A team from the EU Parliament’s Agriculture Committee is on its way to Brazil this weekend on an investigation of the food safety standards there. This is a response to the Operation Weak Flesh investigation which hit the headlines a year ago, though issues arising from it have been in the news again recently with companies suspended from exporting to the EU.

MEP investigation

The 11 MEPs including veteran Northern Ireland MEP Jim Nicholson will meet the Minister for Agriculture in Brazil and visit meat processing facilities. The group will produce a report of their visit and the Agriculture Committee has been critical of DG Sante and their acceptance of meat imports from Brazil despite a series of fault-finding reports. Their most recent report published in September 2017 concluded that “it is of particular concern that most of the shortcomings detected during this audit were the the subject of recommendations in previous DG Sante Audits".

DG Sante recently concluded its latest audit in Brazil but the report hasn’t been published yet. The Brazilian authorities told the Irish farmers Journal that, having seen a draft report, it is one of the most positive so farm.

Brazil potential

While several reports have identified difficulties in compliance with EU production standards, there is no doubt about the serious potential of Brazil as a superpower in global agriculture. An FAO-OECD report last year identified that it was likely Brazil would overtake the USA as the top soya bean producer in the world by 2026 and along with Australia and the USA they will dominate global beef exports.

Brussels briefing for IFJ

In a briefing to the Irish Farmers Journal in the margins of the Forum for the Future of Agriculture conference in Brussels last week, the scale of Brazilian investment in research over the past four decades was impressive. As recent as 1970, Brazil wasn’t a food-secure country but as Embrapa, the Brazilian agricultural research organisation explained, a substantial investment in dedicated research on farming in the tropics has produced huge dividends.

Ploughing is avoided, with a preference for direct drilling which in turn reduces carbon emissions, while avoidance of the use of chemical nitrogen using instead nitrogen captured from the atmosphere, was worth an estimated $13bn in 2016-2017.

Output is growing disproportionately to the amount of land and yields of 7t per hectare in the tropical regions with a protein content 20% above the average is being achieved, according to Embrapa.