Page 41 - Export or Bust eBook

“What we’re doing is an integration of farming and ranching,” Maggi said. “We will keep the
same number of cattle – about 220 million head – but integrate their pasture land into farming.”

By doing that, the percentage of land available for crop farming could increase from 7.5 percent to more
than 14 percent, Maggi said.

But before that happens, Maggi and

da Rosa agree, the pace of
investment in Brazil’s infrastructure

needs to increase.

One of the areas of increased
investment over the past several years
has been on Brazil’s rivers, especially
in the northern part of the country. The
construction of barge ports by

companies like Bunge and ADM are
now helping take millions of tons of
soybeans and corn up rivers to coastal
ports like the ones in Barcarena where they are loaded on ocean-going vessels.

For example, Miritituba, a small city on the Tapajós River, has received over $1.5 billion in investments

since 2014 and is home to six new privately owned terminals that use barges to move commodities
along the river, according to the USDA’s FAS. This gateway was created to facilitate the export of the
increasing production in northern Mato Grosso and improve export competitiveness for markets in
Europe, Mexico, the Middle East, and Asia. These terminals are projected to move roughly 4.5 mmt of
corn and soybeans in 2017 by barge to ocean ports in Barcarena and Santarem. The volumes out of
Miritituba are expected to reach 11 mmt annually by 2021.

Mato Grosso is the largest agricultural state in Brazil now and investors are continuing to turn more
pastureland into farmland. The state has always had fertile land and good growing weather, but it’s the
development of the Tapajós River that’s helped spur the investment.

Farmers, rather than sending their corn and soybeans on leaky trucks along crumbling roads all the way
to southern ports, can now deliver the crops to barges at the southern tip of the Tapajós in the town
Miritituba to the north, in the state of Para.

“Mato Grosso produces 60 million tons of soybeans
and corn,” said Maggi, who is from the state and
farms there himself. “About half of it is going north.
The barges go from Miritituba to Barcarena and
then from there to China or anywhere else in the
world … The infrastructure in Brazil is growing
fast.”

About 130 fulltime employees of the Bunge-Amaggi Storage at the Hidrovias port in Bacarena
joint venture in Miritituba load about 3.5 million tons
of soybeans and corn onto barges to make the 1,100-
kilometer (about 684 miles) trip up the Tapajós River to

www.Agri-Pulse.com 39