Brazil celebrates its organic harvest

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - With its 21.4 million planted hectares (52.87 million acres), Brazil is the world's second-largest transgenic producer behind the United States, according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA).

But following just the opposite trend, organic farms also have increased their harvests.

The method, once known by its semi-handmade production used by small entrepreneurs, now is being used by large companies.

Pão de Açúcar, the largest retailer in Brazil with 1,200 stores, has increased sales of organics by 40% annually since 2006, when the company launched its organic brand Taeq.

"In 2009, we sold R$58 million [US$32.8 million]," says Sandra Caires Sabóia, manager of the organic segment at Pão de Açúcar Group. "Our expectation was to reach that amount by 2012."

Now, the company has 600 organic items, 300 of them in its Taeg line, and its top-selling items are lettuce, potatoes, tomatoes and bananas.

"Ten years ago, only organic greens and vegetables were available in the stores," Caires Sabóia says. "Today, besides produce, we have meat, pastas, sauces and all the components for a complete and tasty meal."

Throughout the country, organic entrepreneurs have joined efforts to enlarge fields and increase sales worldwide. In the past four years, sales already have increased 366.3%, according to data Organics Brasil, which tracks 74 companies in 14 states. Organics Brasil forecasts a 15% growth this year.

The products also have caught on worldwide. Brazil's organic producers sold US$34 million in goods at the Biofach Nuremberg, the world's largest international organic fair, in Germany last month. The companies that are part of Organics Brasil accounted for US$6.2 million of the sales.

Donato Ramos, marketing director of Mundo Verde, a chain of natural products that will reach 450 stores this year, says the group receives new suppliers and organic products from small, rural producers to huge manufacturers daily.

"We are having a larger search for organic products and that process tends to accelerate with the public's understanding their benefits," Ramos says.

There isn't any official data regarding the size of cultivated areas for organic produce in Brazil, so the total amount of food being produced is unknown.

It's estimated that Brazil had 90,000 organic producers in 2006 - six times the amount it had in 1996, according to the last agricultural census by the Brazilian institute of geography and statistics (IBGE).

There are 7.3 million hectares (18 million acres) of areas certified to grow organics in the country, which ranks second in the world behind Finland, according to a recent survey conducted by Organics Brasil.

Seventy percent of what's produced is exported, mainly to Germany, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Japan, according to Ming Liu, manager of Organics Brasil.

The growth has caused the industry to be regulated by the government, as producers have until December to be certified by the ministry of agriculture. Private certifications from other institutions still are valid, but only if the accrediting body is certified by the ministry.

"The exception is only for the small farmers that can sell directly to customers in open markets, since they are associated with an organization of farmers," says Rogério Dias, coordinator of agroecology of the ministry of agriculture.

As the size of their harvests increase, prices for organics fall.

"They will always be more expensive; however, increasing access to these products reduces the perception of the organic as more expensive and only for the elite," Liu says.

Despite the numbers released by ISAAA on the transgenic market in Brazil, environmentalists are celebrating the organic harvest.

"It's an agricultural process that doesn't harm the environment, and perpetuating it as a model can really improve the Brazilian economy and make the country sustainable without the need to look for support in models of agriculture from the past," says Rafael Cruz, coordinator of Greenpeace's transgenic campaign.

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