Camila Veras Mota’s report for BBC Brasil, entitled “Why Brazilian farmers are not planting beans – and what this has to do with hunger” received less attention than it deserved.
While agribusiness tries to convince us that bees work in partnership with large rural producers, the symbol of Brazilian food is disappearing from the countryside. Rice and bean plantations are being replaced by soy, always soy.
It’s neither today nor the fault of the current government, but a series of facts and decisions that have been pushing us into the pit for more than 40 years – and that partially explain the mud in which we live today.
Data from Conab (National Supply Company, linked to the Ministry of Agriculture) show the evolution of planted areas from the 1976/77 crop to the current 2020/21 crop.
In this interval, bean plantations were reduced by 35%, from 4.9 million hectares to 2.9 million hectares. The rice area has shrunk to less than 1/3 of what it was in the 1970s.
Soybean cultivation jumped from 6.9 million hectares to 38.9 million hectares. From Rio Grande do Sul to Piauí, Brazil turned into a gigantic soy field.
All that soy isn’t there to make organic tofu or pastry frying oil. It is a commodity with an international quotation in dollars. And feed for the meat industry, another commodity.
In short: since the last century, Brazilian agriculture has sent a lot (ops!) to crops aimed at ensuring food on the population’s table. It’s something that we weren’t already aware of, but that had never been designed with such didacticism.
There was an increase in productivity, but nothing to compensate for the loss of cultivated area. According to the BBC text, the volume of beans harvested has remained more or less stable since the first measurement, in 1976/77. In the meantime, the country’s population has doubled.
At the same time, mechanisms to guarantee a minimum of food security for Brazilians were abandoned.
To avoid exaggerated price fluctuations, governments must maintain stocks that make up for the lack of this or that food in case of crop failure. The public stock of beans, which was 150 thousand tons in 2010, has been zero since 2017.
In other words, if demand increases or supply decreases, beans are more expensive.
Another sign of disdain for beans is the stifling of research to improve plant genetics and agricultural techniques. The bean research money now goes… yes, you got it right, to soy!
At the limit, the option for soy dollars could lead to the extinction of the Brazilian habit of eating beans and rice for lunch every day. You can’t buy meat anymore. Without beans, what will we eat?
Instant noodles? Stuffed biscuit? Rifles?
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