A specter haunts Brazil’s future: the specter of agribusiness.
Yeah, I know there are going to be people wanting to put me in a straitjacket for writing such a thing. To use the parody of Portuguese English that is today the lingua franca of the marketing world, agribusiness is the popular “case (pronounced ‘kêize’) of success”. He managed to get the idea that he is the pillar of the country’s economic health in the heads of many people; that respects the environment; that feeds Brazil, the world, perhaps even the hungry in the Andromeda galaxy.
Well, more or less. It would be more intellectually honest to define a large part of Brazilian agribusiness not as a “food producer”, but as a producer of inputs for the food industry (and also for other sectors of the industry).
Hey, isn’t it the same thing? Not when you consider, for example, that soy alone accounts for about half of the country’s annual grain crop in recent years (corn is a distant second). In case the reader has not noticed, almost no one eats soy in Brazil, and even a diet based exclusively on pastries from the fair for half the population would not be able to consume so much soy oil. As for corn, it would also be impossible to use the astronomical amounts of grain that come out of our fields as food.
The account only closes thanks to the demand for the export of these crops, and the fact that they are particularly easy to transform into inputs for the industry, basically metamorphosing into porcari… and additives of all kinds. Real food, real food —rice, beans, fruits, vegetables, vegetables—is a business that occupies much lower levels in the ranking than what we produce. It often comes from small properties, not industrial farms managed with supposed efficiency and modernity by the captains of agribusiness.
All of this helps explain why “the country that feeds the world” has so many people going hungry right now. Far be it from me to want to blame agribusiness for doing well what it was created to do, that is, to make a profit. But it is up to society to set limits when the pursuit of profit fails to fill the belly of those who need it.
And this becomes even more urgent in a scenario where water resources and soil, without which no agribusiness can survive in the long term, are becoming acutely fragile thanks to the climate crisis.
The dystopian scenes of São Paulo’s countryside in 2021, with land storms engulfing municipalities where industrial agriculture has basically done what it wants for decades, should have dismantled the “success case” chimera once and for all. If Brazilian agribusiness really wants to show its attachment to rationality and the mission of feeding people, it needs to start listening to science and abandon the illusion that it can expand indefinitely with cattle and soy on top of the rubble of biodiversity.
It is necessary to find another way, both on rustic soil and in the Amazon. Otherwise, the cycle that combines the enrichment of the few with the hunger of the many will not be broken.
