South America Seeks to Fill the World's Table

[Muzzle Tough]

Great news from South America. Poor people are becoming richer and better fed as modern technology and agrilculture are becoming more common.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/international/americas/12brazil.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5090&en=f9ad6ed28fb38920&ex=1260507600&partner=rssuserland

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.

<snip>

The two men are now among the most successful producers in the region, and Mr. Pivetta has twice been elected mayor of Lucas do Rio Verde. Each now cultivates more than 100,000 acres, sending soybeans, cotton and pork to markets as distant as China, Russia and Pakistan. With the Southern Hemisphere's spring planting season now complete, the two farmers and scores of others like them here in Mato Grosso state are looking forward to another year of bumper crops.

"With the great climate and fertile soil we have here, I can't imagine any other place that gets the kind of productivity that we do," said Mr. Pivetta, whose family now runs a half-dozen farms here. "Not in Brazil or anywhere else are you going to find two crops a year yielding three tons of grain an acre."

<snip>

Already the world's biggest exporter of chickens, orange juice, sugar, coffee and tobacco, according to Agriculture Ministry statistics, Brazil soon hopes to add soybeans to the list, depending on what happens in that volatile market.

<snip>

"What's really driving this revolution is that the Brazilians discovered how to use tropical and savanna soils that had always been considered poor," said G. Edward Schuh, director of the Center for International Economic Policy at the University of Minnesota. "They learned that with modest applications of lime and phosphorus they can quadruple and quintuple their yields, not just with soybeans but also with maize, cotton and other commodities."

<snip>

Changes in economic policies have also spurred the boom here. At the beginning of the 1990's, for example, Brazil lifted longtime restrictions on imports, leading to a surge in purchases of tractors, combines, fertilizers, pesticides and seeds.

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[ornotna]

1. On one hand this is a good thing

On the other hand....."Last year, more than 9,000-square miles of rain forest were cut down. The Amazon rain forest is the world's largest remaining tropical wilderness."

Unfortunately this is contributing to global warming.

http://www.news8austin.com/content/headlines/?ArID=114773&SecID=2

[amazona]

2. more soybean agricultural desert is not a good thing NT

.

[opihimoimoi]

3. TOFU RULES..................................LOL

[highlonesome]

4. It's important to understand why

If you ever get the chance read "The Mystery of Capital" by Hernando DeSoto who's a Peruvian economist.

One of the main reasons people are burning rainforest is because it's almost impossible for peasants and farmers -- the poor -- of these countries to purchase land legally. Their property law infrastructure is vastly different from ours and in fact resembles the American system of the early 19th century. In the end it an take as long or longer than seven years and hundreds of bureaucratic steps for them to purchanse land legally -- so they burn down the rainforest and squat on the land.

It's huge and very important and gets absolutely no lip service from liberal sources.