Brazil’s Agriculture Minister Tereza Christina was in Canada this week on a mission to secure more fertiliser to replace the gap left by Russia.

Canada is the world’s third largest exporter of fertiliser after Russia and China, with sales in excess of $5bn in 2020, half of which were to the US according to Statista.

Brazil is the fourth-largest importer of fertiliser in the world. Imports account for 85% of all fertiliser used in Brazil and a quarter of these imports came from Russia. Brazil has been actively seeking alternatives to Russian supplies and has recently concluded a deal with Iran for a trebling in supplies from 600,000t per year to over 2m tonnes.

Productive week

It has been a productive week for Brazilian-Canadian relations as access was secured to the Canadian market for Brazilian beef and pigmeat, which is forecast to be worth $150m (€136m) annually.

Brazilian beef exports have been making huge strides in the US over recent months. So far in 2022 the South American country has shipped 33,500t to the US, almost 10 times the 3,583t in the same period in 2021.

Meanwhile, a number of Brazilian environmental groups are lobbying EU environment ministers who meet this week to strengthen the EU proposals on banning imports from areas that have been deforested.

This has been the outworking in the EU of agreeing the Mercosur trade deal parallel to introducing the Farm to Fork and Biodiversity strategy for EU farmers.

Food inflation running ahead in US

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics has released inflation data for February showing that in the previous 12 months, overall inflation had hit a 40-year high at 7.9%.

The big increases in US inflation are coming from energy, where the increase is 25.6% over the year, with petrol up 38% and fuel oil up 43.6%. The other eye-catching statistic is that used car and truck inflation is running at 41.2%

Overall food inflation is running at 7.9%, the same as overall inflation. However, here too there are variances between different food types.

Inflation in meat, poultry and fish is running at 13.1%, with beef price inflation at 18.6%, pigmeat at 12.7% and poultry meat at 17.7%, the highest inflation since June 1989 in that category.

The meat industry in the US has been put in the spotlight by the Biden administration as a cause of meat price inflation and a programme to encourage development of smaller processors as competitors has been put in place