Brazil’s agricultural boom
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 21 May 2024
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From soybean production to coffee exports to sugar cane, grains and tropical fruit - agriculture is powering the Brazilian economy.
We travel to a farm outside the capital Brasilia, and look at how the country could play a major role in providing the world with food security in the years ahead.
And we consider a major threat to agriculture – climate change, which is forcing Brazilian farmers to adapt to survive.
We talk to the Brazilian head of the International Coffee Organisation – on what her home country can do to deal with extreme weather events.
And away from agriculture, we consider Brazil’s heavy industry, and ask why it hasn’t made more of its rich musical heritage.
Produced and presented by Gideon Long.
(Image: Cultivation of sugarcane in the interior of the State of São Paulo. Huge areas are cultivated and after harvesting will come sugar, alcohol, drink and ethanol. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Gideon Long and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service, |
| 0:06.7 | where all this week we're looking at the economies of Latin America. |
| 0:10.4 | And today we're looking at the undisputed powerhouse of the region, Brazil. |
| 0:15.0 | We'll take you to a farm in the country's agricultural heartland. |
| 0:18.0 | We have an agriculture that is very important not only for the country, |
| 0:22.4 | but for the world. Brazil is the number one soybean producer in the world. And the sorts of |
| 0:28.3 | techniques that it uses are at par, if not more advanced than what the US does. But it's a sector |
| 0:35.8 | threatened by weather, as we've seen in recent weeks, with the devastating |
| 0:39.5 | floods in the south of Brazil. |
| 0:41.4 | It's terrible what it's happening there. |
| 0:43.7 | And it shows to us that the climate change is here. |
| 0:47.0 | It's not the future. |
| 0:48.2 | It's in the present. |
| 0:49.5 | Brazil is a vast nation, the fifth biggest in the world, nearly as large as the United |
| 0:54.0 | States or China. It's home to over in the world, nearly as large as the United States or China. |
| 0:55.6 | It's home to over 200 million people, nearly a third of the population of Latin America. |
| 1:00.9 | And it has a different history and language from other parts of the region. |
| 1:05.2 | It's the one Portuguese-speaking nation in Latin America. |
| 1:08.7 | So, from the Amazon rainforest in the north to the industrial |
| 1:11.7 | plants of the south, let's take a look at the economy of Brazil. |
| 1:21.2 | In 2009, The Economist magazine published a memorable front cover about Brazil. Under the headline, Brazil |
| 1:28.5 | takes off, it showed a picture of the famous Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, soaring |
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