Jun 04, 2020
Brazil's 2020/21 Harvest Plan (Plano Safra) will be Released June 15th
Author: Michael Cordonnier/Soybean & Corn Advisor, Inc.
The Brazilian Minister of Agriculture, Tereza Cristina, indicated that Brazil's Harvest Plan 2020/21 (Plano Safra 2020/21) will be released on June 15th and it will take effect July 1st. The Harvest Plan is Brazil's yearly farm program to support Brazilian agriculture. The main focus of the program is low interest subsidized production loans for small, medium, and large producers.
The Minister indicated that the 2020/21 program will have the same amount of funds available for rural credit as last year. She expects that the interest rates on the production loans to be lower than last year because the prime interest rate in Brazil is now at a historic low of 3%. Last year, small producers paid 3% to 4.6% interest on their loans with higher interest rates for medium and large producers.
The 2019/20 Harvest Plan, which terminates at the end of June, allocated R$ 225 billion for production loans, commercialization, industrialization, and investments.
In a recent webinar, the Minister lamented the fact that Brazil's image abroad has been negatively impacted by the increase of fires in the Amazon region last year and now by the second highest number of Covid-19 cases in the world. She stressed the fact that Brazilian agriculture needs to do a better job communicating the importance of Brazilian agriculture for the world's food security.