FARMING in Brazil was once almost synonymous with coffee. Nowadays, if it hits the headlines, it is often because of protests at unequal land ownership by the militant movement of landless would-be farmers. Yet neither coffee nor protest captures the fertility and potential of Brazil's farms.

Colombia markets the stuff more cleverly, but Brazil is still the world's largest producer of coffee. It is also the world's biggest exporter of sugar and orange juice; the second-largest of soya; the third-largest exporter of beef and chicken; and a big producer of tobacco. Last year, helped by a currency devaluation, farm exports totalled a record $17.7 billion, or 37% of total exports, and a 3.5% increase on 1998.

There is scope for big increases both in the volume and range of farm products. That matters: Brazil's disappointing overall export performance is perhaps the biggest single brake on faster economic growth.

One problem is that Brazil remains vulnerable to market slumps: the value of farm exports fell 4% between January and June, compared with the same period last year, partly because low prices for coffee and sugar led producers to hoard stocks. Hopes that 2000 will be another bumper year have faded.

The longer-term outlook is more promising. Despite high borrowing costs, farmers have invested heavily over the past decade (partly because the state-owned banks have repeatedly rolled over farmers' debts, in response to pressure from the powerful rural lobby in Brazil's Congress). The cerrado, as the vast savannahs of the interior are called, has become the site of efficient commercial agribusiness: the farms are huge there, the climate is more reliable than in the coastal states, and transport links are improving.

Soyabean production is shifting to the cerrado. So, too, is cotton: it used to grow on big, disease-prone bushes in the parched north-east, and was hand-picked. Now, farms in the cerrado plant smaller, more resistant bushes and machine-harvest them. Falling production in the 1990s made Brazil a big cotton importer; now the government predicts self-sufficiency next year, and exports thereafter.

An analagous process is boosting the productivity of Brazil's beef cattle herd. Some 90% of this is still of the traditional, hump-backed zebu breed, which is adapted to tropical climates but grows slowly. But many ranches are now cross-breeding the zebu with Aberdeen Angus and other European stock. The resulting calves go to market in two years, twice as quickly as zebu.

Beef export volumes rose by 86% last year, thanks partly to efforts to stamp out foot-and-mouth disease. After two southern Brazilian states were declared free of the disease last year, Iran, Israel and Egypt started buying beef from them. In May a further swathe of ranching country, from Sao Paulo almost to Amazonia, was certified disease-free. There was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth in Rio Grande do Sul state (and in Argentina and Paraguay) last month. But it had not earlier been declared free of the disease. The authorities have slaughtered affected herds, and are trying to contain the outbreak.

Brazil is also seeking to export higher-value produce, in which it has traditionally lagged. Its fruit growers recently launched a 12m reais ($6.6m) marketing drive to raise demand for tropical fruits among Europeans. Balbo, a Sao Paulo-based group, claims to be the world's biggest producer of organic sugar; last year it produced 23,000 tonnes, about half for export. Several coffee producers have combined to market a high-quality “Cerrado” coffee brand worldwide.

Such efforts notwithstanding, Josef Schmidhuber, an agronomist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, argues that Brazil's competitive advantage lies in churning out huge quantities of low-cost bulk commodities. Rising demand in Asia for soya, beef and orange juice offers the scope for producing more without causing gluts. And instead of trying to prop up prices using intervention schemes, as Brazil and other coffee producers have been doing recently, low prices should be seen as an ally: eventually they will drive out inefficient producers elsewhere, and Brazil will be able to increase its earnings through greater volumes.

Fine, in theory. In practice, Brazil's low-cost food may be shut out by rich countries' trade barriers. The farmers have much to gain from the proposed Free-Trade Area of the Americas, which Brazil's industrialists fear. Even so, increasing efficiency and diversity are paying off for Brazilian farming. They are even starting to generate a few social benefits. Until recently, the woes of the traditional family farms in the south, combined with the shift to huge, mechanised estates in the cerrado, had prompted an increase in rural unemployment, and land invasions. These depressing trends may at last have halted. After falling steadily in the early 1990s, the numbers of Brazilians employed in farming rose last year by 6.3%, to 17.4m.