•  rio de janeiro
• Wednesday, September 21, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Bananas are harvested where apples used to grow; cassava, a traditional crop, is disappearing from the Northeast; and the southeast is losing the fragrance of good coffee. This is the science fiction of a new distribution of crops in Brazil, South America's agricultural powerhouse.

The government is starting to get ready for this open-ended story of science fiction. Only one thing is for sure: the bad guys are neither extraterrestrials nor robots, but the most fearsome human invention: climate change.

In the midst of unusual temperature swings and increasingly intense and frequent natural disasters, weather patterns are modifying landscapes and will also start changing harvests. 'It's still early to categorically state that there are effects on agriculture,' said the Environment Ministry's secretary of climate change, Eduardo Assad. But it is not a far-off possibility, and Brazil, as the world's third- largest exporter of agricultural products, has good reason to be worried, he told IPS.

'There is an increase in extreme weather phenomena, such as high temperatures, which can cause the flower buds on the coffee plants to abort, or low temperatures as well within a very short time period, which cause more severe frost in the south and more intense Indian summers, which are hurting productivity in grain crops and sugar cane,' he said.

In 2008, Professor Hilton Silveira Pinto at the University of Campinas, and Assad, with the Brazilian government's agricultural research agency Embrapa , led a study on global warming and the new map of agricultural production in Brazil.

The study already warned back then that the rise in temperatures — along with more frequent drought and flooding, among other consequences — could cause grain harvest losses of up to 7.4 billion reals (4.6 billion dollars at today's exchange rate) by 2020 and up to 8.7 billion dollars by 2070.

'The geography of agricultural production in Brazil would be profoundly modified,' the study said. According to Assad, 'there is a natural shift of certain crops towards the west- central part of the country, which is more stable in terms of climate. That is the case of soybeans, for example.'

The area planted in Arabica coffee, meanwhile, is shrinking, especially in the southeastern state of São Paulo, and Arabica will possibly be replaced by Robusta coffee, which has a weaker aroma and is considered to have an inferior taste and texture, Assad said.

Arabica could expand in the south, however, if climate change reduces the frequency of frost in that part of the country. 'There is a study that shows that if temperatures rise two degrees in the next few years, apples from Santa Catarina (a southern state) could be replaced by bananas,' said Assad, describing the new agricultural patterns that the government is attempting to prepare for.

The Embrapa study analysed nine Brazilian crops that account for 86 percent of the total area planted — cotton, rice, coffee, beans, sunflower, cassava or manioc, corn, soy and sugar cane — and projected their future distribution in accordance with the different scenarios for rising temperatures outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report : Climate Change 2007 (AR4).

The area planted to sugar cane, the essential raw material for Brazil's successful ethanol industry, could double, the study says. But production of cassava, which is a key part of the culinary traditions of the semiarid Northeast, will likely shrink significantly in that area, while expanding in other regions.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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