THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2024 39 or is broken down by soil microbes, releasing nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. Pound for pound, nitrous oxide warms the planet 300 times more than carbon dioxide. And in recent years in Brazil, farmers have been forced to use more and more fertilizers to maintain current yields—Brazilian soils typically have low fertility compared to U.S. soils, leading to higher application rates. The difficult task of improving fertilizer-use efficiency is critical. As Dr. Luke Ney, director of development assistance at USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) and administrator of the F4L Initiative, has emphasized: “Reducing overuse of synthetic fertilizers is key to keeping agriculture sustainable, both for controlling input costs to farmers and creating a healthier planet.” U.S.-Brazil Collaboration: A Brief History Until the 1970s, Brazil had to import most of its food. But in less than 30 years, it has transformed itself into an agricultural powerhouse, going from a net food importer to a major exporter of agricultural products. Known as Brazil’s Green Revolution, this tremendous increase in agricultural production is widely considered one of the most important global developments in the second half of the 20th century. Today, Brazil is among the top five producers of 36 agricultural products and the leading exporter of soybeans, corn, coffee, sugar, beef, poultry, and orange juice. Sorghum fields grow in the Cerrado in eastern Brazil, June 2024. COURTESY OF MICHAEL CONLON The United States played a vital role in Brazil’s agricultural development. In 1920 Peter Henry Rolfs, the former dean of the College of Agriculture at the University of Florida, helped to create the Federal University of Vicosa, today one of Brazil’s premier agricultural universities. Nelson Rockefeller provided technical assistance to Brazil in agriculture during his time as a federal government employee—including as assistant secretary of State for Latin American affairs in the 1940s—creating several organizations that continue to assist Brazil today. In 1973 the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) played an essential role in creating the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), a main driver of Brazil’s agricultural revolution and widely considered one of the world’s leading research centers on tropical agriculture, which aims to improve agricultural productivity through applied research and technology transfer to farmers. USAID funded the construction of Brazilian laboratories and research centers and sponsored hundreds of young Brazilian agricultural scientists who obtained advanced degrees at U.S. land-grant universities in the 1960s and 1970s, ushering in the close and enduring partnership between U.S. and Brazilian scientists. Embrapa’s greatest triumph was its work in the Cerrado, a vast tropical savanna in eastern Brazil covering around 20 percent of the country and the second-largest biome after the Amazon. Until the 1970s, the Cerrado was considered an infertile
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