Technical advances boost crops in the country
O Estado de S. Paulo 07/26/10
A series of technical advances, covering the main Brazilian agricultural products, helped the crops to quadruple the nominal value of their production between 1996 and 2006, and increase their participation in the wealth of the field. Besides, there was a great increase in the prices of the main agricultural commodities over the last decade, driven by the Chinese and Asian demand. Mauro Lopes, researcher at the Center for Agricultural Economics (CEA) of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV), in Rio, notices that sale of agricultural machinery grew at an annual pace of 8.7% for ten years, while the cultivated area increased at a rate of 1.2% a annum. Such an intense mechanization allied to several biological advances, in his view, created "one of the world's most competitive farming".One of the main advances, he says, was the so-called Embrapa "tropical soy", which allowed its cultivation to spread from Northern Paraná to the Midwestern Cerrado and, today, it is already getting to the States of Bahia, Maranhão, Piauí and the limits of the Amazon. The researcher also notices that as the transgenic variety cut down the costs with crop protection products it "saved the soy crops in Rio Grande do Sul". Another achievement of the Embrapa's (Brazilian Agricultural Research Company) was the adaptation of cotton to the Cerrado. With that, as explains Ignez Vidigal Lopes, Mauro Lopes's wife, and also a researcher of the CEA, the "cotton crop changed the frontier, moving from the South to the Midwest".
Researchers also mention as important developments of the Brazilian agriculture, the "safrinha", a second annual corn harvest planted in February, and that is currently greater than the summer harvest in Mato Grosso; the long, thin, irrigated rice of Rio Grande do Sul that allowed it to increase from 5 thousand to 8 thousand kilograms per hectare, and the pre-germinated rice, which gets to ten thousand kilos per hectare; the deep rooted saracura maize that is more resistant to drought; the productivity increase of the sugar cane that went from 85 to 140 tons an hectare in São Paulo; and the irrigated beans with a central pivot; among others.