The payoff is clear: the amount of grain that Ricardo can produce from an acre of land is close to what I get in Illinois. And the numbers for the country as a whole are impressive as well. Brazil is now the second-largest exporter of soybeans after the United States.
The growing supply of food, an expanding economy that gives people more income to buy it, and a number of farsighted nutrition assistance programs by the government have all combined to reduce hunger in Brazil. According to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, DC, the proportion of undernourished people in Brazil’s population had dropped to 6 percent in the 2005–07 period, compared to 11 percent in 1990–92. Better yet, the prevalence of underweight children under the age of five dropped to 2.2 percent in the 2004–09 period from 6.1 percent in 1988–92.
The single biggest farmer demographic in Brazil is still subsistence growers who work less than twenty-five acres of land. In recent years, the Brazilian government has focused a lot more of its attention on the small growers it calls “family farmers,” who are eligible for more generous credit subsidies than what commercial farmers can receive. It also guarantees that small farmers get to supply their produce to government nutrition programs. That is a great example of how federal nutrition programs can attack poverty on two fronts: by fighting hunger through the schools (forty-seven million students are served every day) and by creating markets for small farmers. The Brazilian government spends $2 billion annually on school feeding programs and buys at least 30 percent of the commodities it needs from these small farmers.
I met one of the small farmers who sells her goods to the government. Noildes Maria de Jesus, forty-four years old, is a single mother who lives in a simple cinder-block house with her ten children. A petite woman with her black hair pulled back, she invited me to sit in a wooden chair on her porch and offered me water as she explained that when she arrived on this land, she camped in a plastic tent. She said she chose to homestead here, deciding that it was the best way for someone with simple means to support a family. Plus, she had the labor of her kids. She farms five hectares of land, of which a half hectare is in strawberries, her big cash crop.
The government, Mrs. Noildes said, buys her strawberries for $4.50 a kilo, compared to the $2.50 a kilo she gets selling locally, which helps her to support a daughter studying at a university. I asked her teasingly whether the government’s guaranteed market means that she sells her lowest-quality strawberries to the school program, saving the best for the open market. “Of course not,” she scolded me. “My children eat this food, so I send my best produce to the school.”
For all these successes, I don’t want to paint Brazil as a country that has made no mistakes or has eliminated food insecurity. More than a fifth of Brazilians live in poverty. The poor crowd into shanties that cling to the steep hills like vertical slums, piled one above the other, not far from the fancy beaches of Rio de Janeiro. Land tenure has been a contentious issue for decades, and child labor is widespread. Thanks in part to a flood of foreign capital, inflation is high.
It’s also true that Brazil’s emergence in agriculture came at a cost to the larger environment. Brazil has some of the world’s most progressive forest-protection laws on its books; however, loggers, ranchers, and farmers were gouging out millions of acres of the Brazilian Amazon annually by the early 2000s. This was threatening one of the world’s most diverse collections of animal and plant life. Brazil lost over one hundred million acres of forest between 1990 and 2005—or roughly the area of California. The Brazilian Amazon lost one-fifth of its forest cover over the last three decades, helping to make Brazil one of the world’s biggest producers of greenhouse gases. When people burn the forest to clear land, they release into the atmosphere carbon long stored in the trees.
Soybean farmers became a lightning rod for deforestation when conservation activists targeted Brazil. Europe buys a lot of soybeans from Brazil, and the publicity worried big customers such as McDonald’s, which did not want to be associated with deforestation. But there has been progress: Cargill and the other big soybean exporters agreed to a moratorium on buying soybeans from farmers involved with deforestation after 2006, and Cargill even helped monitor forests to help environmentalists keep track of land being converted. The government created a forest service and gave it the mission of managing Amazon forest sustainability. State-controlled credit to farmers and ranchers can be withheld if deforestation rates don’t improve. The government’s space agency now prides itself on being a leader in using satellites to monitor tropical deforestation.
A group called Conservation International, or CI, is partnering with the Monsanto Company to ensure that the agricultural supply chain is in compliance with regulations, and specifically is working to prevent illegal deforestation and local extinction of species. EMBRAPA officials told me that its goal is to double Brazil’s food production without taking another tree. The agency is encouraging farmers to plant more trees as part of a soil improvement strategy called agroforestry. Large farmers are required by federal law to keep 20 percent of their land in forest or woodland.
Brazil’s successes have attracted the attention of global agricultural companies such as Monsanto, which now see it as an important and growing market for their products. Monsanto plans (pending regulatory approval from China, a big importer of soybeans) to soon introduce a soybean seed called Intacta RR2 PRO, which has several valuable features that should be particularly helpful in the tropics. The beans resist the herbicide Roundup and also are fortified against soybean loopers and velvet bean caterpillars, bugs particularly troublesome in that ecosystem. That can reduce insecticide use. In much of the United States, this technology is used mostly to protect corn and cotton, but it turns out to be useful for soybeans in Brazil.
