DEVELOPMENT: Brazil Beefs Up its Cattle Industry

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 2 1998 (IPS) - An old refrain used to speak of “they grow an awful lot of coffee in Brazil” but today there is a bigger cattle industry in this country.

Brazil has 160 million head of cattle – or one beast for nearly everyone living in the country – and the industry is undergoing a great transformation in order to increase productivity and its capacity for export. This process could also be beneficial to the environment.

Despite the big numbers, Brazilian beef exports fetched only 450 million dollars in 1997, just 2.3 percent of the world’s total and a sum much lower than that of Argentina. Even with its enormous nation herd, Brazil still imports milk and other dairy products, especially from Argentina, whose productivity in the industry is three times that of this country.

In many ways Brazilian cattle farming is about the conquest and consolidation of rural property rather than about production although this has been changing during the past four years since the stalisation of Brazil’s currency. Land has stopped being a defense mechanism against inflation and once again has become a means of production.

Intensive cattle farming, using stables and the seeding of grass fields in winter, is gaining ground. In 1993 it accounted for 1.7 million head of cattle, and this year has surpassed the 4 million mark. These levels are still relatively low when compared to the 80 million in the United States, but they are nonetheless having an visible impact on the market.

Productivity also is rising. Beef consumption no longer is threatened with annual periods of scarcity and price increases formerly resulted from the destruction of grasslands in the winter, a phenomenon which contributed to the failure of a previous economic stabilization plan implemented in 1986.

This process, moreover, created serious problems for large-scale cattle farming, which takes up large areas of low-denisty forest land in the centre of the country.

According to Eduardo Martins, president of the Brazilian Institute for the Environment – the official agency for environmental policy – the increase of intensive cattle farming has freed-up close to 80 million hectares for agriculture, thus reducing the destruction of forests in the Amazon and other regions.

This figure, which is equivalent to 50 percent of the total land dedicated to commercial agriculture in Brazil, has remained stable since the early 1980s although it has doubled its productivity. The shift to intensive cattle farming also is visible in the decreasing price of land, which no longer is utilized to shelter capital from inflation.

Since July 1994, when the current stabilization plan was implemented, the price of land has dropped by 61 percent, according to the Center for Agrarian Studies of th e Getulio Vargas Foundation.

Like other sectors of the economy, the cattle industry is now seeking more productivity and competitiveness, and has been deeply influenced by the opening of the market and competition from other sources of protein.

Chicken farming, which has made great strides in the last three decades as a re sult of the advanced technologies implemented in the industry, has conquered a great part of the internal market for meat. In 1997, the value of chicken exports doubled those of beef.

Along with inefficient methods of husbandry, hoof-and-mouth disease has been an other obstacle to increasing the production and export of beef. Yet this obstacle is also being surpassed according to Minister of Agriculture Francisco Rutta, who announced that the International Organization of Epidemic Influenzas declared beef from the southern states of Rio Grande do Sul and Sant a Catarina free (although vaccinated) from hoof-and- mouth disease.

These two states have nearly 15 million head of cattle. The major international markets close their doors when the disease is present in a particular region, thus this certification could translate into an increase in exports of 100,000 tons of beef this year alone. This figure was given by Joao Carlos Mirelles, Secreta ry of Agriculture for the state of Sao Paulo and a leader in the cattle industr y.

Minister Turra believes that hoof-and-mouth disease will be eradicated nationwide by the year 2007 as a result of current vaccination programs and other disea se control efforts. (FIN/IPS/mo/ff/if/mg/mk/98)

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