The protein system
Brazil had 104.3 grams of protein per person a day in 2022.[1] It produces more beef, chicken, pork, eggs and soy than it uses.[2] It is also a major meat exporter. Chicken exports reached 5.32 million tonnes in 2025 and beef 3.50 million tonnes.[8, 9] Brazil's first bird flu outbreak on a commercial farm, in 2025, held up some trade, but chicken exports still ended the year at a record.[9, 31, 32]
Brazil's animals eat mainly Brazilian crops. The 2025/26 grain harvest was forecast at 358 million tonnes, including 180.1 million tonnes of soybeans and 138 million tonnes of maize.[2, 3] Brazil also exports large amounts of both crops and what is made from them. Soybean meal exports reached 23.3 million tonnes in 2025.[27] Growing its own feed gives Brazil's livestock farms a buffer that farms relying on imported feed lack. The weak point is further back, in the fertiliser that keeps crop yields high.[18]
The food supply has smaller gaps. Wheat is the largest: Brazil imported 7.2 million tonnes in 2024/25 and used 12.2 million.[2] Dairy imports, mostly from Argentina and Uruguay, fill a gap of about 2 billion litres of milk, and salmon and other premium fish come from Chile.[5, 6, 10] These imports matter for particular foods and prices, but they are small beside Brazil's own meat, feed and crops.
Durable domestic capacity:
Brazil produces far more beef, poultry, pork, eggs and soy than it uses. It supplies about a third of the world's traded chicken from its own feed. In 2025 it also became the world's largest beef producer, at 12.61 million tonnes against 11.84 million in the United States.[2] Almost all its farms are rain-fed, in a country with about 13 per cent of the world's renewable freshwater,[12] and they do not depend on groundwater that cannot be replaced.
The gaps do not threaten Brazil's protein supply. Wheat is the one major grain Brazil always imports, with output forecast to fall to 6.7 million tonnes in 2026/27 against demand of 12.5 million.[2] Dairy runs short by about 2 billion litres of milk despite record output.[6] Fish farming grew 4.4 per cent in 2025, but Brazil still imports more premium fish than it sells.[4, 5]
Resource headroom:
The farm research agency Embrapa has mapped 28 million hectares of degraded pasture that could make good or very good cropland. This is land that could be used, not land already converted. The figure leaves out forests, Indigenous lands, protected areas and areas rich in wildlife.[11] A government mapping in 2025 found a similar 27.7 million hectares.[61] Brazil already grows a second crop of maize, the safrinha, on soybean land after the soy harvest. It supplies 108.5 million tonnes, about 77 per cent of the 2025/26 maize crop.[3]
There is water and money to grow, within limits. Irrigation covers 8.2 million hectares, against an estimated 55 million hectares that could be irrigated.[13] Farms get less than half the bank lending their share of the economy would suggest, though the gap narrowed between 2019 and 2024. The 2026/27 farm credit plan, Plano Safra, offers R$525.1 billion.[56, 58] Arable land grew 22 per cent between 2000 and 2024, about as fast as the population, so land per person barely changed.[55, 57]
How the land is governed limits how much of it can be used. Amazon deforestation fell to 5,796 km² in the year to July 2025.[14] The legal status of the Soy Moratorium, the industry's pledge not to buy soy from newly cleared Amazon land, is unsettled, so the forest rules around expansion are uncertain.[15, 16, 17] A low-carbon credit line, ABC Recuperação, was meant to restore degraded pasture. An independent review found three quarters of the land it financed unchanged four years later, and no more than 2.5 per cent of the programme's target could be credited to it.[60] A 40-million-hectare successor programme had published maps and investment estimates by May 2026.[61] What it achieves will depend on delivery.
Import exposure:
Brazil imports little protein, and most of it comes from next door. The one real exposure is wheat: 7.2 million tonnes imported in 2024/25, against 12.2 million used.[2] Argentina supplied 63 per cent of wheat imports in 2024, and the three Mercosur neighbours 83 per cent between them. All are reached by land or short sea routes that pass no chokepoint. Russia supplied another 11 per cent by sea. Dairy imports fill the 2 billion litre gap[6] from the same neighbours. Argentina and Uruguay supplied 91 per cent of dairy imports in 2024, free of tariffs under Mercosur.[10] Salmon comes from Chile.[5]
Next to Brazil's exports, these imports are small, and no likely supplier failure would leave Brazil short. Argentine export curbs are the real threat to wheat, and even those would raise prices rather than empty shelves. Wheat, dairy and fish are the main gaps in a food supply built on exports.
Upstream dependence:
Brazil grows more feed than its livestock eat. It exported 23.3 million tonnes of soybean meal in 2025 and 43 million tonnes of maize in 2025/26.[27, 2] So its livestock farms do not depend on imported feed, a position shared by only a few big exporters, such as the United States and Argentina.
Fertiliser is the opposite. Brazil became the world's largest fertiliser importer in 2024, ahead of the United States, India and China. In 2025 it bought 88 per cent of what it used abroad: a record 43.3 million tonnes of the 49 million sold, against 7.2 million made at home.[18] Potash is 96 per cent imported, nitrogen 95 per cent and phosphate 72 per cent.[18] The fertiliser trade deficit was US$13.2 billion in 2024.[19] The suppliers are where political risk is highest. In 2023 Canada shipped 36 per cent of Brazil's potash, Russia 29 per cent and Belarus 8 per cent.[20] When Iran restricted Hormuz in 2026, it cut a route that carried up to 30 per cent of the world's fertiliser shipments in 2024.[18] Urea rose from an average of US$398.7 a tonne in late 2025 to US$856.9 in April 2026, up 80 per cent on February.[22] It fell back to US$453.1 in June, just as farmers were buying for the 2026/27 soybean crop.[21] Researchers led by Arita at North Dakota State University, reported by IFPRI, estimate Brazil's urea imports from April 2026 to March 2027 would fall 18.7 per cent if the strait stayed closed to July, and 27.3 per cent if it stayed closed to the end of 2026.[23]
Fuel adds a second dependence on Russia, of shifting size. Russia supplied 59 per cent of imported diesel and 35 per cent of imported petrol from January to August 2025.[24] By March and April 2026 it supplied 81 per cent of diesel imports by value.[25] Then purchases fell about 65 per cent in June 2026, before Russia banned diesel exports from 8 July to the end of the month.[26] The dependence is real, but it keeps changing, and Brazil has more than once switched to fuel from the United States, India and the Gulf within three months.
After the 2022 shock from the war in Ukraine, Brazil found new fertiliser suppliers within a season and still harvested record crops. A phosphate plant opened in 2024 added 1 million tonnes of capacity for the home market.[18] Nutrients already in the soil mean that losing potash for one season would cut yields, not stop farming. But a disruption lasting longer than a season would hurt.
Access and affordability:
The share of Brazilians who fell from 31.2 per cent in 2021 to 21.1 per cent in 2025. It was 20.8 per cent in 2020,[40] so it is now back near where it was before prices surged. One in five people is still a real pressure. fell far enough for Brazil to leave the FAO Hunger Map in the 2025 report, below 2.5 per cent on the 2022-24 average.[41] has stayed near 7.0 per cent since the last national nutrition survey, well within the World Health Organization's low band.[42]
Brazil's main weaknesses at home are swinging prices and uneven access to food in shops. Output is strong. Food and drink inflation jumped from 1.03 per cent in 2023 to 7.69 per cent in 2024, adding 1.63 points to that year's overall inflation of 4.83 per cent.[43] It eased only to 6.66 per cent by mid-2025.[45] Dairy alone rose 22.1 per cent in 2022.[44] Much of this comes through the currency and through prices set by export markets. Access to shops is a narrower, local weakness. A study of the favelas of Belo Horizonte, mapping every food shop registered in Minas Gerais in 2019, found that shops selling mostly healthy food were fewer and further away, while shops selling mostly unhealthy food were everywhere.[46]
World meat price rises reached Brazilian shops. Retail prices passed on about 86 per cent of the 2021-22 rise in world meat prices, measured in reais.[63, 64, 62] The real fell 7.9 per cent against the dollar between 2023 and 2024, the same period in which food and drink inflation jumped from 1.03 to 7.69 per cent. The weaker currency added to the rise rather than softening it.[62, 43]
Food prices in Brazil have not come back down since world prices fell from their 2022 peak. Food and drink prices rose about 23.8 per cent between March 2022 and July 2026, while world food prices fell 18.2 per cent.[64, 63] Within a year, the swings households face are much larger than these averages suggest. Black beans in Rio Grande do Sul shops varied by 50.7 per cent, from a February 2025 high of BRL 7.88 a kilogram to a December 2025 low of BRL 5.23.[65] At the 2026 minimum wage of BRL 1,621 a month, or BRL 7.37 an hour, a kilogram of beans at the July 2026 price of BRL 6.87 costs 0.93 hours of work.[66, 65]
Shock endurance:
Brazil exports far more protein than it imports, which gives it a large buffer at home. It exports about a third of its beef, about a third of its chicken and more than half of its soybean meal.[2] In a crisis it could keep that food at home, so its protein supply would hold up even if trade stopped entirely. Brazil's first bird flu outbreak on a commercial farm, announced on 16 May 2025 at Montenegro in Rio Grande do Sul,[31] stayed on one farm. Brazil declared itself free of the disease 33 days later, and the World Organisation for Animal Health recorded the case as resolved.[32] China's ban ran from 29 May to 31 October,[33] and chicken exports still set a record in 2025.[9] A 50 per cent US tariff in mid-2025 cut shipments to the United States by nearly 80 per cent. The trade went to China instead, which took 948,000 tonnes from January to August, up 19.6 per cent.[34] China then put a 55 per cent tariff on beef above a 2.7 million tonne quota, for three years from 1 January 2026, which shows the limits of relying on one buyer.[35]
The weaknesses are at home. Public food stocks are thin after the state supply agency, CONAB, ran its reserves down in the 2010s. A package announced on 29 July 2026 commits R$1.335 billion (about US$262 million) to rebuild them. R$850 million will buy 310,000 tonnes of rice and 180,000 tonnes of maize.[36, 39] CONAB's Ponta Grossa store was expanded from 180,000 to 300,000 tonnes in June 2026.[37] Transport inside the country is fragile. During the ten-day truckers' strike in May 2018, feed deliveries stopped, about 70 million chickens were culled and only two of 109 beef plants kept working.[29, 30] Export routes now have more options. Northern ports, the Arco Norte, handled 40 per cent of maize and soybean exports from January to August 2024.[38] But food is still moved around the country mostly by road. And the currency and export-linked prices can carry world price spikes into food inflation even when food is plentiful.
The money to keep buying in a crisis partly makes up for this. Reserves reached US$358 billion at the end of 2025, up US$29 billion on the year and 121 per cent of the level the IMF considers adequate.[51] The World Bank's 2024 figure is 8.11 months of imports.[52] During COVID-19, the emergency payment Auxílio Emergencial reached 55.6 per cent of the population. It used the existing Bolsa Família and Cadastro Único registers, a new way to apply and checks against more than 40 government databases. The World Bank rates it among the fastest and best-targeted responses by any developing country.[54] The budget is tighter. Government debt is near 93 per cent of GDP, and all three rating agencies rate Brazil below investment grade, at BB, BB and Ba1.[53] Brazil can still borrow, but at a rising cost.
Trajectory
Harvests and meat output have reached records, fish farming has passed a million tonnes,[2, 3, 4] and 28 million hectares of pasture could be turned into cropland without clearing forest.[11] Access to food has improved too. The share who cannot afford a healthy diet has fallen every year since 2021, and Brazil has left the Hunger Map.[40, 41] But swinging prices and the lack of healthy food in the favelas show that better averages have not yet closed the gaps.[43, 44, 46] The national fertiliser plan to 2050, published in 2022, starts from 85 per cent import dependence in 2020. In its central case, potash imports fall from 98 per cent of use in 2020 to 40 per cent by 2052.[28]
For now Brazil still makes only 7.2 million tonnes of fertiliser, while imports set records.[18] New potash and nitrogen plants, rebuilt public stocks, more rail and river transport, large-scale pasture restoration[61] and steadier public finances would make the system stronger.[51, 53] Expanding again by clearing forest,[14, 15, 16, 17] or losing the recent gains in affordability, would make it weaker. Brazil remains a major protein exporter, but its farms still rely on imported potash.