Brazilian farmers are battling a voracious caterpillar that likely arrived from Asia, challenging the agricultural superpower's widely touted mastery of tropical farming just as it is on the verge of becoming the world's top soybean producer.



While crop losses have thus far been limited, Brazil is now on red alert over the nation's third major pest outbreak in 30 years. Officials have stepped up port controls, farmers are rethinking planting patterns and the hardest hit are blaming the government's cumbersome bureaucracy for not allowing the import of pesticides that have helped control the bug in other nations.

Most importantly, the caterpillar appears to be eating away at Brazil's proud claim to have conquered the craft of growing reliable crops in a tropical region where pests and disease can spread more quickly than for other major growers.

"When you find helicoverpa armigera you have to act immediately, while they are still small," said Rudelvi Bombarda, who farms 2,000 hectares (4,942 acres) with his brother in São Desidério, a dusty farming hub in western Bahia.


"If you wait and send it to a lab it will be too late," he said.


To be sure, the caterpillar has not reduced forecasts for an even larger soybean harvest that could dethrone the United States as the world's leading grower this year.

But it has provided a wake-up call on the risks of farming in the bug-ridden tropics, especially as more farmland is put into use. It also shows how Brazil's emergence as a major breadbasket has made it the fastest-growing market for biotechnology firms like Monsanto, which could benefit from the outbreak by selling its new caterpillar-resistant genetically modified soy and cotton seeds.

'It Changed Everything'


"No one was expecting a species like this," said Alexandre Specht, the researcher whose microscope identified the caterpillar at a laboratory outside Brasilia.



Most likely, the caterpillar arrived with cargo on a plane or ship from Asia, said Luis Rangel, director of the sanitation department at Brazil's agriculture ministry.

"With the intensification of this transit of goods it is natural that sooner or later one of these pests would show up," he said in an interview. "The Chinese bring in a lot of plants, it could have come in through this transit."

China is Brazil's No. 1 trade partner and buys most of its soybeans.




First there was the silverleaf whitefly in the 1990s, followed by soy rust fungus 10 years later, and both are still problems. Brazil was also the world's top cocoa producer until Witches' Broom disease devastated the industry in the 1990s.


To prevent another outbreak, the government is promoting "integrated agriculture," which involves monitoring pests, rotating crops and seed varieties, and using biological controls and natural enemies, with chemicals as a last resort.

It is a completely new approach, according to Rangel. "The helicoverpa changed everything about phytosanitary policy in Brazil," he said.

Brazilian Bureaucracy

"The solution for helicoverpa is to bring in products to control the helicoverpa - immediately," said Bombarda, an agronomist from southern Brazil who was lured by the potential to work with irrigation in western Bahia's frontier and employs full-time bug monitors on his farm.



"It turned into an unprecedented bureaucracy ... the government created a bunch of rules and obstacles," said Celito Breda, a cotton consultant in Bahia who has traveled across Brazil to discuss helicoverpa armigera and believes Emamectin Benzoate would provide the most efficient control.


Rangel said bureaucratic hurdles had been worked out and Emamectin Benzoate would be available with special approval on an emergency basis. He defended the government's caution, saying that as a top commodities exporter, Brazil must be careful about what pesticides are used to avoid retaliation from buyers.

President Dilma Rousseff's government has authorized 36 other chemical and biological products to combat helicoverpa armigera, Rangel said.

Syngenta's Loss, Monsanto's Gain?

Two weeks from harvest, Bombarda's soybean crop looks healthy. He applied pesticides 10 times, including five coats of Belt, a product he had never used before, made by Germany's Bayer AG.

Syngenta has so far lost out on what would have been a lucrative opportunity to sell Emamectin Benzoate in Brazil. But Monsanto, the world's largest seed company, had better luck.

Over the past 11 years, Monsanto developed a caterpillar-resistant soybean strain specifically for South America, with an eye on Brazil's growing pesticide reliance.

"Today there is basically 12 months of continuous planting and you don't break the pest cycle," said Renato Carvalho, an insect control specialist at Monsanto in Sao Paulo. "Over the years pressure increases, the pests become resistant to the insecticides and increase in population."



More Intacta seeds will be available for next season, though not nearly enough to cover local demand, Monsanto said. Intacta seeds cost 115 reais per hectare, five times more than the 22 reais Brazilian farmers paid for the company's previous technology, herbicide-resistant Roundup Ready.


"I think working with biological control, natural enemies, is the road we should pursue," Schreiner said, referring to viruses that can be applied to crops to kill caterpillars.

"We won't be able to eliminate it but we should be able to have a good level of control at a lower cost."