Can Brazilian agriculture be sustainable and still ramp up its food production?
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskThe practice Ms Porto uses—which combines livestock, crops and forestry—requires less land and can make a farm five times more productive than the average Brazilian holding. It restores degraded pastures, making it ideal for use in the, the unwieldy savannah which covers a quarter of the country. Yet it has been slow to catch on. Despite the system’s advantages, it has been adopted on only 18.5m hectares, or around 5% of farmland.
Responding to these challenges requires innovation. In an executive order on April 22nd President Joe Biden said that the United States would try to reduce the import of food produced on illegally deforested lands, such as the Amazon. In polls, around half of consumers in rich and middle-income countries say that they consider sustainability when buying food and drink.
Beef production alone accounts for around 8.5% of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Brazil, as the world’s largest beef exporter, has a big incentive to label its goods “carbon-neutral”. Not all are convinced. Such claims of neutrality rest largely on the metric of carbon sequestration: that the grass cattle graze on, or forests they slumber in, can act as a sink for carbon dioxide.
However even with such large resources, Carapreta still struggles to make its farming fully eco-friendly. In a country almost the size of the United States, but with shoddy infrastructure, some of its cattle are moved in trucks thousands of kilometres from other states. The company buys cattle feed from Cargill, an American food giant. Organic fertiliser is difficult to produce: fully 70% of Carapreta’s inputs are chemical.
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