BRAZIL: Plant Pests Join Globalisation Process and Destroy Jobs

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 6 1997 (IPS) - The free market and tariff reductions mean the Brazil of today can eat French lettuce, US fruit and Chinese garlic, but it is also facing imported pests which threaten agriculture and destroy jobs.

Now the trade barriers which protected the producers and national harvests have fallen, the government is now trying to design a plant health defence system suited to economic liberalisation.

From an average of twenty new damaging fungi, bacteria, insects and organisms entering the country per year pre-1994, Brazil now receives 300 of these new immigrants each year, said Agriculture Defence Minister, Enio Marques Pereira.

This has vastly increased the need to apply agrotoxics to crops. The agricultural pest control industry is hoping to reach two billion dollars in sales this year – 15 percent more than in 1996 and double the amount at the beginning of the decade.

Investments in the sector will have to increase to 335 million dollars in the next five years, said the National Industrialists Association, given the expected growth in business.

And while they push production prices up, the imported pests also cause waves of rural unemployment when they attack crops which employ a large workforce.

Such was the case of cotton and cocoa in Brazil, although the pests which attacked these sectors occurred before the national market was opened up in 1990.

Cocoa, which made the south of Bahia state, in the Northeast of the country, one of the richest areas of Brazil in recent decades, provides the crudest example of the organic, economic and social damage an agricultural pest can cause.

The “witches broom,” a disease provoked by the fungus Crinipellis perniciosa, which prevented cocoa production from becoming competitive in the Amazon and Aledana areas, was unknown in southern Bahia until the end of the eighties.

Since then, the harvest of cocoa beans has fallen to little more than half its former levels, with nearly a quarter of the 615,000 hectares covered by cocoa trees being totally destroyed and 250,000 workers losing their jobs.

President of the National Centre of Cocoa Producers, Walace Setenta, has valued the losses of cocoa producers at around a billion dollars in the last seven years.

The Ministry of Agriculture crop defence department said the real situation was less dramatic, calculating the number of jobs lost at 50,000 and the value of the cocoa lost due to the “witches broom” at 400 million dollars.

The country which was the world’s biggest producer of this fruit therefore turned into an importer overnight in order to feed its chocolate industry. In the first half of this year, Brazil spent 61 million dollars on these imports.

But while the pest was a decisive factor in the collapse, it not the only element involved.

For a tonne of cocoa today is worth 1,500 dollars, a third of the value at the end of the golden period in the seventies. The lower price and higher costs, due to the need for fertilizers and fungicides, laid to rest the easy money of the past.

Brazil underwent a similar process with cotton. The boll weevil, Antonomus grandis, which came into the country ten years ago contributed, along with foreign competition based on cheap credit, to dramatically reduce national production of this fibre.

In these ten years, Brazil changed from a great exporter to one of the biggest cotton importers in the world. These losses cost the country around three billion dollars, said the Agriculture Minister.

The area planted fell to a third of its previous size, with serious effects on jobs, as this is a crop which employs a large workforce, even though only seasonally, during the harvest.

With the increased import diversification, a number of other pests are invading Brazil, threatening horticultural and fruit production, especially in the citrus sector, which has become a large-scale exporter over the last decade.

Therefore, the Agriculture Ministry decided to fork out five million dollars to fund a plan to confront the germ warfare which is accompanying international trade.

One part of this will mean integrating the activity in the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). A Southern Cone Vegetable Health Council will work on common programmes and harmonising regulations, in order to achieve effective agricultural defence which does not become an undue barrier to trade.