Brazil is on track to reach historic milestone with first corn export to China

Brazil is poised to take the fight to the “corn world” against the U.S. in China, the world’s largest grain importer, and is looking for new suppliers.

Negotiations on the signing of health protocols between Brazil and China were completed at the end of May to allow the export of Brazilian corn to the Asian country.

Until the beginning of this year, China was practically supplied with corn from only two sources: the U.S. and Ukraine, but after the Russian military operation in Ukraine, this supplier was eliminated. In addition, U.S.-China relations are at a critical stage due to the Taiwan issue.

In this context, the Chinese government has been looking for new corn suppliers and promoting increased purchases of alternative products – such as sorghum and feed barley.

“We had previously negotiated (with the Chinese government) that we would export corn from the next harvest (2022/23). But the Chinese government proposed that we pre-empt that and start exporting corn from the current harvest,” Marcos Montes Cordeiro, Brazil’s minister of agriculture, livestock, and supply, told Bichos de Campo in an interview.

After a drought that wiped out much of the expected 2020/21 crop, Brazil harvested 114.6 million tons of corn this season, more than enough to supply domestic and foreign markets.

However, because China is a major corn importer – it is expected to buy 23 million tons of the grain at the end of the 2021/22 cycle – Brazilian officials have been analyzing the scenario of an early release of corn supplies to the Asian country, given the need to keep Brazil’s huge poultry, pork and beef industries constantly supplied with this input.

In this regard, steps are being taken to export Brazilian corn to China in 2021/22, which will be an important milestone in the grain’s global trade matrix.

Argentina, another major exporter of grain that could also become a new Chinese supplier, is not as reliable, as the government of Alberto Fernández regulates corn exports through discretionary quotas.

In 2012, the Argentine Ministry of Agriculture and the Chinese General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection, and Quarantine (AQSIQ) signed a protocol that allowed corn exports to the Chinese market, but since then, there have been virtually no foreign sales of corn to China.

This is because the protocol-which was adopted during Norberto Yauhar’s tenure at the helm of the Ministry of Agriculture-contains a chapter on pests that makes it technically impossible to export corn to that destination.

With information from Bichos de Campo