RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – According to IBGE estimates, the Brazilian grain harvest will reach a record level this year. It will be nearly 259 million tons, up 2.3% from last year. Wheat, which should also accompany this progress, faces one obstacle: a shortage of seeds.
Currently, Brazil imports half of the 12 million tons it consumes. And to reduce its dependence on foreign countries, Embrapa developed a variety three decades ago that is well adapted to Brazil’s Cerrado.
However, the area under cultivation is still tiny. There are 200,000 hectares of wheat grown in the Cerrado, but the potential is 4.5 million hectares.
Renildo Simões, who grows Cerrado wheat in Araxá, in the interior of Minas Gerais, has tried to increase the area planted this year, but there is no seed.
A single industry in Contagem, in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte, buys 200,000 tons of wheat annually, of which only 40% is produced in the state, is Cerrado wheat.
This amount could be much higher if more areas were planted with this variety.
“Embrapa itself, together with the Ministry of Agriculture, is developing a plan to expand wheat production in the Cerrado region. And one of the main guidelines of this work plan will be for seed producers to produce more seed so that we can expand the area planted with Cerrado wheat,” explains Julio Albrecht, a wheat researcher at Embrapa.