Development for Sustainable Agriculture

The Brazilian Cerrado

Akio Hosono, Carlos Magno Campos da Rocha, Yutaka Hongo, Akio Hosono, Carlos Magno Campos da Rocha, Yutaka Hongo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781349558391
  9781137431349
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137431356
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Biological Sciences

Since the mid-1970s, the tropical savanna, known as Cerrado, has been transformed into one of the world's largest grain-growing regions. This book explores how and by what Brazil achieved inclusive and sustainable growth in the Cerrado.

Part I

Development of Cerrado Agriculture

1

Technological Innovations That Made Cerrado Agriculture Possible

Akio Hosono and Yutaka Hongo

Introduction

For the development of Cerrado agriculture, three technological advancements were essential. First, the soil needed to be improved and new crop varieties suited to tropical zones developed. These constituted the core technological innovations needed to develop Cerrado agriculture from practically nothing. Second, new technologies and practices needed to be effectively transferred to a large number of medium-sized farms, as family farmers were the main actors in Cerrado agriculture, rather than the limited number of companies that are often responsible for launching new industries. Third, a solid and highly effective institution needed to be involved with the continuous technological innovation required for Cerrado agriculture in order to geographically scale up, diversify, and deepen its agro-industrial value chains. To address this need, EMBRAPA (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation) was created and subsequently expanded, and a strong innovation system was developed. The following sections of this chapter discuss each of these crucial factors, which enabled Cerrado agriculture to be successful.

1.1 Scientific discovery that changed the view of the Cerrado

The Cerrado region was considered to be a marginal area for agriculture until the 1960s, and thus had been largely abandoned for a long period. Land use included only subsistence agriculture along the rivers and some beef cattle grazing on native pastures, with stocking rates ranging from 5 to 20 hectares per cow.

This conventional view of the Cerrado was called into question in the early 1940s. In 1942, two botanists from the University of São Paulo, Professors Felix Kurt Rawitscher and Mário Guimarães Ferri, began to doubt the commonly held belief that the state of the vegetation in the Cerrado was caused by dryness. They discovered that many of the native plants did not defoliate even in the driest season; on the contrary, some of them even began to bud or sprout. Plants in dry areas usually have only a small number of pores on the underside of their leaves in order to avoid evaporation, but this was not true of the native plants of the Cerrado. Detailed studies were then initiated to investigate the causes of the Cerrado’s peculiar vegetation. Studies that began in botany rapidly expanded to include geology, physiography, soil science, meteorology, zoology, and agronomy, with regional universities and research institutes participating alongside the University of São Paulo. By 1952, the theory that attributed the Cerrado’s vegetation to the soil instead of the lack of rainfall came to be gradually supported (Alvim and Araujo, 1952).

In 1959, Ferri and others proposed the concept of oligotrophic scleromorphism, a theory that attributed the state of vegetation in the Cerrado to the chemical factors of the soil rather than lack of rainfall (see Ferri, 1971). This theory can be summarized as follows: Cerrado soil is among the oldest soils in the world, having existed for at least a million years, but nutrients had been leached from it during that period, bringing it to an exhausted state. This severely worn-down soil is classified as latosol (oxisol and ultisol in the US taxonomy) and is typical of Cerrado soil, occupying 46 percent of the area. It also has high acidity and aluminum toxicity. Plants capable of withstanding these severe conditions are not capable of fully synthesizing protein from carbohydrates, which have accumulated in great quantities within the plants due to their active photosynthesis in the sub-tropical region. As a result, these plants – the peculiar trees of the Cerrado – have thick leaves and bark.

This scientific discovery completely changed the view of the Cerrado as marginal land. From that point on, research began on how to make use of the Cerrado for agriculture, which led to the discovery of its agricultural advantages, including: (1) the rainy season, during which annual rainfall ranges from 500 mm in the Northeast to 2,300 mm in the sub-Amazonian areas; (2) the deep and friable soil; (3) the potential to improve soil conditions using limestone and fertilizers; (4) the vast, flat land, which is ideally suited to large-scale mechanized farming; and (5) the shrub vegetation, which is easy to clear so that land can be reclaimed, thereby reducing initial cultivation costs (agricultural land development), especially compared with the tropical rainforest in the Amazon. As the Cerrado’s natural vegetation was considered to be much poorer than the Amazon’s, Cerrado agriculture drew little opposition from environmental standpoints, and this was one of the factors that accelerated its development.

1.2 Creation of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA) to foster technological innovation

Thus, the potential to transform the Cerrado from ‘sterile’ land into arable land was gradually revealed. Yet, it was not easy for private businesses and farmers to independently achieve the technological innovations necessary for this purpose. Some pioneering farmers did have positive outcomes and attained success, and this contributed a great deal to the overall efforts, as will be discussed in Chapter 2, but the Brazilian government judged that it was necessary to establish an organization dedicated to fostering the necessary technological innovations. The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA) was established in 1973 and did in fact achieve much success: recent discussions on the Cerrado point out that EMBRAPA’s greatest contributions were soil improvement (the control of soil acidity and the improvement of soil fertility) and the development of new varieties of crops such as soybeans, maize, rice, beans, and wheat that were better suited to tropical zones (FAO and The World Bank. 2009, The Economist, 2010; Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), 2010; Correa and Schmitt, 2014).

With the creation of EMBRAPA, Brazil addressed the high cost and risk of research and development for agriculture in general and for Cerrado agriculture in particular. Investment in learning, knowledge, and technology is highly risky, and risk markets are absent (especially in developing countries), which in turn discourages such investments (Norman and Stiglitz, 2012). Further discouraging private investment is the general feeling that the technology and knowledge required for agriculture should be a public good. Though such technological innovations require high investment, investors cannot appropriate the knowledge and technology, which should instead be disseminated freely to farmers for agricultural development. EMBRAPA, a public entity established in 1973, effectively invested in knowledge and technology and provided them as a public good to farmers, who started to cultivate land in the Cerrado.

