Brazil Becomes the New Food Superpower

A soybean harvest. Brazil has become the world's No. 1 soybean exporter.

But the police presence and fines, coupled with the scrutiny of ngos and news media, are sowing antipathy along the agricultural frontier. As you travel north on the BR 163, the level of tension and suspicion rises. "Going forward, our hands are tied," predicts Nelson Glucksberg, a farmer from Sinop in northern Mato Grosso. Maggi is not as pessimistic. But he acknowledges that "we know that we cannot open new areas because of the environmental restrictions." Farther up the road, in the forest town of Alta Floresta, rancher Leocir Jose Dellani recalls that the government once beckoned pioneers to settle the region. He vents his frustration in a restaurant crowded with federal police on the ecology beat. Ranchers, he says, are smarting over "being treated like criminals."

The backlash played a role in the recent resignation of Brazil's environment minister, Marina Silva, an ardent activist once allied with the slain Amazon icon Chico Mendes. Her hard line on deforestation had put Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, on the hot seat. Some environmentalists believe that da Silva is now siding with ag interests.

But others are thinking about how to accommodate rising demand for Brazilian farmland without knocking down more Amazon. Daniel Nepstad, a leading ecologist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, says the "escape valve" for the Amazon lies in channeling Brazil's farm expansion onto existing pastureland, which itself can be downsized by more efficiently raising cattle. Brazilian farmers and officials say the same: Brazil can rise to the challenge of provisioning the world without presiding over the Amazon's destruction.

In the meantime, the next breakthroughs in tropical agriculture are gestating. EMBRAPA is getting an infusion of money and scientists. It has opened an office in Africa, a hunger-ridden continent where some of Brazil's advances could translate well. By 2010, EMBRAPA will be the largest agricultural research agency in the world. It is working on disease-resistant corn, cotton, and soy and on sugar cane that would require less fertilizer. It is developing a "light" pig—more meat and less fat. And Brazil's scientists are experimenting with tropical wheat. Should that venture succeed, expect a shock to the central nervous system of the American breadbasket. "We had the Green Revolution. Now we can have the tropical revolution," enthuses EMBRAPA's Crestana.

We can help feed the world, the Brazilians are saying. It is an ambition that few would want to deny.