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Published: August 16th 2008
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New neighborhood in Nova Mutum
This was forest about 3 years ago.... I just arrived back in Mato Grosso's capital, Cuiaba, after a 5 day road trip with Susiane, a Field Supervisor for the Mato Grosso Soybean Producers Association, or Arosoja. Yes, I am actually doing some work here.
I was so fortunate to be able to take this trip with Susi to see several cities developing due to the soybean boom here in Mato Grosso. I came here, planning to show up in Sinop, the biggest of the cities I ended up visiting, and try to convince people to talk to me about their lives and about soy, not an easy task. Instead, thanks to the help of Chris and one of his contacts here in Brazil, I met with a very receptive and friendly employee of Aprosoja in their offices here in Cuiaba last friday, and took off with Susi at 8am on Monday morning.
Getting to Sinop was my initial goal, and it is the city furthest north on the "Soy Highway", BR 163. This highway is a vein running down the middle of the state, and it is the only major road in and out of Mato Grosso for all of the soy, corn, cotton, livestock, and
Luis Henrique
Son of friends in Mutum - he is a total ham. He LOVES having his picture taken. other products produced here in this bread-basket state. Our first stop on BR 163 was Nova Mutum, a young city of only about 20 years that is seriously booming with money, growth, development, and new arrivals to the area, mostly from the southern part of the state and the southern part of the country. I could never have imagined the growth going on in this city, even with the census data i had already been looking at - houses are popping up on a seemingly hourly basis and everyone I talked to was proud of the city, its growth, and its promises for the future. I saw all of the new buildings, schools, universities, municipal services, and houses - many of which even had big yards, a rarity in Latin America in my experience.
After a brief tour of the city and some lunch with some friends of Susi, we went to an ENORMOUS fazenda owned by one of the three big agricultural groups here, Vanguardia, and secured a tour. The big deal in this area is vertical integration, or creating as closed of a system as possible, either on the farm or within the municipality. One reason for
Cotton Harvest
The cotton is collected and packed into these giant, tractor-trailer sized bales to be de-seeded and processed for oil, cotton, and feed. this is that it is a strategy to combat the high costs of production associated with chemical imputs and transportation - in other words, oil prices. This-state-of-the-art fazenda, 28,000 ha in size, produces soy, cotton, and corn - which it processes itself, producing cotton, corn and soy for export, and oil, feed, and soon - bio diesel - for its own consumption from the by products. And this is just one fazenda owned by this company - in total it owns about 200,000 ha of MT. It aslo produces livestock - beef and pork - and produces methane gas from the waste. It also grows its own grapes, which it turns into grape juice and markets under its own brand name. The eventual goal of the fazenda is not to have to puchase any imputs except agro-chemicals from outside the farm. In the end, instead of producing only soy - which is sold to someone else to be converted into a more valuable product - they are shipping the valuable, final product - meat, oil, etc., making the high costs associated with transportation much more reasonable.
One night in Mutum, and it was off for Lucas do Rio Verde,
Nuclear attack or gear required to enter processing plant
The ear plugs were a real handicap to my already iffy portuguese, I must admit... another city in its infancy, who's growth is being funded by the agricultual boom there. This is the home of the Lucas do Rio Verde Legal project (
Legal in portuguese means both legal and cool - a nice double entendre for their marketing campaign). This project, sponsored by the local government and the Nature Conservency, is undertaking an extensive campaign to verify that all of the environmental laws about who can grow what where and when are respected in their municipality. They have satelite images, cadastral maps, and teams of people who go visit every fazenda and verify that everything is up to snuff. Their goal is economic development of their municipality, but they decided this will not happen without sustainability acheived by respecting environmental, labor, health, and other regulations. The municpality is very proud of this project, and Americans and Europeans are apparently visiting on a weekly basis.
A night in Lucas, and off to Sorriso - a much bigger city. Here, and in Sinop (finally!) the next day, I spoke with a couple of producers (ie, farmers - but here, the owners don't work the land themselves, so they don't like to be called farmers),
Cotton
A bale of cotton. Its fed into machines that take the seeds out and re-bundle it for export. the lawyer for the rural cooperative in Sinop, and a couple of other people. Turns out the further north you go, closer to the Amazon, the more you run into people up stirred up about environmental regulations, classification of the land as forrest or cerrado, the presence of the MST, and all the other controversies you find in this region.
The break is pronounced - just a 100 km south of Sorriso on BR 163, you find thriving agro-business, optimism, rapid economic growth, and the conviction that they live in a fabulous place that will feed the world, and feed it well. Up in north Sorriso and Sinop, the cities are much more developed, and these days serve more as commercial centers for the agribusiness taking place further south than as hubs of the agrobusiness itsself. Here, you are more in the Amazon biome, and you notice it in the flora and in the culture. The pioneer spirit is gone, and instead there is quite a bit of bitterness at the government for attracting them to this area with promises of unfettered access to the land, then changing the rules on them once they got here, by greatly restricting
Julio, Emmerson, and Susi
examining the cotton-oil producing machinery. the conditions under which they can plant on the basis of environmental conservation.
And, certainly not to be forgotten, I got to see a big chunk of the infamous (well, with a small group of people I know interested in such things) BR163. Will this road be the key to Brazil's jump into the 1st world? Will it lead to the absolute decimation of what is left of the Amazon? I'm not sure, but imagine driving 60 miles an hour down 19th street (before they repaved it) for 400 miles, surrounded front, back and side with semi-trucks with double trailers hitched on the back. This is pretty much the only way in and out of much of Mato Grosso - incredible, considering the billions and billions of dollars of product that travel this road every day.
Now, back in Cuiaba, gearing up for the trip back to Campinas, then back to the "other" interior that is Kansas, I am still amazed at all I saw in just 5 days. I met a lot of fabulous people, and got to drive around for 5 days in a tiny little Fiat with with soybeans painted on it, listening to lots
A brand-new biodeisel plant
They are just waiting on the license to be able to start production. of certaneja music (this is Brazilian country music, all duos - imagine entire radio stations playing only Brooks and Dunn, and you'll have a good idea). Don't worry, i'm bringing back some CDs that you can all copy...
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