Exporting technology in soybeans

The dependence on the export of commodities with low added value is often presented as a reason for part of the problems of the Brazilian economy. However, not all commodities are equal. Unlike mineral products that are extracted and exported depending on the availability of natural reserves, agricultural commodities are produced in a renewable way and their productivity directly depends on the technology and knowledge used.

In recent decades, Brazil has become a major player in the world food market thanks to the national development of agricultural technologies that have allowed an increasingly widespread and intense production of crops such as soybeans, which are in great demand on the world market. 

The intensification of the use of technology in recent years has enabled a large increase in productivity, expanding production at a much more intense pace than the increase in areas used for agriculture. These are improvements provided by biotechnology, agronomic advances, more modern machines, knowledge management with precision agriculture and digital agriculture, irrigation techniques and many others. When larger harvests are exported each year, we are exporting, within each soybean, a lot of technology used to increase production in areas already cultivated. 

As a country that needs to develop, we have to evaluate the value of the technology used and its origin. The costs of new technologies must be adequate to leave the country with a greater margin for production, and cannot be more expensive than the benefits they bring. 

We must mainly support the national development of technologies that support increased production. We cannot remain dependent only on good imported technologies, as these will charge the prices for their development. As a nation, if we remain just a production field using imported technologies, the margins we will have for the country's development will be smaller and smaller. 

However, if we continue investing in developing national agronomic knowledge and technology to be used to increase production, within each soybean we will be exporting a little of the knowledge, inputs and technologies used to produce it.