The largest Brazilian port operator (Santos Brasil) has been acquired by the French shipping company CMA CGM. The transaction announced this week illustrates the growing interest of shipping companies in Brazil, an agricultural giant whose logistics capacities are developing less quickly than production.
Brazil has become a gigantic global farm and does not hide its ambition to remain so, as former Agriculture Minister Roberto Rodrigues confided last year in an interview published in the report Demeter 2023Every year, the ten-year production targets formulated by the Ministry of Agriculture are increasing, recalls Olivier Antoine, geopolitical scientist, expert on agricultural and food issues in Latin America.
Cotton production, for example, has exploded, which means, in figures, three million tonnes to export. At 25 tonnes per container, the calculation gives the dimension of the logistical challenge. Coffee exports are another challenge for the world’s leading exporter of Arabica: as a result, at the moment, containers loaded with beans leave two or three months late.
Harvests increasingly isolated
The disruptions on the Suez Canal have lengthened the routes and disrupted the flow of empty containers. This is part of the problem that affects all exporters, but the brakes are also purely Brazilian. For years, each large harvest of soy or corn has put pressure on the transport infrastructure and it is not getting any better, because the more production develops, the more it comes from lands far from port areas.
Transporting crops from Mato Grosso, in the center of the country, or from Mato Piba (states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piaui and Bahia), in the northeast, has become a problem that did not exist with the same magnitude fifteen years ago.
New capacities in the northeast and south
To meet the needs, new railway and road sections have been built as well as river ports on the Amazon and its tributaries, but the infrastructure is still insufficient and navigation has been disrupted this year by the drought that has lowered the water level. Work has also been launched to develop new agricultural (and mineral) bulk transport capacities in the northeast of the country – between Salvador and the port of Santana, on the left bank of the Amazon estuary. Further south, two container terminals – Itapoa and Navegantes – have in recent years supplemented the supply of the state of Santa Catarina, leader in meat exports.
However, these developments are often made with a delay compared to the country’s ambitions, driven by an agribusiness sector that nothing seems to slow down in Brazil, deplores an expert in the agricultural sector.
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