Tereza Cristina Correa, the Brazilian Minister of Agriculture, highlighted the importance of the Brazilian agribusiness sector by stating that it was one of the country’s economy’s mainstays. She also stated that Brazil planned to export as many quality products as possible to the Chinese market.
“One of our goals is to increase the basket of products that we offer to the world, including China, which is a large market. We recently opened the Chinese market to our melons and now we are working to open it to our grapes,” she said.
The minister pointed out that Brazil’s agricultural business sector “had been working to organize itself for many years. It uses a 100% Brazilian technology that the Brazilian Agricultural Research Company (Empraba) developed over the last 40 years.”
According to the official, the agribusiness sector “wasn’t very affected by COVID-19 because there is little agglomeration in the field. From the beginning of the pandemic, we had contingency plans and actions to collect the harvest and transport it to urban centers and our ports so we wouldn’t be affected. Thankfully, based on the experience of other countries, we managed to succeed and our agricultural sector wasn’t affected much,” she stated.
She also said that 88% of the exported soybeans, Brazil’s main agricultural, were destined for the Chinese market. In this regard, Cristina rejected that the country’s increase in soybean production in recent years was one of the causes of the increase in deforestation in the Amazon, the largest jungle in the world.
SOURCE: Fresh Plaza
