Cattle

Brazil has become the leading world exporter of animal products, and above all of beef. For most of its evolution the cattle industry was a low-productivity industry. When Argentina turned itself into a great exporter of chilled and frozen beef at the end of the nineteenth century, Brazil with its larger herds never engaged in exports. It was only in the late twentieth century with the import of Zebu cattle, the development of planted pastures, the application of modern sanitary and health practices, and the expansion into the frontier lands of the Center-West that the industry began to modernize. First in the Southeast, and then in the Center-West a modern meatpacking industry developed in the last decades of the twentieth century and first decades of the new century. In turn, with major government financing, two of these meatpackers emerged as multinational companies JBS and BRF which are now major producers in numerous other countries as well, including the United States.