Brazil to harvest a record grain crop of 270.7 million tons in 2022

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazil, one of the world’s largest food suppliers, will harvest a record grain crop of 262.2 million tons in 2021, an increase of 3.2% compared to 2020 (254.1 million tons), so far the largest in the country’s history, the government reported Thursday.

According to a projection released today by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) based on field visits made in January, Brazil’s production of cereals, pulses, and oilseeds, this year will exceed 2020 by 8.1 million tons.

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The grain harvest in 2020 had already been 5.2% higher than that of 2019 (241.5 million tons), so if the projection for 2021 is met, Brazil will string together three consecutive years with record production.

Brazil harvested a record crop of 238.7 million tons in 2017, but production fell in 2018 to 227.5 million tons before it rose again and, according to projections, set three consecutive annual records.

This year’s projected increase will be possible mainly because producers raised the area to be harvested this year by 2.1%, from 65.4 million hectares in 2020 to 66.8 million hectares in 2021, according to IBGE.

The increase in the cultivated area will especially favor soybean, corn, and rice crops. In that order, Brazil’s main products, which account for 93.4% of the national production and 87.8% of the planted area.

The area planted to corn was increased this year by 3.2% (to 18.8 million hectares), soybean by 3.0% (38.2 million hectares), and rice by 0.6%.

These increases will allow soybean production to reach a record 130.3 million tons this year, up 7.2 % compared to 2020, and corn production to increase by 0.4 %, also to a record 103.7 million tons.

The rice crop, however, will shrink by 0.6% to 11 million tons this year.

The cotton crop will shrink by 16.5 %, to 5.9 million tons, because its cultivated area was reduced by 11.3 %, to 1.5 million hectares, following the reduction in international demand for the fiber caused by the covid-19 pandemic.

The forecast for this year’s production of coffee, a bean of which Brazil is the world’s largest producer and exporter, is 2.7 million tons, with a 27.3% drop compared to 2020 due to the biannual cycle of this product.

The record of three consecutive years of record production was possible mainly due to new technologies and seeds that raised productivity and turned the country into a world agricultural power, since, compared to 1996, the planted area only doubled: from 33 million hectares 24 years ago to 66.8 million hectares in 2021.

The agricultural sector was one of the least affected by the pandemic in Brazil. Its production increased even during the months in which the social distancing measures imposed to halt the advance of covid-19 were in force.