Brazil’s Focus Shifts From Logistics To Cotton Quality
August 23, 2013 Those who haven’t had the good fortune to attend an annual meeting of the Brazilian Cotton Shippers Assn. (ANEA) probably don’t realize that the venue alternates each year, from an urban setting that features a black-tie dinner (like São Paulo in 2012) to a more relaxed, resort-style of event – like this year’s event, which was held June 13-15 at the Hotel Transamerica in Ilha de Comandatuba in the state of Bahia.
At the event in 2012, the focus was on celebrating the best year Brazil’s cotton exporters ever had. This year, it was about what steps can be taken to ensure Brazil’s cotton quality – well known across the spinning world – maintains its high standards going forward.
The truly remarkable agricultural advantages Brazil enjoys due to its abundance of rich soil, ideal natural rainfall and massive tracts of arable land made it a farmer’s dream. While those things have helped Brazil ascend rapidly to the upper echelons of the global cotton industry, they also make it easy for growers to shift to whatever crop offers the best price at the time.
That fact is immediately evident in Brazil’s last two cotton crops. Last year, Brazil shipped more than 1 million tons of cotton lint for the first time in its history. But decreasing prices, combined with rising prices for many food crops, will result in a dramatically smaller cotton crop this season. That’s the expectation of Marcelo Escorel, ANEA’s immediate past president.
“Last year’s enormous crop was a test for Brazil’s logistics capacity, due to the sheer amount of cotton fiber we produced,” Escorel says. “Compared to the previous year, we are going to have a very small crop this season, which will allow us to focus on quality improvements instead.”
A decrease of 50% in exports (from 1 million tons last year to 500,000 tons or less this year) is virtually guaranteed, because Brazilian farmers made their planting decisions in December 2012. In fact, cotton lost planting space to other crops not once, but twice, since Brazil’s ideal climate and soil conditions allow farmers to plant two crops on the same field each year.
“In September, growers decided to significantly decrease their cotton area in favor of soybeans for their first crop,” Escorel says. “Then cotton lost space to corn in December/January, when growers decided on their second crop. The result is the small crop we have in front of us.”
ANEA ‘Adopts’ Children through Casa da Paz
Few nationalities know how to have a good time like Brazilians do, but that doesn’t mean everything in the South American country is about fun and games. While it’s rising rapidly in terms of global influence and GDP, there are still some areas of heartbreaking poverty in many of its cities and towns.
One of the many charities that are trying to lift Brazilians out of poverty is Casa da Paz, which was founded by social worker Simone Lemos in 1994 as a halfway house for girls in Embu Guaçu, a very poor and violent urban area about 40 kilometers south of São Paulo. It operated as a halfway house with up to 20 girls until 1999, when the project was converted into a youth center serving school age kids in the local community; the kids spend half of the day at school, and the other half on extracurricular activities at Casa da Paz.
“We started with 30 kids and are now up to 320 kids. The objective of the project is to raise the cultural and educational standard of these kids so that they have a fighting chance to make it to the university,” Lemos says.
As is often the case with young charities, Casa da Paz was in dire financial conditions and needed some operational help as well. Fortunately, Ecom’s Antonio Esteve got involved and formed a new board of directors who could support the project. Many of those board members were from the cotton sector including Marcelo Escorel, Rodrigo Somlo, Marco Antonio Aluisio, and the wife of cotton broker Joao Robert Souza Naves, Lilian Garubbo.
“ANEA helped build and supports Casa da Paz´s Web site,” Esteve says. “Most ANEA members support Casa da Paz through their sponsorship of the ANEA golf tournament, so it’s fair to say that ANEA has adopted Casa da Paz as its charity of choice.”
For more information, please visit Case da Paz website at Casadapaz.org.br.
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