Analyzing how technological innovations were made possible in the Cerrado can provide clues to the factors behind EMBRAPA’s successful research and development. Established in 1975, EMBRAPA’s Cerrado Agricultural Research Center (CPAC, also called “EMBRAPA Cerrado”) achieved success very early as an innovative research institution. The CPAC realized technological innovations for soil management and the improvement of crop breeding, both of which were fundamental to the development of Cerrado agriculture. Although the CPAC is a research institute affiliated with EMBRAPA, it is no exaggeration to say that this institute virtually was EMBRAPA at that time, as EMBRAPA had been established to support agricultural development mainly in the Cerrado. The Japan–Brazil Agricultural Research Cooperation Program in the Cerrado was started at the CPAC by EMBRAPA and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in 1977.¹ This technical cooperation program began prior to the Japanese–Brazilian Cooperation Program for Cerrados Development (PRODECER), which will be discussed in Chapter 2, and served as technological preparation for PRODECER.²

The research begun by EMBRAPA in 1973 progressed steadily, making it one of the largest agricultural research institutes in the southern hemisphere, and one of the largest tropical agricultural research institutes in the world. At the end of 2011, there were 9,803 people working for the corporation, 2,389 of whom were researchers, with 1,959 of these possessing PhDs. In comparison, only three researchers with doctorates had been with EMBRAPA at its founding in 1973. Since then, EMBRAPA has dispatched 3,000 people to developed countries to work or study, and it now has 47 affiliated research centers and is highly appreciated overseas for its distinguished research.

1.3 Soil improvement: a core technological innovation

Most of the soils under Cerrado vegetation are oxisols. They are deep, highly weathered soils with a low capacity for holding water. The soils’ acidity was very high and their aluminum saturation was high, while levels of available nutrients were extremely low. These characteristics led to the conclusion that these soils were unsuitable for agriculture.³ Therefore, the first research conducted by the CPAC was on soil improvement, using cutting-edge soil analyzers, which helped to reduce the soil analysis period from several days to several hours. One of the greatest obstacles to the development of Cerrado agriculture was the soil itself, so these analyzers had a great impact on the project. They accelerated soil research and increased accuracy, and as a result the number of papers related to soil science published in academic journals by the CPAC increased rapidly.

At nationwide Cerrado symposiums regularly held in Brazil, the CPAC presented its most up-to-date soil research results, which made a great contribution to the development of Cerrado agriculture. These results were compiled in literature such as the book Soils of the Cerrado: Technologies and strategies of management, published by the CPAC in 1989. Many researchers were involved in the soil research, with especially noteworthy contributions by Dr. Wenceslau J. Goedert and Edson Lobato. Goedert was appointed as the first Director of the CPAC and established the basic direction of its soil research. He analyzed Cerrado soils, contributed to the establishment of the methodology to convert them into agricultural fields, and was the editor of the above-cited book. Lobato received the 2006 World Food Prize for his outstanding role in helping to transform the Cerrado into productive cropland. He worked to enhance soil quality and counteract water stress, and collaborated with farmers and extension technicians to implement the technologies and practices related to soil fertility and soil management pioneered at the CPAC. A book that he edited in 2004, Cerrado: Soil Correction and Fertilization became a standard reference for both farmers and researchers.

Brazilian and Japanese researchers were convinced that detailed data needed to be collected to clarify the diverse characteristics of the various areas in the Cerrado. Carlos Magno Campos da Rocha, who served as the Director of the CPAC and later as the President of EMBRAPA, noted that detailed studies on the soil of the Cerrado began with the start of Japan’s cooperation.⁴ In fact, the initiation of research cooperation between Brazil and Japan triggered the shift to the establishment period.

Until around 1978, during the preparatory stage of Cerrado agriculture, there were only about 700 research papers on the Cerrado, most of which dealt with botanical issues such as features of the vegetation. This situation completely changed when the establishment period for Cerrado agriculture began, partly due to the creation and strengthening of the CPAC. At this time there was a surge in the number of agronomical research papers, which placed greater emphasis on soil and crop production. This was the crucial difference between the preparatory and establishment periods of Cerrado agriculture. The number of research papers on the Cerrado increased dramatically during the first five years of Brazil–Japan research cooperation, and the ratio of papers on agricultural technologies rose to 95 percent. Most of the CPAC’s Brazilian researchers later studied at the Tropical Agricultural Research Center in Tsukuba (later reorganized as JIRCAS), Japan, further underscoring the importance of this cooperation.

1.4 Soybeans fit for the tropical climate: a technological breakthrough for Cerrado agriculture

Besides soil improvement, another breakthrough was the success in developing new crop varieties that were adapted to the tropical environment, with a focus at first mainly on soybeans. Prior to this, it was considered impossible to develop large-scale agriculture in the Cerrado because there were no crops well suited to the environment there. Even acid-resistant rice, which was considered an exception to other crops, which cannot resist the high acidity of the Cerrado soil, could not be pollinated during the ‘boot stage,’ or ear formation stage, of development due to the short dry season, known locally as ‘veranico,’ which occurs during the rainy season in the Cerrado and which causes a high-risk of empty husks. Moreover, as soil deterioration was caused by continuous cropping upland, rice production was not viable and had to be abandoned in tw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Development of Cerrado Agriculture
• Part I  Development of Cerrado Agriculture
• Part II  Technological and Institutional Innovations ThatEnabled Sustainable Cerrado Agriculture
• Index