Increasingly, although all products need to eventually be tested in real conditions, sophisticated agricultural research labs start and accelerate the process. Monsanto’s extensive R & D facility just outside Saint Louis, Missouri, is capable of studying conditions from every point on the globe. It has over one hundred growing chambers about the size of a residential garage outfitted with lights, humidifiers, and dehumidifiers, and soil combinations designed to mimic any conditions that farmers face. Researchers can dial in longitude and latitude and the humidity and rainfall pattern from a specific period of time. Its scientists have scoured the genetic traits from crop species around the world to find the best combinations for high-yield varieties they can then enhance with other traits fine-tuned to a given environment. The process can take a decade or more from lab bench to farmers’ fields. In Brazil, Monsanto scientists work closely with EMBRAPA on a number of projects. According to the company, Brazilian and Argentinean farmers now are second and third, respectively, in the adoption of advanced seeds (behind only the United States).
A MODEL FOR AFRICA?
The cerrado’s emergence as a breadbasket can be an important model for Africa. In general, Brazil has more water than many parts of Africa. However, both Brazil and large swaths of Africa lie outside the fertility belts, have old and worn-out soils, and are in the tropics. Both of their populations are booming. Brazil had those natural challenges yet managed to transform itself from a net importer of basic food staples in the late 1970s into one of the world’s biggest food producers and agricultural exporters. The supply of calories per capita in Brazil climbed 25 percent between 1975 and 2007.
When it comes to food security, only government can take on some tasks. Who would have helped poor farmers on this scale except for a public institution? Building a farm belt is like maintaining a military force or running an education system. It demands integrated and coordinated activities. Only the government can protect land rights, conduct large-scale research for the common good, regulate markets so that they are transparent, and create the legal support to enforce contracts. And only government can create a favorable economic climate for farmers with forward-thinking policies. In the late 1980s the
Brazilian government set about dousing the hyperinflation that reached more than 1,000 percent in some years. It threw out decades of protectionism and adopted a new currency, the real, in 1994 and allowed it to depreciate against the US dollar. And it adopted open trade policies that allow farmers to import inputs when they are cheaper than domestic sources.
Clearing the way for multinational firms to invest in Brazil triggered a flood of capital into the country’s farm sector, bringing the most up-to-date technologies to Brazilian farmers and new suppliers willing to provide credit. Brazilian agricultural exports became more attractive to foreign buyers, as moving the real to a floating exchange rate made Brazil a low-cost supplier of food. The government also provided cheap credit and other subsidies to its farmers.
Brazil’s experiences and future development could be a big help to Africa’s farmers. EMBRAPA already has its own researchers conducting outreach work in Ghana, Mozambique, and Senegal, and has launched a $7 million, five-year program that uses the internet to match Brazilian agricultural scientists with African scientists interested in whether techniques that worked in Brazil could work in Africa. Our foundation has funded several projects in which growers on the land most like the cerrado—what Africans call the “Guinea savanna”—were taught soil conservation techniques that poor farmers can afford.
Agricultural experts I know who have worked in both Africa and Brazil are optimistic that Africa’s savanna can grow a lot more food than it grows now. There are large areas of land in the same latitudes as Brazil’s tropical savanna, stretching from Angola east to the Indian Ocean across Zambia, Malawi, and Mozambique, that mimic the cerrado in topography, soil, and weather. Another large belt covers millions of hectares in western Africa, where it begins in the interior of Ivory Coast and crosses Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. We need to develop these areas while also protecting the considerable existing forests and jungles within them.
It’s important to acknowledge that while Brazil focused initially on helping large-scale farmers, it has given more and more support to smaller family farmers too. The governments of some African countries have been wooing large foreign farmers with tax incentives, water rights, and cheap long-term leases of government-controlled land. Some brokers are promising returns of 15 percent to 20 percent a year on African farms, which is highly unlikely. US agricultural land—where you can get parts for your tractor in a reasonable amount of time, all the fertilizer you need, and the most modern seed—has averaged a return of about 6 percent over the past thirty years.
The potential for Africa’s savanna is real. Africa’s leaders will blow their best chance in a generation to lift up their people if they don’t concentrate on helping their own small farmers. African countries won’t replicate the success of the cerrado by giving more help to foreign investors than to their own farmers. Allowing foreign large-scale mechanized agriculture to come in doesn’t create enough local jobs, and shipping those crops back out of the country helps mostly the foreign farmers and the government officials who sign the deals.
To fight hunger most effectively in many places around the globe, we must share our growing knowledge of how to breathe life into stressed and depleted soil. That takes sustainable agronomic practices, a firm will, and committed government institutions. What Brazil has accomplished on the cerrado gives me hope.
Story 34
Chocolate-Covered Opportunities
Joe Whinney is the CEO of an organic premium chocolate company called Theo Chocolate based in Seattle, Washington.
Joe is not a guy who scares easily.
Let me explain.
I first met Joe a few years ago on a trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the most food-insecure, conflict-plagued countries in Africa. We were visiting a local NGO called Green House, which is trying to improve the livelihoods of local farmers by teaching them how to improve their yields of cocoa and attain access to premium cocoa markets. The DRC can be chaotic, not to mention dangerous. Armed militia and factions with shifting loyalties are constant threats. Joe, who travels to many exotic and complicated places to source cocoa, was low key and unfazed by everything. I realized right away that he was not your typical food company CEO. And the more I talked with him, the clearer that became.
