Dismantling Embrapa: a blow to the table of Brazilians.

Brazil is already the second largest agricultural power in the world, behind only the USA.

Indeed, Brazil is the world's largest producer and exporter of coffee, the largest producer of sugarcane, refined sugar, and ethanol. We are responsible for 60% of the world's orange juice production and are the world's largest exporter of the product. Our country is the world's third-largest producer of corn and the second-largest exporter of this grain. Brazil is also the world's largest exporter of soybeans.

In livestock farming, our country accounts for approximately 40% of global poultry meat exports, 20% of beef exports, and almost 9% of pork exports. In 2016, Brazil was the second largest exporter of beef in the world, losing only, and by a small margin, to India, which does not consume the product domestically for religious reasons. Also in 2016, Brazil was the world's largest exporter of poultry meat.

 But it doesn't stop there. According to projections prepared by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Brazil will assume absolute leadership in world agricultural exports as early as 2024, thus consolidating the progress the sector has made in the country in recent years.

How did Brazil reach this level of extreme international competitiveness in this strategic sector?

Those unfamiliar with the subject might argue that Brazil has become one of the world's leading agricultural powers due to its natural advantages, such as abundant arable land, ample availability of fresh water, favorable solar regime, etc. Indeed, we do have these natural advantages. However, if we analyze the growth of agricultural production in Brazil in recent decades, we will see that the determining factor has been productivity.

Until the early 1970s, the productivity of Brazilian agriculture was generally very low, in line with most underdeveloped countries with tropical climates, and far from the superior productivity of North American agriculture, for example.

However, starting at the beginning of that decade, a profound transformation occurred in national agriculture, which intensified in the 1990s.

At that time, Brazil produced only 58,2 million tons of the five main grains (wheat, corn, soybeans, rice, and beans). By 2014, Brazil had managed to produce 182,6 million tons. Thus, we increased our grain production by 214% (three times more) in just two decades. However, this extraordinary increase occurred with an expansion of only 55% in the cultivated area. This was only possible due to an exponential increase in productivity of 119%. Thus, while the average productivity of these crops was only 1.522 kg/ha in the 1990s, today it is estimated at 3.340 kg/ha. In other words, we produce more than double in the same area.

It should be noted that this increase in productivity, in addition to producing concrete and very positive results in food security and reducing food costs, also had significant effects on environmental preservation, as it reduced the pressure to occupy new agricultural areas, especially in the Northern Region.

Studies conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture show that Brazil is one of the countries where productivity is growing the most. From 2006 to 2010, agricultural yields increased by 4,28% per year in Brazil, followed by China (3,25%), Chile (3,08%), Japan (2,86%), Argentina (2,7%), Indonesia (2,62%), the United States (1,93%), and Mexico (1,46%). Therefore, we are international champions in agricultural productivity.

Well, this exponential growth in the productivity of Brazilian agriculture is the result of decades of effort in biotechnology, public investment in new agricultural techniques, and the development of cultivars adapted to our climates and soils. It was thanks to this gigantic effort that Brazil ceased to be a food importing country, with enormous supply crises, and transformed itself into a significant exporter of a diversified range of agricultural products.

And the company that led this gigantic effort was an extremely efficient public company called the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa).

Created in December 1972, Embrapa quickly revealed itself as a breeding ground for talent and a powerhouse of significant innovations. It was Embrapa that created, for example, the soybean variety adapted to the low latitudes of the Cerrado and fostered the development of the Cerrado itself, supported by a set of technologies that enabled agricultural production in this biome, allowing its incorporation into the production process of grains, fibers, and meats.

Through decades of research, innovation, and hard work, Embrapa has accumulated enormous public capital—Brazilian capital—of knowledge, technologies, and cultivars that guarantee our agricultural productivity and food security. Our daily bread largely comes from this decades-long national technological effort.

Furthermore, it should be noted that Embrapa is today a world reference in agricultural research and technology, particularly in tropical agriculture. Just as Petrobras is a world leader in deep and ultra-deep water oil exploration technology, Embrapa is an international leader in tropical agriculture.

This effort is embodied in a gigantic gene bank, where germplasm, cultivars, and all innovative products developed with public funds are stored. (Evaluated) in more than US$1 billionThis bank preserves strategic material for national sovereignty in agricultural and forestry research, for the mitigation and adaptation of agricultural cultivars to climate change, and, above all, for the food and nutritional security of the Brazilian population.

Well, this economic, scientific, and technological heritage of Brazil is now seriously threatened.

The fact is that, secretly, without any prior discussion with its researchers and employees, the government sent an initiative to the National Congress, Bill No. 5.234 of 2016, which authorizes Embrapa to create a wholly owned subsidiary, called Embrapa Tecnologias Sociedade Anônima. EmbrapaTec.

According to the justification of the aforementioned project, this wholly owned subsidiary, in the form of a privately held corporation, Its social objective will be the negotiation and commercialization of technologies, products, and services developed by Embrapa and other scientific, technological, and innovation institutions, and the exploitation of trademark usage rights and the resulting intellectual property rights, in order to promote the dissemination of generated knowledge for the benefit of society..

Thus, the official justification for this initiative relates to a supposed desire to allow greater commercialization and dissemination of Embrapa's technologies and products, for the benefit of all. It should be emphasized that, to fulfill this purpose, the project allows EmbrapaTec to be a minority shareholder in companies in the agricultural sector, including multinational corporations.

