At an event, the Minister talks about strategies to increase rural producers' profit margins

In a speech at the opening of the seminar “Agribusiness Perspectives 2019”, in Campo Grande (MS), minister Tereza Cristina (Agriculture, Livestock and Supply) highlighted this Friday (05) that one of the biggest problems facing Brazilian producers is the high production cost, aggravated by infrastructure problems. She said that, in the last five years, the profit margin of Brazilian rural producers has become increasingly squeezed, because the country is unable to compete with countries that have much better production flow infrastructure than Brazil's.

“We are losing a little more competitiveness every day,” she said. “If you look at production costs over the last five years, you will see that the producer’s margin is increasingly squeezed. For many reasons. First, infrastructure: we cannot compete with countries that are already ready, like the United States, which already have ports, railways, waterways, highways, they just have to make improvements. Argentina has a much better geography than ours, as the country is long, it is much easier to reach ports than in Brazil, with this continental dimension that we have. Everything here is more complicated, more expensive, and we need to take great care of our production costs.”

According to the minister, the Ministry of Agriculture is working hard to improve these conditions in Brazil, mainly in the negotiations for the 2019/2020 Harvest Plan, which will be announced soon. Tereza Cristina said, however, that Brazilian rural producers need to “start opening their minds” to open the country's markets to the world.

“Our Economy Minister (Paulo Guedes) is a liberal, and being liberal means protecting our markets, but also opening our economy to the world. We cannot continue thinking that we export 80% of our soybean production to China and that China will not ask for a counterpart from us, in a product that it wants to send to Brazil”, explained the minister. “Things work both ways. We have to think that the market cannot remain closed forever.”

She said that some production chains need to “do their homework” and improve their structural conditions, to improve competitiveness. 

Improve the producer's image

On Thursday night (04), when participating in the opening of Expogrande, the agricultural fair in Campo Grande, the minister also said that she is committed to improving the image of Brazilian rural producers, especially abroad, showing that they help to preserve the environment and is concerned about sustainable production.

“I want to sell the real image, the image of producers who work with many difficulties, who do not have an easy life. We have a framework of laws that hinder the lives of those who want to produce. If we manage to deconstruct the image that they took out of our country, people will begin to change their understanding and see Brazil differently”, said the minister. 

The minister recalled that, under Brazilian law, rural producers have to allocate 20% to 80% of their properties to environmental preservation, without receiving anything in return for this.

“It is we rural producers who finance this preservation in the world! We are happy to preserve the environment, promote development together with environmental preservation, making sustainable production. It's very nice to talk about sustainability, but rural producers are the ones who do this. We want to continue preserving, we will continue preserving and, just like that, we will continue producing more and more to feed the world population, which in a few years will reach 9 billion people”, said the minister.

According to her, “Brazil has the opportunity and responsibility to produce to feed part of these people in the world, putting healthy, cheap food on the table of Brazilian citizens and also exporting to more than 160 countries”.