” is a common phrase that frames a subject as acting maliciously. It’s not a term of art, and this framing is compatible with its use in security.
Farmers with chainsaws are not automatically bad actors because their actions are mostly not malicious. They are often acting legally, or are encouraged to act illegally under a regime of intentionally loose enforcement (“everyone does it”). It is a political problem where the term “bad actor” is relative to the political position of the observer.
That’s why terms like “bad actor” are unhelpful. It frames all the subjects as malicious, when in many cases their actions are perfectly reasonable and often perfectly legal.
Some farmers with chain saws are bad actors, but not all of them. We need to help all of them.
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.
Defense industry? Semiconductor fabs? Pretty much anything? You name it dude. I'm just sick of my country being the world's barn. Producing soy and shit. I wish Brazil had balls to do what China did.
> you're parroting Bolsonaro's demagogy
Please. I don't care at all about Bolsonaro. He's irrelevant. I had this opinion before he even took office.
It's not that I "haven't thought of the consequences", it's that I really don't give a shit. I literally couldn't care less that there's going to be a price -- I'd pay it gladly, if it brought prosperity and power to my nation.
That's the whole issue: you aren't the one who is going to pay for it.
I'm originally from the same nation as you, that's exactly why I'm calling you moronic. Semiconductor fabs don't depend on the Amazon being burnt down. Defence industry does not depend on the Amazon being burnt down. These depend on political stability, well-educate population, State investment in R&D for the future, economical policies that foster national industries through the whole chain, fiscal policies (and stability of those) that don't overburden small R&D companies. Custo-Brasil encompasses all of that: political instability, fiscal policies that are burdensome to abide to, a poorly educated population, bureaucratic inefficiencies, so on and so forth.
That's what need to change in Brazil, not fucking burning the Amazon down, that won't bring any prosperity as the elites would be unchanged, they would still pillage and loot you and the rest of the population, as it's been done since the 1500s.
You're calling me a moron because you took my post literally. Truth is I don't even disagree with the rest of your points. The sentiment I tried to convey was "the amazon doesn't matter, we have bigger problems to worry about". That's the most polite way I found to express what I feel when I see people worrying about a jungle in a country that's unable to provide basic sanitation to all its citizens. Especially those living in said jungle, and there are many.
At least it's a relatively noble cause. I'm a lot less polite when it comes to intellectual property.
This one of the most champagne socialist positions I had a privilege to witness. Thank you for this.
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.
What? Literally any economical activity you can think of would be a better use for that massive amount of land. If you told me I could have a billion dollar fab built in my country but the only place I could build it was in the middle of the amazon, it wouldn't take me even one second to decide.
Did you know there's oil reserves in the amazon? People in the government keep making noises about that. Every once in a while I see news about some environmental drama concerning the extraction of petroleum in that region. I wish they'd just do it already.
- A billion dollar fab will be 0.00001% of the forest.
- Oil can be extracted without destroying forest
I know because I literally live in a city where this happened. Steel industry. When my parents came here, it pretty much was a jungle. Now they call it the Steel Valley.
are you a business man? https://thestorytellers.com/the-businessman-and-the-fisherma...
enjoy your life without pollution, drought etc, instead of money
Personally I don't give a damn about nations, I care about the planet as a whole, I live in France but nowhere like the average, more like a third-world person (I don't even have a fridge, not hot water, nor heating or AC, just to give you an idea), so your talk doesn't make sense to me
If I hate anything it's the weakness of our governors who are perfectly happy in their positions as globalist puppets. They are always seeking the next great power so they can align themselves with them. Once upon a time that was the United States. Now it looks like it's China. Wish they had the balls to aspire to be the next great power instead.
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.
The only adequate source of nitrogen is ammonia manufactured from petroleum.
So Brazil's chief challenge will be obtaining adequate ammonium fertilizers.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/08/20/341884706/wh...
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.
Ironic, isn't it?
Haven't found good english sources newer than 2020.
Sibling article you mentioned says nothing about amazon deforestation. It's about indigenous people's land rights.
Why trust the internet dude? Marina Silva, a strong person in the ecology sector, is probably leaving the government, because of Lula decisions: https://www-estadao-com-br.translate.goog/politica/apos-reun...
"Still during a trip to the G-7, in Japan, Lula had already signaled that he could contradict Marina regarding Ibama's refusal to grant a license for Petrobras to drill oil deposits at the mouth of the Amazon River. The project put the head of the Environment on a collision course with the Minister of Mines and Energy, Alexandre Silveira , as shown by Estadão"
You're right, why trust the internet, especially anonymous forum commenters with no reputation to uphold?
educate us: how can he become better at lying?
Again, is common in Politics, knowing that a propose has now change to be approved, politician A or B submit it to be voted, just for Virtue Signaling. Lula as president, has other instruments, to make it happens, other than going through the senate. Was the same thing with the oil drilling in Amazonas, shortly blocked by technicians and not by politicians. As you can see in the article, Lula was pro-drilling, but now he just stepped down from the discussion, because he saw that it could be bad for his image.
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.
https://www.czapp.com/analyst-insights/brazil-develops-tropi...
Our wheat would reach around 1m high, thus our "food 3D printer" has a volume of 100 x 100 x 1m. We could obtain 2 to 7 tons of wheat in that space
With corn our production space is 100 x 100 x 2 m and we can obtain on average 5 tons of corn (but we could obtain 7-10 tons with some extra effort).
With avocados our production volume is 100 x 100 x 25 m. We could obtain between 7 and 13 tons of Has avocados, but with a good culture practices, good rootstocks and smart planning we could produce 23 tons
With Oranges we could harvest also 10 - 22 tons of oranges
And bananas would yield 50-60 tons of food... on average
So If our goal is to feed as many people as possible, what should we culture, trees or herbs?
Isolationism is part of this and I’d argue this makes conflict more likely, not less.
What do you think will happen if there is major crop failure and food shortages?
These free-market extremists don't know when to stop, they have caused more damage than the Taliban.
I agree with you cynicism about the free market, but the situation with Russian gas turned out way better than was feared. Party this was due to a mild winter but the forecasts were very grim for a while there.
I live in Europe and have to laugh at that. The misery they're talking about is a 2x increase in the electric bill, which some of the richer governments (e.g. Sweden) paid back to most consumers (I got two paybacks so far, making my electric bill for the year about the same as the year before, I would say). If they think this is "misery", I think the commenter has absolutely never seen anything even close to real misery.
There are few sources to back up Global Warming?
Oh, ok. I rest my case.
I took Guarulhos, 10 years ago. Couldn't be happier.
"The only solution to the Brazilian problems is [leaving through] the airport" is a common trope among disatisfied, angry and fed up Brazilians (and I bet every other problematic country).
Since my parents died, I gave up on my Brazilian citizenship and have a bellow-zero interest on visiting the country.