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Getting a first-hand look at Brazil |
After a long overnight flight from Knoxville, Tennessee via Chicago and
Miami, we arrived, short of sleep, in Sao Paulo on Thursday morning
along with seven others. We had just a few minutes to check into the
hotel before heading down a long and winding road to the Port of Santos
on the Atlantic coast. The Port of Santos is organized around two sides
of a channel that separates Santos Island from the mainland. The Santos
side is on the island and the Guarujá side is adjacent to the community
of Guarujá. We spent several hours visiting Cargill’s Guarujá facility
which handles soybeans, soybean meal, and sugar.
Guarujá is the busiest of Cargill’s Brazilian ports. During peak season
it will handle 200 semi-truck loads of soybeans or meal and 300 truck
loads of sugar during a 24-hour-three-shift day at the same time that
it is transferring those loads to ships that are moored at Cargill’s
dock. Meanwhile there are several days worth of trucks waiting to be
unloaded. Some of the trucks bring soybeans in from the middle of Mato
Grosso state, some 1,200 miles away. In addition to the trucks, they
can handle 30 rail cars a day for grain and meal and 80 railcars of
sugar.
Cargill Guarujá is capable of handling the equivalent of over 150
million bushels of soybeans a year, loading product onto 250 vessels of
various size. The Panamax freighters hold approximately 2 million
bushels and are capable of going through the Panama Canal. Capesize
freighters hold approximately 3.3 million bushels and can be used to
deliver soybean and sugar products across the Atlantic to European
markets and around the Cape of Good Hope to South Asian markets.
After visiting with Cargill staff and touring the facility, we decided
that we were too tired to take a boat trip around the Port of Santos
and returned to our hotel in Sao Paulo. Early the next morning we were
off to the airport to board a plane that took us 2,042 miles through
airports in Brasilia and Manaus to the Port of Santarém on the Amazon
River. It is hard to describe the experience of flying into the
Santarém Airport and viewing the Amazon River for the first time. It is
huge even though Santarém is 500 miles upstream of the mouth. We have
crossed the Mississippi River on I-70 at St. Louis many times. It is
nothing like that.
The Amazon consists of a main channel and many side channels and
adjacent wetlands. To country boys from the grain belt it looks more
like a lake than a river; it is that wide. We wanted to visit Santarém
in the state of Para because it is the location of Cargill’s newest
Brazilian port facility. This location has the potential to handle a
significant portion of the soybeans being produced in the northern and
western portions of Mato Grosso where in recent years soybean acreage
has been growing by leaps and bounds. The Cargill facility there is in
the first stage of development and exported just over 29 million
bushels of soybeans during the last crop year. In the coming crop year
they hope to load nearly 37 million bushels on ocean going vessels.
At present 90 percent of the soybeans come by barge via a river port on
the Madeira River, a tributary of the Amazon. The beans are trucked to
the river from the western portions of Mato Grosso. Most of the other
10 percent of the beans come from within a 60 mile radius of the plant.
In the long run, Cargill officials expect that their Santarém facility
will surpass Cargill Guarujá. The key to that growth is the
construction of a paved road, BR 163, from northern Mato Grosso through
Para to Santarém.
While we were visiting Santarém, we were told that another hurdle had
been overcome in the quest to get the road built. Returning to the
hotel, we met a young man who arranged for us to take a boat ride out
on the Amazon River so that we could see the grain loading equipment
from that side. After the short excursion, we docked in downtown
Santarém and ate a dinner at an outdoor restaurant across the street
from the river. Today was spent getting back from Santarém to Brasilia
where we are staying for the night. Tomorrow we will fly into Cuiaba,
Mato Grosso and travel by van to Prima Verde do Leste where we will
have our first opportunity to walk into a Brazilian soybean field.
Don’t worry, we have been instructed to wear an old pair of sneakers
for our field visits. Before we come home, we will wash our clothes and
throw those sneakers away to remove all traces of soybean rust.
Daryll E. Ray holds the Blasingame Chair of Excellence in Agricultural
Policy, Institute of Agriculture, University of Tennessee, and is the
Director of UT’s Agricultural Policy Analysis Center (APAC). (865)
974-7407; Fax: (865) 974-7298; dray@utk.edu; http://www.agpolicy.org.
Daryll Ray’s column is written with the research and assistance of
Harwood D. Schaffer, Research Associate with APAC.
Reproduction Permission Granted with:
1) Full attribution to Daryll E. Ray and the Agricultural Policy Analysis Center, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN;
2) An email sent to hdschaffer@utk.edu indicating how often you intend
on running Dr. Ray’s column and your total circulation. Also, please
send one copy of the first issue with Dr. Ray’s column in it to Harwood
Schaffer, Agricultural Policy Analysis Center, 309 Morgan Hall,
Knoxville, TN 37996-4519.
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