In sign of growing clout, Brazil competes with U.S. ag.S. market

As U.S. cornfields withered under drought conditions last summer, Brazil’s once-empty Cerrado region produced a bumper crop of the grain, helping feed livestock on U.S. farms and ease a drought-related spike in prices. The U.S. imports of Brazilian corn were small by world standards. But they are rising fast, and they mark just one element of the increasingly complex and sometimes contentious relations between the world’s agricultural superpower and its fast-growing competitor amid shifts in the global economy. Starting at zero in 2010, Brazilian corn exports to the United States are on pace to exceed $10 million this year and are bound to rise as farmers here expand planting and more corn is funneled to nonfood uses, such as ethanol production. Brazil is expected next year to dethrone the United States as the world’s largest producer of soybeans. With so much land available for cultivation, that status will probably become permanent. With a heavy dose of U.S. capital and know-how, a massive agribusiness complex has been established here. State-backed research since the 1970s has turned the Cerrado — once considered unproductive scrubland — into a vast farm belt. Still mostly unplanted, and comfortably distant from Brazil’s environmentally sensitive Amazon region, the Cerrado has become a new frontier in the green revolution that made U.S. farmers the most productive in the world. Just as the vast plains of the American Midwest helped keep down world food prices for the last half of the 20th century, the Cerrado may do the same in the 21st...more

And of course, there is this:

Despite what is described as intense cooperation between the two governments, there is a developing sense of competition as well. Brazil challenged U.S. cotton programs in the World Trade Organization, arguing that U.S. government support for domestic growers held down world prices and hurt cotton farmers in Brazil. As the result of a 2009 WTO ruling, Brazil now receives about $17 million in monthly payments from U.S. taxpayers — money being used to advance the Brazilian cotton industry with research on best practices, pest management and other issues. The Obama administration agreed to the payments as an alternative to either curbing government support for U.S. cotton growers or having Brazil slap import taxes on American goods to compensate for the loss to its farmers.

The D.C. Deep Thinkers have you paying U.S. farmers not to farm, while at the same time sending your money to Brazil  to expand their farming.