|
 Brazilian state company Embrapa Solos (Soils), in partnership with the private sector, is developing organic fertilizers based on industrial residues. With this, Brazil may reduce imports of nutrients, which represent almost 75% of the 30 million tons consumed per year.
With regard to potassium, the country currently imports 92% of the volume consumed. "And the tendency is for this total to grow," said researcher José Carlos Polidoro, one of the coordinators of the project.
Roda d'Água, from Minas Gerais, was the first private company to seek Embrapa interested in creating new products for the Brazilian organic agriculture market, developing its own fertilizers for tropical agriculture, making greater use of nutrients.
Polidoro said that the Embrapa Soils objective is to stimulate national companies that already produce fertilizers through non-technological processes, based simply on composting organic residues, offering technological support for their products to have minimum technical guarantees, making them able to replace imported products.
Initially, Embrapa Soils should make use of residues supplied by Roda d'Água group as raw material, including residues from the brewery, like barley bagasse, supplied by Ambev, and the waste supplied by the industrial restaurant of carmaker Fiat, to make organic fertilizer. "What we want now is to improve this fertilizer."
According to Polidoro, the product reaches the requirements for certification at the Ministry of Agriculture. "But it cannot yet compete with imported fertilizer, as it has too low levels of nutrients." With this service, the Embrapa is trying to use its technology to place on the market a fertilizer capable of competing with the imported product.
Another positive aspect is protection of the environment through the reuse of residues for the production of fertilizers. To Polidoro, the use of adequate fertilizers is one of the factors necessary for Brazilian organic agriculture to reach high productivity with low environmental impact. "Then, it becomes a professional activity, which should always be sought in agriculture."
Eight researchers worked on the organic fertilizer project, which also uses residues like grass cuttings, charcoal, bio fortification and horse waste. "Besides being a viable alternative to reduce dependence on foreign inputs, it avoids environmental impacts caused by all these residues," said Polidoro.
He pointed out that even imported products must be well used in agriculture. "We cannot throw fertilizers out, nor allow residues like potassium to be turned to garbage dumps, or accumulate in industrial patios. It must all become fertilizer."
To him, companies must start producing competitive organic fertilizer from industrial residues, adding technology. For Brazilian agriculture, it is a question of "national safety", as the country needs agribusiness to maintain the positive commercial balance, said the researcher.
"It is dangerous to depend so much on imports like this, as there are few countries that export these nutrients." The main exporters of potassium are Russia, Canada, China and the United States.
Polidoro said that the only nutrient for fertilizer currently produced in Brazil is phosphate, which is equivalent to 50% of consumption.
In 1993, the country produced 100% of the phosphate it consumed. "There was even excess phosphate, which we exported to Latin America. Now we import half of the phosphate we consume." With great phosphate reserves, Morocco is the main Brazilian supplier of the product.
ABr
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.
I never saw a Brazilian addicted to foreign fertilizer, but I guess these days anything is possible.
Instead of asking for Cascola (contact cement), I always ask the clerk for "aquela cola que a gente cheira no saco plastico" and the clerk always knows just what is meant and asks, "grande ou pequena?"