The World’s Largest Coconut Farm Is in the Amazon

Deep in the Brazilian Amazon, about 110 kilometers from the city of Belém, a coconut farm the size of a small European principality has quietly redefined what industrial-scale tropical agriculture can look like. This is part of The Rio Times’ daily coverage of Latin American news and financial markets.

The operation belongs to Sococo, a company founded in 1966 in Maceió, Alagoas, that dominates Brazil’s coconut derivatives market — from grated coconut to coconut water. In the late 1970s, working with France’s Institut de Recherches pour les Huiles et Oléagineux (IRHO), Sococo identified the municipality of Moju in Pará as the ideal location for commercial coconut cultivation. The farm went into production in the early 1980s and has expanded ever since.

The numbers are staggering. Across roughly 20,000 hectares of total area, only 6,000 are planted with coconut palms. The remaining 14,000 hectares serve as protected environmental reserve — one of the largest privately maintained conservation areas linked to agriculture in Brazil. The property is so vast it contains some 400 kilometers of internal dirt roads. During peak harvest, the farm sends more than 400,000 coconuts daily to Sococo’s processing plant in nearby Ananindeua, where they are turned into grated coconut, coconut milk, coconut oil, and the company’s flagship product: packaged coconut water.

The secret to that output lies in hybrid varieties developed by crossing giant and dwarf palms from Malaysia and West Africa. While traditional Brazilian coconut trees produce between 40 and 120 fruits per year, Sococo’s hybrids reach up to 220 — almost doubling productivity per hectare. Pará’s year-round rainfall, which provides the 250 liters of water each tree needs daily, proved an ideal match. The model was so successful that hybrid palms now account for approximately 70% of all coconut-cultivated land in Brazil, reshaping an entire industry.

Brazil itself is the world’s fifth-largest coconut producer, generating around 2.3 million metric tons annually — far behind Indonesia (17 million), the Philippines (15 million), and India (14 million). But while those Asian giants rely overwhelmingly on smallholders farming plots of five hectares or less, the Moju operation represents a radically different model: vertically integrated, technology-driven, and deeply tied to conservation.

For the global agricultural industry, the lesson from Pará is clear. Scale and sustainability need not be enemies — and the world’s largest coconut farm, surrounded by standing rainforest, is the proof.

Related coverage: Brazil’s Morning Call | USA & Canada Intelligence Brief for Monday, February 16, 202