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Agricultural commodity

SOY

For Brazil, soybeans today represent the main crop of the Brazilian agribusiness, with approximately 114.843 million tons produced on a planted area of 35.822 million hectares (Conab, June 2019).

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Over the years, in the mid-1970s, due to the explosion of soybean prices on the world market, there was an increase in interest in the crop, which provided greater profitability for producers. As a consequence, a socioeconomic and technological revolution led by soybeans occurred in modern Brazil, even being compared to the phenomenon that occurred with the sugar cane, rubber, and coffee cycles, which, in different periods from the 17th to the 20th centuries, commanded the country's foreign trade. The great opportunity and competitive advantage in relation to other soybean-producing countries benefited Brazil due to the shipment of the harvest during the American off-season, when prices reach the highest quotes. Since then, the country has invested in technology to adapt the crop to Brazilian conditions, a process led by The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation.

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The surprising growth that soybean farming has had in the last 47 years, increasing productivity by around 262 times, has made Brazil the second-largest soybean producer in the world, behind only the United States (for now). The new forecasts for the 2019/20 crop season already point to Brazil as the largest soybean producer in the world, surpassing the USA. Socially, soybean cultivation has sparked interest in the colonization of previously uninhabited Brazilian regions. Thousands of soybean producers from the southern region of Brazil migrated to the depopulated and undervalued Brazilian Cerrado in search of large, low-cost lands, bringing development and promoting the implementation of a new culture in the central region of the country.

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