Petr
04-02-2006, 11:39 AM
I thought this might deserve a thread of its own:
http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/news/76261.php
Brazilian crop boom threatens U.S. farms
COX NEWS SERVICE
PETROVINA, Brazil - The six-seat Embraer airplane glides from a cloudless sky onto a red-dirt runway. Views of scrub-brush savanna stretching to the Amazon River give way to fields of 10-foot high corn and boll-bursting cotton.
It's a farmer's wonderland, where the fecund soil can be had for as little as $200 a sun-drenched acre and a Maryland-sized chunk of land is cleared each year for cotton, corn, soybean and cattle farms.
Agriculture is booming in Brazil, and U.S. farmers are taking notice. Buffeted by high production costs, low market prices and the World Trade Organization, Americans increasingly look to low-cost, low-wage Brazil for economic survival.
Hundreds of U.S. farmers have visited the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso, Parana and Bahia the last two years. A few have spent millions to buy land and equipment and become Brazilian farmers. Others have put their money in U.S.-managed investment groups. For $25,000, an investor can own a piece of a 13,000-acre Western Bahia corn, cotton and soybean farm that promises a minimum 15 percent return.
Virtually every U.S. commodity farmer fears the Brazilian agricultural revolution that threatens to hollow out the domestic industry the way the Asians gutted manufacturing. "I see agriculture being taken away from us by Brazil. It's very scary," says cotton and peanut farmer Don Wood of Rochelle, Ga., after visiting Brazil. "We can keep doing what we're doing for two years. But after that, it looks like we'll stop planting cotton. There's no way we can compete with those guys."
In second place now
Brazil, the world's No. 2 agricultural power, might displace the United States as the top food producer within a decade.
The world's fifth-largest country, with a land area similar to the continental United States, could turn another 420 million acres into crops, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department. The United States has 250 million total acres of cropland.
Brazil is the world's top exporter of coffee, beef, sugar, ethanol, tobacco, poultry and orange juice.
"Sitting back home, looking at your 80 acres, you can't imagine what it's like to see tractors planting all the way to the horizon, then just disappearing," says Matthew Kruse, 26, a sixth-generation Iowa farmer who helps run an investor-backed farm. "There definitely is a lot of opportunity here that you'll not find in the United States anymore. Come down and see what you're up against."
http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/news/76261.php
Brazilian crop boom threatens U.S. farms
COX NEWS SERVICE
PETROVINA, Brazil - The six-seat Embraer airplane glides from a cloudless sky onto a red-dirt runway. Views of scrub-brush savanna stretching to the Amazon River give way to fields of 10-foot high corn and boll-bursting cotton.
It's a farmer's wonderland, where the fecund soil can be had for as little as $200 a sun-drenched acre and a Maryland-sized chunk of land is cleared each year for cotton, corn, soybean and cattle farms.
Agriculture is booming in Brazil, and U.S. farmers are taking notice. Buffeted by high production costs, low market prices and the World Trade Organization, Americans increasingly look to low-cost, low-wage Brazil for economic survival.
Hundreds of U.S. farmers have visited the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso, Parana and Bahia the last two years. A few have spent millions to buy land and equipment and become Brazilian farmers. Others have put their money in U.S.-managed investment groups. For $25,000, an investor can own a piece of a 13,000-acre Western Bahia corn, cotton and soybean farm that promises a minimum 15 percent return.
Virtually every U.S. commodity farmer fears the Brazilian agricultural revolution that threatens to hollow out the domestic industry the way the Asians gutted manufacturing. "I see agriculture being taken away from us by Brazil. It's very scary," says cotton and peanut farmer Don Wood of Rochelle, Ga., after visiting Brazil. "We can keep doing what we're doing for two years. But after that, it looks like we'll stop planting cotton. There's no way we can compete with those guys."
In second place now
Brazil, the world's No. 2 agricultural power, might displace the United States as the top food producer within a decade.
The world's fifth-largest country, with a land area similar to the continental United States, could turn another 420 million acres into crops, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department. The United States has 250 million total acres of cropland.
Brazil is the world's top exporter of coffee, beef, sugar, ethanol, tobacco, poultry and orange juice.
"Sitting back home, looking at your 80 acres, you can't imagine what it's like to see tractors planting all the way to the horizon, then just disappearing," says Matthew Kruse, 26, a sixth-generation Iowa farmer who helps run an investor-backed farm. "There definitely is a lot of opportunity here that you'll not find in the United States anymore. Come down and see what you're up against."