The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE, in Portuguese) released on Thursday (15) a new update to its forecast for this year’s harvest in Brazil. The production estimate, which has shown signs of reaching a record high since January, tends to be even higher than the institute announced previously, reaching 328.4 million tons.
The new figure was calculated based on data from April. It is 0.2% higher than the March production estimate. It is also 12.2% higher than the crop actually harvested in 2024, 292.7 million tons.
IBGE reinforces the good moment for Brazilian agribusiness. “In 2024, we faced a series of climatic problems that affected Brazil’s main crops. In 2025, we have a recovery crop, with much better weather for crop development,” said Carlos Alfredo Guedes, IBGE’s agriculture manager.
Contrary to what the government had predicted, however, this recovery has not translated into a decrease in food prices – at least not yet. According to the IBGE itself, in April, the 12-month accumulated rise in food and drink prices reached 7.81%, the highest since February 2023, the second month of the term of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers’ Party), who promised cheaper food.
In Lula’s current presidential term, in fact, food inflation fell in 2023. It closed that year at 1.03%, more than ten times less than the 11.64% rise in 2022, the last year of former president Jair Bolsonaro’s (Liberal Party) administration.
However, since the end of 2023, food inflation in Brazil has been on an upward trend. And not even the record harvest, already partially harvested in the first few months of this year, has helped reduce the pressure on the cost of food.
The reasons
The first explanation is that, despite harvesting a record grain crop, Brazil is not harvesting a record food crop or a record quantity of products for domestic supply – and soy is the best example of this.
According to IBGE, soy will be half of what Brazil will produce in 2025. There will be 164.2 million tons of the grain out of a total of 328.4 million tons. Soy is not part of the traditional Brazilian diet, that’s why around 65% of the grains harvested in the country are exported, with 70% going to China.
Despite this, soybean production is one of the fastest-growing in Brazil. According to the IBGE, in 2025 it will be 13.3% higher than last year’s, and almost all of it has already been harvested.
Corn production accounts for another 39% of national production. It is also doing well: estimates say 128.2 million tons of the grain will be harvested, close to the 2023 record of 132 million tons. Part of this will also be exported, so corn prices in Brazil will not be completely reduced.
Commodities vs. food
“We need to make a distinction between commodity production and food production,” said Paulo Petersen, an agronomist and member of the executive nucleus of the National Articulation of Agroecology (ANA, in Portuguese). “They have very different behaviors when it comes to meeting economic and social needs.”
Petersen said that, in recent years, Brazil has been structurally producing less and less food, but more and more commodities. As a result, despite record production numbers, food inflation has been increasingly severe.
In his studies, José Giacomo Baccarin, professor of economics and agricultural policy at São Paulo State University (Unesp) and director of the Zero Hunger Institute (IFZ, in Portuguese), has already identified this structural rise in food inflation in Brazil. “The basic cause of the increase in food prices is that we started exporting a lot, especially in this century,” he said at a livestream the IFZ made in February.
He advocates ways of directing production so that it is not so focused on the foreign market. “We need to have some capacity to arbitrate publicly between supplying the domestic market and exporting,” he recommended. “Today, this arbitration is done by the private sector, by economic groups.”
He mentions the example of meat to show how focusing on exports can generate harmful effects. The product rose by 20.8% during 2024 because meatpackers broke export records in the year, increasing their sales abroad by 30%.
Petersen also advocates that the Brazilian government should take measures to ensure that national agriculture serves to supply the country. He pointed out that this year’s rice and bean harvests, for example, are already going to be bigger.
Risks
In the last six years, agricultural activities have been responsible for more than 97% of deforestation in Brazil. The data was extracted from the MapBiomas platform, through the MapBiomas Alert initiative, which identifies and qualifies areas of forest suppression throughout the country. The survey indicates a drop in deforestation in all Brazilian biomes by 2024.
The agricultural frontier of Matopiba accounted for 75% of deforestation in the Cerrado biome and around 42% of all native vegetation loss in Brazil last year. These figures, however, represent a 40% drop compared to 2023.
