Brazil develops tropical wheat and predicts self-sufficiency in 5 years (opens in new tab)

This would happen imports or not. So long as wheat exports are allowed, the local price will settle on the world price as the product is able to flow to the highest bidder. An event like the Ukraine war will impact someone and that will drive the world price up.

No, it means you can’t take a position without paying a cost. A lot of countries used to depend on Russia for various things, and they have paid a price to change this.

What? Source? Just some rough Google search results seem to consistently show China as #1 in production and the US being #1 in exports (and in the top 3 for production.) The first result I found showed Brazil as #4.

Maybe you're ultimately correct, but you should show a source when making those claims (I'm not trying to make a claim.)

About wheat, yeah, nobody ever place any priority on being self-sustaining. That's because it's not really important. Brazil has a couple of neighbors that produce enough wheat for supplying it, and need quite a bunch of stuff Brazil produces. The only reason anybody is going for self-sustainance now is because it's profitable, and things will change once it's not.

On fertilizers, well, Brazil can not produce enough of the material for the fertilizers it imports.

Not at all. President Lula sided with China and Russia already. Dude loves communists. He even had Venezuelan dictator Maduro over for lunch.

I’d thought refineries would be hungry for oil when opec decreases production and therefore be a net benefit for oil producers outside opec.

Every country in the world is dependent on trade, which is saves a lot of money over self-sufficiency. North Korea is the only country that tries self-sufficiency.

If it costs you $100/bushel to produce wheat and you can buy it for $60/bushel (I'm fabricating numbers), why produce it?

Watch this space.. Green Ammonia is going to be a big new development for Brazil soon... or at least there are a couple of green hydrogen companies that trying very hard to get that up and running in Brazil right now.

I also find the take on decoupling from russia weak and cowardly.

It's the other way around.

Brazil and Argentina especially should be rich, what's lacking is coherent social organization from top to bottom. Obviously it matters more at the top, but it has to be borne by regular people as well.

Same could be said of other Central/South American nations, but geographic factors and natural resources do give a material advantage that can be leveraged into a lot.

Consider that Canada, unlike most other so called 'advanced nations' - does not actually have lot of advanced industry. Research, yes, but 'applied' - no. And yet, because it has a 'free export card' with natural resources, it can import the equipment and materials necessary to support the rest of the regular domestic economy, which benefits from ultra boring politics, 'functional' bureaucracy, low levels of corruption.

Innovations can only be leveraged by organizations that have the coherent ability to make use if them.

The 'low hanging fruit' in Brazil is governance, though I hope this Wheat helps.

I remember being asked in elementary school to help "buy a piece of the Amazon to stop it from being cut down". I mentioned this years later to some Brazilian friends, and they found it amazing, saying first that it almost certainly wasn't a specific plot of land, and second that enforcement of property rights and anti-poaching laws in spread-out rural areas has been spotty, and also hindered by violence and corruption.

So I guess it's a thorny question, if someone in Brazil accepts such a subsidy, how that ultimately translates into physically stopping people from making illicit uses of Amazon lands.

Edit: In theory, stopping an illicit farm (which takes time to grow and has to be tended and harvested) would be easier than stopping someone with a pickup truck and chainsaw from just grabbing a bunch of trees for lumber. On the other hand, the U.S. has spent tons of money trying to eradicate poor people's coca farms in the Andes and it doesn't seem to have had the level of success the government hoped for (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca_eradication).

Meanwhile, some people are apparently still maintaining wildcat marijuana farms on U.S. Federal lands. Wheat farms aren't as profitable as coca or marijuana, but even suppressing certain kinds of farms in remote enough areas seems like it can be non-trivial!

then go buy some rain forest, and pay at least as much property tax on it as someone converting it to farmland would.

Since, according to the article, wheat should be planted on already existing crops, I don't think it will be a big issue in the near future. However, soybeans are already a major cause of deforestation, especially in the Midwest, and this extra productivity may boost these activities.

I'm not an expert, but working with multiple crops in the same year can also further deplete soil resources, decreasing the overall productivity and increasing deforestation.

Brazilian politics is extremely messy right now, and it's hard to tell how we're going to face environmental issues in the near future. The recently-elected president has a strong environmentalist agenda, but is fighting with the Congress and may lose support for pushing forward such legislation.

I'm skeptical of this reasoning. Wheat may be planted on existing farmland. But then where will the previous crops on that farmland be planted? If one changes a bean farm to a wheat farm, but then somebody else slashes and burn Amazon Forest or Pantanal to plant the displaced beans, then we have a net loss.

What do you think will happen if there is major crop failure and food shortages?

These free-market extremists don't know when to stop, they have caused more damage than the Taliban.

Most minor minerals are present in plants to the tune of 0.001% by weight or less. We extract many times as much manganese, chromium, copper etc as the metal as we would from the soil. Selenium is generally postulated as the limiting element for life on Earth, but we're not yet at the point of needing to supplement it in soil. Brazil nuts are supposedly a particularly Se-avid crop, yet they haven't destroyed the ecosystem of Brazil so far.

Soil depletion more generally consists of changes in texture (less water holding) and reduced ability to slow-release the nutrients we already add (NPK). It has been addressed by adding clays — chiefly aluminosilicates — which are predominantly composed of elements not utilized by living things (mostly). In other words, it's usually not the nutrients themselves being removed from a "depleted" soil, at least in the modern day.

They’ve probably come up with some stupid technique like diverting the entire amazon river in order to pull this off. And then a few years down the line they’ll be asking where all the water went and why the forest is gone.

[0] https://www.embrapa.br/en/international