Brazil’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) could gain up to R$94.8 billion per year by 2030 with the greater adoption of sustainable and already available agricultural technologies, estimated a study carried out by the Bioeconomy Observatory of Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), which also seeks to promote public policies and private investments.
The calculation was made considering the increased adoption of biofuels, bio-inputs, direct planting systems and intensive cattle finishing, which also contribute to lower greenhouse gas emissions.
“Within this scope of technologies (…) they not only have the capacity to mitigate carbon, but also have an economic impact”, said Cícero Lima, researcher at FGV and responsible for the study, to Reuters.
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According to him, the Ministry of Agriculture’s ABC+ plan, which finances low-carbon agriculture, does not provide this quantification of economic gains. And the study can serve as a basis to encourage greater allocation of resources to the program, which still has relatively small funds.
“One of the benefits of the project is to signal to the government how public policies could be oriented to enforce this adoption by producers. You can think about a faster adoption rate depending on how the financing mechanisms will target this”, said the coordinator of the FGV Bioeconomy Center, Guilherme Bastos.
According to Bastos, if there is an increase in costs for adopting best practices, this is where public policy must come in, so that the use of technology becomes more accessible to producers.
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The CEO of Instituto Equilíbrio, Eduardo Bastos, the organization that supported the study, stated that it is important to talk about this during the COP30 climate conference, in Belém, next month, for the construction of the next Safra Plan, showing that investments will result in environmental benefits and more income.
“The idea is to raise awareness among financial actors, public and private, that this is an economic agenda, but also an environmental, energy and food one”, said the institute’s CEO.
Alone, biofuels can generate an additional R$71.4 billion per year, the analysis showed. The wider adoption of bioinputs would add R$15.2 billion to GDP, followed by the expansion of direct planting (R$4.7 billion) and the intensification of beef finishing (R$3.5 billion).
“The study shows that a single technology, such as bio-inputs, can add up to 0.13% to GDP per year. In a country that grows at 2%, this is more than 6% of total growth coming from low-carbon practices alone”, explained Lima.
In addition to the macroeconomic impact, large-scale adoption could create more than 700,000 direct jobs by the end of the decade, the work estimated.
The Direct Planting System (SPD), a technique that reduces soil disturbance and favors carbon retention, could be expanded from 10.8 million to 34.1 million hectares, resulting in a reduction of 7.4 million tons of CO₂ equivalent between 2025 and 2030, thanks to greater carbon fixation in the soil.
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In livestock farming, the expansion of intensive finishing — a system that anticipates slaughter and increases the herd’s weight gain — could increase the number of animals in intensive management from 8 million to 13.5 million heads by 2030, reducing emissions by 19.3 MtCO₂, due to the shorter time spent by the animals in the system.
