With a decrease in the volume produced and an increase in fertilizer purchases, the supply of the product increased the domestic market in 2017. Last year, Brazil spent US $ 7.781 billion with imports of raw materials and intermediate products for fertilizers, increase of 20.17% compared to 2016.
“The strong dependence on fertilizer and raw material imports destined to the production of fertilizers, is currently the main fragility of Brazilian agribusiness”, emphasizes the Institute of Agricultural Economics (IEA) of the Secretariat of Agriculture and Supply of São Paulo.
Last year, fertilizer sales in Brazil totaled 34,438 thousand tons of products, a small expansion (+ 1.04%), compared to the same period last year. The record harvest last year made it possible to rebuild global inventories, affecting commodity prices on international exchanges, which discouraged the decision to increase investment in crops, says IOA director Celso Luís Rodrigues Vegro.
For the researcher, although the increase in total volume was insignificant, some states have quite expressive percentages, such as São Paulo, which accounts for the largest share of production in the sugarcane segment, and invested, in 2017, + 6.2% in the purchase of fertilizers; or the states of the North and Northeast regions, frontier of advance of the cultivation of grains, that leveraged the demand for fertilizers in 4,1%, when compared to the volumes acquired the previous year.