Joe is from Philadelphia. He was a good student in high school, but he grew impatient and dropped out during his senior year, before graduation. Joe and a buddy pooled their money, bought a sailboat, and began an adventure in the Caribbean. But after three months, Joe went ashore in the Central American country of Belize, and he decided he wanted to do something productive with his time and energy. He went to work for an NGO that was fighting to preserve indigenous species in the face of increasing development pressures. It didn’t take long before Joe realized that to accomplish that, you have to figure out how to improve the livelihoods of people living in and near fragile ecosystems, so they don’t see destroying the rain forest and endangered species as the only way to survive.
One of the projects the NGO was exploring was helping the Belizeans expand the market for their high-quality cocoa. Major chocolate companies, including Hershey’s, had operations in Belize and liked the quality of the local product. Joe went out to learn about farming this crop. The first day he showed up on a cocoa plantation to work with the local farmhands, they handed him two things: an old rice sack with a car seatbelt sewn onto it as a strap, and a shotgun. They gave no explanation. “I wondered, ‘Do you shoot the trees to shake off the pods?’ ”
Joe watched his coworkers and saw that wasn’t it. They told him his job would be to collect cocoa pods rolling down the hillsides of the plantation after the workers pulled them off the trees. He put down the gun and began chasing the mango-sized pods. Before long, he reached for a pod and realized there was a snake as thick as a baseball bat next to his hand. He jumped back, but he was intrigued and pointed it out to a worker nearby.
“Get the gun, boy!” his coworker yelled. The plantation was also a prime habitat of a snake species called the fer-de-lance, which is extremely poisonous, aggressive, and territorial. It hunts in pairs. (What’s not to like?) Joe handed the gun to his coworker, who shot the snake. “The other guys barely looked up,” he says. Before long, the occasional sound of a gun firing was just part of Joe’s workday. He came to appreciate how hard the local people worked, for little money, and that the simple act of parting leaves or moving to a new tree could be deadly.
Joe talks about how many cocoa farmers around the world have never seen the finished chocolate that results from all this labor—and how the journey that cocoa takes from tree to truffle is not even remotely imaginable from looking at a raw cocoa pod. “The pods are like a cross between a little football and a pumpkin,” he explains. At the end of his first day, Joe saw the workers open the pods and eat the milky white, creamy pulp inside them. “It’s absolutely delicious. I could not believe that the Milky Way bar I had stolen from my brother’s Halloween bag could come from this.”
He was hooked. Joe felt empathy for the local people, and he could see that cocoa was a premium crop that could improve their livelihoods, but only if they could access global markets. “By the early 1990s, I was trying to source organic chocolate. I was buying beans, taking risks, and selling lots to ADM and other companies. But I realized there was nothing proprietary about what I was doing, and a large manufacturer could just step in and take the market. I started my own chocolate company in 1994, but we couldn’t turn a profit trying to develop the farming side. Nobody cared about cocoa. In the 2001 market, my funding dried up. There wasn’t money around to do the development work. I realized if I didn’t get profitable fast, it was over. If the business doesn’t perform financially, nothing else matters. The business had been too mission heavy, and I didn’t focus on nuts and bolts.”
He assessed what he had learned, and he figured out a better way to go. By 2004, Joe and a partner had formed Theo Chocolate in Seattle. He was determined to pursue “enligh
tened capitalism,” but capitalism nonetheless.
BEYOND GOOD INTENTIONS, CREATING NEW CHOICES
Joe is what some call a “social entrepreneur.” The term has become a buzzword in development, and it can apply to a wide variety of both nonprofit and for-profit enterprises. This sector of innovation is one I am excited about, and I expect it to produce lots of good ideas in coming years. As a foundation, we have only begun to get involved with some of these entrepreneurs and projects, and I don’t know which forms will be the most successful. But what is so crucial is that the projects develop markets and jobs. They go beyond good intentions and aid, and create sustainable solutions.
There are start-ups with narrow business models, such as selling smart-phone apps to help rural farmers check grain prices, or even small, regional crop insurance companies that collect premiums and pay claims through cell phone credits. In India, there is a company using cell phone texting to alert residents in different parts of a city that water is about to be directed to their local spigots. Even some very poor people find this service worth the small cost, because it means a family member who otherwise would have to wait by the spigot for hours can go to school, or get a job.
I recently met a social entrepreneur with a broader vision forged in an unusual setting. Jake Harriman graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1998 with plans of pursuing a military career. In 2003, he was a Marine leading a platoon defending a road in Iraq in the early phases of the war. A car driving erratically headed straight for their position; fearing it was an enemy suicide mission, Jake and his team moved toward it, weapons pointed. The frantic driver stopped and got out and ran toward them, shouting, just as another vehicle sped up behind the car and Iraqi soldiers got out and began peppering the car with bullets. Jake and his men killed the attackers. The driver went back and lifted his seriously wounded young daughter out of the car. His wife and baby girl were already dead. “He was coming to us for help,” Jake soon realized.
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