It is necessary to understand agribusiness – 07/01/2023 – Elio Gaspari

On Thursday, the new Brazil and its challenge were on display. A photograph by Danilo Verpa showed the Volkswagen automaker’s yard crammed with thousands of cars. On the same day it was reported that the company had suspended its production and that the government would extend aid to the sector, with facilities for buyers.

On the other hand, the numbers from the 2022 Census reported that the Midwest region, where much of the agribusiness is located, had a population growth of 1.2% per year, double the national average. This was during the government of Luiz Inácio da Silva, known as Lula, son of “Mr” Aristides and Mrs. Lindu.

Lula was seven years old in 1952, when Lindu and uncle Dorico took the children into a truck, bound for Santos. They were guided by the hope of Brazilians in the 1950s. Aristides was a Northeasterner of the great migration. He was in Santos and was carrying bags of coffee in the port. Since the Empire, national wealth was in those bags. Lula never carried coffee. He took a course at Senai, became a lathe operator and took pride in walking around in grease-stained overalls. Juscelino Kubitschek’s Brazil produced automobiles.

Time has passed and Lula’s story is well known. With him on the Planalto, the automakers’ cars are stranded and there is a migratory flow to the Midwest. Many Aristides today go to Goiás and the two Mato Grossos.

In the first quarter of this year, agribusiness grew 21.6%, while industry shrank by 0.1%. A year ago, at the production end, the waiting time for a soybean and corn harvester was six months, now it is three. In the last harvest, planting yielded more than 50%, in dollars. Next time it should yield 25%.

One sector has become internationally competitive, while the other continues to compete for protection and benefits.

Brazil needs both, but a part of it doesn’t deal well with the novelty. Fortunately Lula stopped calling a part of the agribusiness entrepreneurs “fascist”, embarrassing those who supported him against the troglodyte faction that followed Bolsonaro.

The great agribusiness entrepreneurs are not the old colonels of the Northeast of the 20th century, nor the agrotroglodytes of the 21st. By Asmodeu’s art, they ended up in the same pot.

(At JK’s time, it was irrelevant to note that Schultz-Wenk, the president of the Brazilian Volkswagen, who was driving a Volkswagen Beetle alongside the president, had been an enthusiastic young man of the Hitler Youth, affiliated with the Nazi party two years before his coming to power. )

AGRO’S CULTURAL ORphanhood

For some time, the conservatives in Parliament were ridiculed, saying that the BBB bench existed, with the ox, the Bible and the bullet. The ox boosted the economy, the Bible was the best selling book in the country and a good part of the population defended the death penalty for bandits. In 2018 he gave Bolsonaro.

Brazil in the 20th century bequeathed to the 21st a lame culture when dealing with the rural country. He was portrayed by injustices, suffering and empty exaltation. Euclides da Cunha said that the sertanejo is first and foremost a strong man and, as a reporter, he was enlisted in the troop that massacred the people of Canudos. Jorge Amado, Graciliano Ramos and João Cabral de Melo Neto exposed this country, but it is no longer the same. Guimarães Rosa brought an epic but inert sertão.

Like a party crasher, rural Brazil has settled into music and the sertanejo genre has been on the charts for decades. In January of this year, he was the most played on radio stations in the country. In second place came forró.

While the question was in the field of culture, this problem was of a good size, but it was circumscribed. Today he is in the showcase and in the statistics.

The incarnation of the powerful lord of agribusiness has nothing to do with the classic rural landowners in literature. He is a settler from the south of Brazil, whose father didn’t leave him a penny. He went up to Goiás, Mato Grosso and arrived in Roraima. He grated like João Cabral’s Severino. Differentiating himself from him, in his part of the estate, he planted soybeans. Culturally orphaned, he is alive, raised his son well and doesn’t care about it.

SERVICE

“Feeding the World – The Emergence of the Modern Agricultural Economy in Brazil”, by Herbert Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna, has been in bookstores for some time. For those who opine about agribusiness with superficial knowledge, it’s a class. Answers all questions.

IBGE NUMBERS

With governments concerned about what they believe to be “a communication problem”, the IBGE gave a lesson in competence by releasing the Census numbers.

He had numbers to report and he made them available, without adjectives.

Sounds easy, but it’s rare.

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