The country is essentially self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs and is a leading exporter of a wide range of crops, including oranges, soybeans, coffee, and cassava, which are grown mainly in the South and Southeast. Brazil, unlike most Latin American countries, has increased agricultural production by greatly enlarging its cultivated area since World War II, but this expansion has come at grave environmental cost in frontier areas.

Brazil is the world’s leading producer of coffee; it was the country’s most important single export in the early and mid-20th century. Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo are the principal coffee-producing states, followed by São Paulo and Paraná. In the 1990s soybeans and their derivative products, particularly animal feeds, became a more valuable source of revenue than coffee. Most of the country’s soybeans are grown in Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul; Mato Grosso do Sul state has also become a leading producer, because farmers there have increasingly used machinery and fertilizers to work the savanna soils.

About one-third of the world’s oranges are grown in Brazil—more than twice the amount produced in the United States, which is the world’s second major supplier. Brazil is also the world’s main producer of cassava and a leading grower of beans, corn (maize), cacao, bananas, and rice. Although the bulk of these products are consumed domestically, some are exported, including jute and black pepper from the Amazon region; palm oils from the Northeast coast; garlic from Minas Gerais; peanuts (groundnuts), oranges, and tea from São Paulo; and tobacco from Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul. Brazil nuts are economically important only in limited areas of the North.

Brazil has one of the world’s largest livestock populations (at more than 200 million) and slaughters more cattle annually than does the United States. The most extensive grazing lands are concentrated in the South and Southeast, with a smaller but increasing share in northern states and frontier zones, such as Amazonia. The meatpacking industry’s principal operations are in Rio Grande do Sul, the state closest to the beef-producing plains of Uruguay and Argentina. Brazil also produces great quantities of poultry; both poultry and meat are important exports.

Mechanized farming is still somewhat rare in Brazil. Tractors and other large machinery are employed mostly in the South and Southeast as well as on the western frontier (Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Acre, and Rondônia). Few tractors are available in the Northeast, where even the sugar plantations rely on manual labour. That region contains about half of Brazil’s farms but most cover only some 12 acres (5 hectares) or less. The government has built costly, large-scale irrigation projects in the Northeast, but they have helped few family farms. Many poor families barely subsist on small, overworked patches of land, whereas some of the largest rural landholdings lie fallow or largely unused. To promote land reform, tens of thousands of impoverished Brazilians have participated in the Landless Movement (Movimento dos Sem Terra), which has organized protests and property invasions, sometimes risking violent confrontations. The government began to redistribute land on an unprecedented scale in the 1990s, although budgetary constraints and administrative backlogs hampered the program.

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Brazilian technological advances and scientific efforts have benefited the agricultural sector, including the discovery in mid-2000 of the genetic sequence of Xylella fastidiosa, a bacterium that infects orange trees. A government initiative in the 1970s began to replace costly, imported gasoline as a motor fuel with ethanol (ethyl alcohol) produced mainly from sugarcane, as well as rice and wood shavings. Brazil’s gasoline-substitution program became the most successful effort of its kind in the world: the area under sugarcane cultivation rapidly expanded in São Paulo state and on the Northeast coast, modern distilleries were built, and, for a few years, virtually all new automobiles in Brazil were engineered to run on the fuel. Many Brazilian engines now burn fuel that is one-fifth to one-fourth ethanol, and some use a larger proportion of ethanol than gasoline. Brazil is one of the leading producers of ethanol.

Fishing

Brazil catches significantly less fish than does Argentina or Mexico, although most of Brazil’s population lives on or near the country’s extensive Atlantic coastline. Brazil’s commercial fishing fleets account for roughly two-thirds of the saltwater catch. They sail mainly from Southern and Southeastern ports, partly because of their proximity to markets but also because the coastal waters are warmed by the southward-flowing Brazil Current, which supports fewer fish than do the colder waters farther south. Most ocean fishing in the Northeast focuses on lobsters and shrimps, which are caught primarily for export.

Roughly one-fourth of Brazil’s total catch is freshwater fish, of which a major portion comes from the Amazon River system. The Northeast accounts for another large segment, much of it from reservoirs that the government has stocked with tilapia, a fast-growing fish introduced from Africa. In Fortaleza manufacturers use the skins of tilapia and cambulu, a saltwater fish, to make fashionable shoes, clothing, and accessories—products formerly made from the hides of alligators, which are now endangered.