Anyone interested in understanding how Brazil became what former Secretary of State Colin Powell called an “agricultural superpower” on the verge of surpassing the United States as the world’s largest food exporter would do well to start at this busy network of government laboratories.
These sprawling laboratories and test fields, run by Embrapa, Brazil’s agricultural and livestock research agency, have become a must-stop for any Third World leader visiting Brazil.
Although little known in North America, Embrapa has grown over three decades to become a global leader in tropical agricultural research and has aggressively expanded into fields such as biotechnology and bioenergy.
“Embrapa is a model not just for so-called developing countries, but for all countries,” said Mark Kackler, manager and deputy director of the World Bank’s Agriculture and Rural Development Department. “A key reason why Brazil’s agricultural economy has performed so well is that the country has invested heavily and wisely in front-end agricultural research, and Embrapa has been at the forefront of this effort.”
Embrapa owes its reputation in large part to its pioneering work on the Cerrado, a vast savannah stretching more than 1,600 miles across central Brazil. Considered useless for centuries, the region has become Brazil’s food belt in less than a generation, thanks to the discovery that soil can be fertilized by sprinkling it with phosphorus and lime, which scientists at the Brazilian company Embrapa identified the optimal combination of.
Last year, when the annual World Food Prize was awarded to two Brazilians associated with Embrapa, the eulogy called the emergence of the Cerrado “one of the greatest achievements of agricultural science in the 20th century.”
Embrapa is also promoting the region’s staple crop by developing more than 40 tropical soybean varieties that were originally considered only temperate crops.
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