URUACU, Brazil – When the Chinese came looking for more soybeans here last year, they inquired about buying land – lots of it.
Officials in this farming area would not sell the hundreds of thousands of acres needed. Undeterred, the Chinese pursued a different strategy: providing credit to farmers and potentially tripling the soybeans grown here to feed chickens and hogs back in China.
“They need the soy more than anyone,” said Edimilson Santana, a farmer in the small town of Uruacu, which is in the center-north of the country. “This could be a new beginning for farmers here.”
The $7 billion agreement signed last month – to produce 6 million tons of soybeans a year – is one of several struck in recent weeks as China hurries to shore up its food security and offset its growing reliance on crops from the United States by pursuing vast tracts of Latin America’s agricultural heartland.
Even as Brazil, Argentina and other nations move to impose limits on farmland purchases by foreigners, the Chinese are seeking to more directly control production themselves.
“They are moving in,” said Carlo Lovatelli, president of the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries. “They are looking for land, looking for reliable partners. But what they would like to do is run the show alone.”
While many welcome the investments, the aggressive push comes as Brazilian officials have begun questioning the “strategic partnership” with China encouraged by former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. The Chinese have become so important to Brazil’s economy that it cannot do without them – and that is precisely what is making Brazil increasingly uneasy.
China has become Brazil’s biggest trading partner, buying ever-increasing volumes of soybeans and iron ore, while investing billions in Brazil’s energy sector. The demand has helped fuel an economic boom here that has lifted more than 20 million Brazilians from extreme poverty and brought economic stability to a country accustomed to periodic crises.
Yet some experts say the partnership has devolved into a classic neo-colonial relationship in which China has the upper hand. Nearly 84 percent of Brazil’s exports to China last year were raw materials. But about 98 percent of China’s exports to Brazil are manufactured products – including the latest cars for Brazil’s emerging middle class – that are beating down Brazil’s industrial sector.
While visiting China last month, Brazil’s new president, Dilma Rousseff, emphasized the need to sell higher-value products to China, and she has edged closer to the United States. “It is not by accident that there is a sort of effort to revalue the relationship with the United States,” said Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “China exposes Brazil’s vulnerabilities more than any other country in the world.”
The Columbus Dispatch