Thanks, Linda, for the interesting Amazon article.  For another perspective 
on what's happening in Brazil, below is an article with an Iowa connection.

Cindy 

***

U.S. farming is going south - to fertile, cheap lands of Brazil
By Dan Chapman 
Cox News Service    
   
Petrovina, Brazil -- The six-seat Embraer airplane glides from a cloudless 
sky onto a red-dirt runway. Views of scrub-brush savanna stretching to the 
Amazon River give way to fields of 10-foot-high corn and bountiful cotton plants. 
It's a farmer's wonderland, where the fecund soil can be had for as little as 
$200 a sun-drenched acre, and a Maryland-size chunk of land is cleared each 
year for cotton, corn, soybean and cattle farms.

Agriculture is booming in Brazil, and U.S. farmers are taking notice. 
Buffeted by high production costs, low market prices and the World Trade 
Organization, Americans increasingly look to low-cost, low- wage Brazil for economic 
survival. Hundreds of U.S. farmers have visited the Brazilian states of Mato 
Grosso, Parana and Bahia the last two years. A few have spent millions to buy land 
and equipment and become Brazilian farmers. 

Others have put money in U.S.- managed investment groups. For $25,000, an 
investor can own a piece of a 13,000-acre Western Bahia corn, cotton and soybean 
farm that promises a minimum 15 percent return on investment. 

Virtually every U.S. commodity farmer fears the Brazilian agricultural 
revolution that threatens to hollow out the domestic industry the way the Asians 
have gutted manufacturing. "I see agriculture being taken away from us by Brazil. 
It's very scary," says cotton and peanut farmer Don Wood of Rochelle, Ga., 
who visited Brazil in January. "We can keep doing what we're doing for two 
years. But after that, it looks like we'll stop planting cotton. There's no way we 
can compete with those guys down there." 

Brazil, the world's No. 2 agricultural power, might displace the U.S. as the 
top food producer within a decade, according to the United Nations Conference 
on Trade and Development. The world's fifth-largest country, with a land area 
similar to the continental United States, could turn another 420 million acres 
into crops, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department. The U.S. counts 250 
million total acres of cropland. Brazil is the world's top exporter of 
coffee, beef, sugar, ethanol, tobacco, poultry and orange juice. In the next few 
years, it will probably surpass the U.S. as the world's soybean king. 

Agriculture accounts for 40 percent of Brazilian exports, or $210 billion 
last year. "Sitting back home, looking at your 80 acres, you can't imagine what 
it's like to see tractors planting all the way to the horizon and then just 
disappearing," says Matthew Kruse, 26, a sixth- generation Iowa farmer who helps 
run an investor-backed farm in Brazil. "There definitely is a lot of 
opportunity here that you'll not find in the United States anymore. You should come 
down and see what you're up against."     

Kruse, who works one of 14 U.S.- owned farms in western Bahia, began 
harvesting 7,500 acres of cotton last week. Soybean (3,700 acres) and corn (2,000 
acres) harvests were underway. Brazil Iowa Farms LLC, his family's investor-owned 
farming corporation, plans to double its cultivated acreage next season. 
Cotton will be the king crop. With good reason. At No. 5, Brazil is moving up fast 
on the list of the world's cotton exporters. (U.S. growers, ranked No. 1, 
control 40 percent of the global market.) 

Brazil has successfully sued the United States in the World Trade 
Organization over cotton subsidies given annually to U.S. farmers. Washington doles out 
$3 billion to help market U.S. cotton overseas, a subsidy deemed by the WTO to 
be an illegal, trade- distorting enhancement. Brazil argues that U.S. exports 
would drop 41 percent without the marketing subsidies and that cotton prices 
worldwide would rise 12.6 percent. Washington will decide by July 1 how to 
respond to the WTO ruling. 

"Brazilian farmers are not competing against U.S. or European farmers. We are 
competing against Fort Knox," Agriculture Minister Roberto Rodrigues said in 
a recent interview at his sugar-cane fazenda, or farm, near Ribeirao Preto. 
"U.S. farmers will have to look for something else. We firmly believe in free 
trade and fair trade on agriculture because it gives us a bright future." Once 
subsidies disappear, according to the Brazilian Association of Cotton 
Producers, another 200 million acres will be planted in Brazil. 

Wood, the Georgia farmer, says the end of subsidies will force him from the 
cotton business. On his trip through Parana, Wood learned of Brazil's optimum 
growing season with a perfect amount of rain that stops before harvest time, 
requiring none of the expensive irrigation used by many Georgia farmers. 
Brazilian soil, he says, is deep, nutrient-rich and requires little weed-killing 
pesticides. It costs Wood 65 cents to produce a pound of cotton. Kruse can do it 
for 40 cents a pound. 

"They have all the advantages," says Wood, 62, "other than not living in 
America."    

***

Cindy Hildebrand
[log in to unmask]
Ames, IA  50010

"...the Praries Contain Cheres, Apple, Grapes, Currents, Rasp burry, 
Gooseberris Hastlenuts and a great Variety of Plants & flowers not Common to the U S.  
What a field for a Botanist and a naturalist."  (William Clark) 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
To get off the IOWA-TOPICS list, send any message to:
[log in to unmask]