This justification is unsustainable. In reality, the coup government no longer wants to invest public money in science and technology. Therefore, the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation has been suffering brutal budget cuts, on the order of 44%, in addition to other budget freezes, which has even provoked a reaction from the international scientific community. In line with this shortsighted and criminal attitude towards national interests, Embrapa suffered, in 2017 alone, a 27,48% cut in its discretionary spending budget. The available funds do not even come close to covering the total estimated expenses for this year, which are around R$ 3,6 billion.

Therefore, the coup government has been dismantling Embrapa, a trend that is expected to intensify in 2018, when Constitutional Amendment No. 95 of 2016, which will prevent public investment for 20 years, comes into full effect. Just as the coup government is removing the poor from the budget, it is also removing public investment from the budget, especially discretionary spending on science and technology.

In this context of constitutionally mandated budgetary constraints and an ideological bet on a minimal, or rather, minuscule state, the "solution" is to privatize companies or, alternatively, sell their products, sell off public assets.

The creation of EmbrapaTec follows a strategy to allow the privatization of Embrapa's intangible assets through this commercial arm, without the need for the official privatization of the company. What will be sold is not the company itself, but its innovative products, the result of years of public investment.

The sale of this strategic public asset on the market, including through minority partnerships with private companies, would, according to the coup government, increase Embrapa's own revenue. According to calculations by the illegitimate government, opening the subsidiary and establishing a commercial structure abroad would be able to triple the state-owned company's revenue from technology sales in the first year alone.

mutatis mutandisThis is a strategy similar to that used against Petrobras. The company is not yet being privatized, but its great asset, the largest public asset in Brazil, the fantastic pre-salt oil fields, are being sold at bargain prices to multinational oil companies, in order to generate quick, short-term cash for the bankrupt coup government.

Well, Embrapa's germplasm bank is the pre-salt oil reserves of Brazilian agriculture. It is a fantastic asset upon which national agricultural productivity and the population's food security are based. It is a public asset that acts as a multiplier of income and productivity. It has never generated and will never generate losses.

With its innovative products and technologies, which increase the productivity of Brazilian agriculture and agribusiness and lower the relative prices of food, multiplying the population's disposable income, Embrapa offered the country a social profit of R$ 34 billion last year alone, according to the company's calculations. This is much more than the expenses and investments that Embrapa makes annually, which amount to approximately R$ 3,5 billion. Therefore, Embrapa generates significant profit for Brazil.

To think that Embrapa needs to sell this precious asset to generate profit is a shortsightedness that's enough to make you cry.

But those laughing all the way to the bank at this lack of strategic vision from the coup government are the large multinational corporations in the sector, which have created a gigantic oligopoly in food production. In fact, six large companies, called... Gene Giants(Genetic giants) currently control 59,8% of the world market for commercial seeds and 76,1% of the agrochemical market, in addition to being responsible for 76% of all private investment in the sector. These companies, Monsanto (United States), Syngenta (Switzerland), DuPont (USA), BASF (Germany), Bayer (Germany), and Dow (USA), are eyeing the genetic assets of Embrapa, the only company that competes with them in Brazil. In fact, with the exception of Embrapa's products, all crops released in Brazil at the beginning of this century use transgenic technology and pesticides produced by these large companies, which aim to dominate the entire economic cycle of food production, from fertilizers to seeds, including pesticides.

Therefore, the creation of EmbrapaTec is part of a suicidal strategy of total denationalization of Brazilian agriculture. We have already denationalized potassium production after Vale sold its deposits. Fertilizer production is almost entirely handed over to foreigners, as is that of agrochemicals. With the sale of Petrobras' petrochemical units to the Norwegian company Yara, we also handed over nitrogen production, vital for agricultural productivity. With the handover of Eletrobras' hydroelectric plants to foreign state-owned companies, we will also lose, at least partially, the management of freshwater, essential for agriculture. With the promised sale of land to foreigners, this fundamental input for agriculture will, in the same way, be partially denationalized. All that remains is the sale of the crown jewel, Embrapa's genetic heritage, for this anti-national work to be complete.

For anyone with even a modicum of discernment, there is no doubt that the creation of EmbrapaTec will inevitably lead to the following negative effects:

a) Embrapa's public technological assets will be appropriated, at bargain-basement prices, by large multinational corporations in the sector, thus increasing the technological oligopoly that already exists in food production worldwide.

b) The support that Embrapa currently provides to family farming, responsible for 70% of food production for the domestic market, and to organic farming will certainly dwindle, since the company's focus will be solely on supporting and selling products to large agribusiness companies that engage in export-oriented agriculture.

c) Embrapa's cutting-edge technology in tropical agriculture is expected to be transferred by multinational companies in the sector to other regions of the world, such as Africa, which could create production hubs that will compete with Brazilian export agriculture.

d) The exacerbation of agricultural technological oligopoly, coupled with the abandonment of support for family farming, is expected to increase the relative costs of food in the domestic market and generate food insecurity, especially for the most vulnerable population.

With this nefarious project, the destructive power of the coup will reach the tables of Brazilians in the form of less healthy, less diverse, and probably more expensive food. With this anti-national project, the fate of Brazilian agriculture will be definitively handed over to international capital. As in colonial Brazil, the production of commodities and food will be under the control of the metropolises.

And when food insecurity knocks on the doors of Brazilians, perhaps the coup plotters, paraphrasing Marie Antoinette, will say: If they have no bread, let them eat genetically modified brioche.

There is no doubt. The coup has reached Embrapa and the food of Brazilian women and men.