São Paulo – Brazil has a pivotal role to play in meeting the additional demand for food around the world over the next ten years. So said Roberto Rodrigues, coordinator of the Agribusiness Center at think tank Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), during the panel on Food Security and Logistics at the Brazil-Arab Countries Economic Forum being held by the Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce this Monday (2) in São Paulo.
“In order to meet the demand, the world will need to produce 20% more food, and Brazil alone will have to increase its output by 41% in order to meet the global target,” Rodrigues told an audience of business owners, executives, delegates from various organizations and government officials from Brazil and Arab countries. In the morning, the Forum welcomed an audience of over 600, 100 of whom are Arab.
Eduardo Assad, a professor and researcher with the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), added to Rodrigues’ rationale by discussing how Brazil’s food industry evolved over the past few decades. “Up until the 1970s, Brazilians would eat chicken only on Sundays. It was a rare treat, not an everyday dish,” he said. According to him, that same decade saw the government invest in agricultural training programs, send scientists out to different parts of the world, and that caused output to increase, through a “technological effort tantamount to building a Boeing aircraft.”
Assad said that now, Brazil possesses the technology required to breed and grow high-quality chicken, soy and maize and supply the world with its products. “Bring Arab students over to Brazil,” he told the Arabs in the audience, stressing the need for technology exchange programs to keep the knowledge flowing between the countries and achieve “qualitative leaps in science, technology and trade.”
According to Ricardo Santin, the vice president for Markets at the Brazilian Animal Protein Association (ABPA), Brazil shipped 2.1 million tons worth of poultry to Arab countries last year, grossing USD 3.1 billion in the process. Brazil is currently the leading halal poultry producing country in the world.
Hassine Bouzid, the chairman of the Brazil-Tunisia Business Council, criticized the lack of food security in the world today and mentioned a number of issues, like insufficient output and low commodity prices. “Nine hundred million people around the world are malnourished. Waste prevention policies are lacking, as are agrarian reforms to change this around,” he said.
The panel moderated by journalist Fernando Lopes and Hassine Bouzid also featured Abdelmoniem Mohamed Mahmoud, secretary general of the Arab Union for Industrial Exports Development (AUIED); Ted Lago, president of the Itaqui Port in Maranhão, Brazil; Anders Kron, commercial manager of Oman’s SOHAR Port and Freezone; and Alaa Ezz, secretary general of the Federation of Egyptian Chambers of Commerce.
Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum