Brazil has been successfully growing crops on its center-west plains since a breakthrough in tropical soybeans in the 1980s unlocked the productive potential of the expansive region by breeding soy to grow closer to equatorial regions.
While Mozambique possesses similar climatic and soil characteristics, Amapa President Carlos Ernesto Augustin told Reuters that some areas in the country on the southeast coast of Africa even had more fertile soils than Brazil.
“The price of the land there is too good to ignore,” said Augustin, who added that the risks inherent in buying Brazilian land as a producer were enormous because of high costs and stiff environmental regulations.
Producers who are granted concessions to plant would be required only to pay a tax of 21 reais per hectare, and would receive an exemption from import tariffs on farm equipment.
Prime productive land in Brazil’s developed south can run to 35,000 reais a hectare, compared with 5,000 reais in the extreme frontier regions of the center-west and northeast savannas, where infrastructure is poor. Brazil’s import tariffs on farm equipment can also be steep.
Mozambique’s Agriculture Minister Jose Pacheco made the offer after a visit to Brazil three months ago.
The country is offering 50-year concessions for Brazilian producers to develop 6 million hectares (15 million acres) of its savanna. Brazil currently plants 24 million hectares of soybeans and another 18 million of corn and cotton.