In Bloomberg, “in two months, Brazil went from the expectation of a record soybean crop to the worst harvest” in two years.
It is the new forecast by Conab, the state-owned supply company, which echoed, almost with celebration, on US agriculture news sites, such as Brownfield, “Big cut in Brazil’s estimate.”
The explanation, from Bloomberg to Reuters and the Chinese channel CGTN (below, image of a lake in Rio Grande do Sul), is the drought that mainly affected the three southern states, plus Mato Grosso do Sul.
By the same assessments, despite the crop failure, prices don’t go up anymore — and the US just doesn’t sell anymore — because China is not buying soybeans around the world.
At the turn of the year, as People’s Daily, Xinhua, the South China Morning Post and others reported, Xi Jinping openly spoke that his country needs to be “self-sufficient” in soybeans — and iron ore, another focus of Brazilian exports.
One of his statements: “Never let others grab you by the throat when eating. It’s a basic matter of survival.”
Chinese news has since reported that the country’s main soy-producing region, Heilongjiang, in the northeast, released a plan to expand the harvest; and that its agriculture ministry prepares rules to release genetically modified soybeans.
The strategic explanation is that “soybeans became a battleground between Beijing and Washington during the Trump-era trade war.”
But the statements by ministers and Jair Bolsonaro himself – almost threats – also echoed at the time that China depends on Brazil, for food, more than Brazil depends on China.
RUSSIAN SOY?
After the New York Times, the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung also published earlier this year that climate change could make Russia a competitor in the production of grains, including soybeans. “The world’s largest country is best positioned globally to profit from warming.”
‘OVER CROWDED’
On Bloomberg, with impact on social media in the US, Beijing blamed Washington for the problems generated by Elon Musk’s satellites.
And one of the most searched topics on American Google was that NASA itself is “concerned” about the excess of SpaceX satellites, after a solar storm “kills” 40 of them (above, scene captured in the Caribbean).
