Caterpillars and fungus, as well as drought, hurt Brazil's current soya crop and higher costs to control them will limit planting of new fields next season, the director of agricultural analysis firm Agroconsult said on Tuesday. Brazil will likely produce 86.9 million tonnes of soyabeans in the season that is drawing to a close, still a record crop but well below the firm's initial forecasts for more than 90 million tonnes of soya, Agroconsult's director, Andre Pessoa, said.
Starting in September, area planted with soyabeans will likely expand by 1 million hectares, down from 2.5 million new hectares of soya area sowed this season, he said. Brazil is the world's top soyabean exporter and its crop size has approached that of the top-producing United States the last two years. But farmers have been battling a new type of caterpillar, helicoverpa armigera, that likely arrived from Asia, sending pesticide costs skyrocketing and challenging Brazil's much-lauded mastery of tropical agriculture.
They also saw higher incidents of other types of harmful tropical bugs as well as Asian rust fungus, Pessoa said. "Spending on defences had grown last year and increased again this year - in some regions, like Mato Grosso and Bahia, it increased up to seven applications," he told a news conference.
"We could be entering a phase of much more moderate expansion than we saw in the previous years," he said, adding that an expected record crop from the United States and lower international soya prices would be a further discouragement to planting. Agroconsult does extensive field work across Brazil, and Pessoa said this was one of the most difficult years on record to formulate forecasts due to the wide variety of pests and climate differences. Drought struck south-eastern Brazil, knocking some 2 million tonnes off Parana state's soya crop, at the same time heavy rains held up planting in the center-west.