Brazil caught in climate Catch-22 as global agriculture crisis threatens

Mining proposals are caught between indigenous rights, economy, environment

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Artist’s rendering of future plans for mine development in northwestern Brazil. Image: Brazil Potash.

(Michael Molinski is a senior economist at Trendline Economics. He’s worked for Fidelity, Charles Schwab and Wells Fargo, and previously as a foreign correspondent and editor for Bloomberg News and MarketWatch.) 

AUTAZES, Brazil (Callaway Climate Insights) — On a bare hillside near the Rio Madeira, just 75 miles southeast of the Amazon city of Manaus, is a patch of land that some say holds the key to solving Brazil’s fertilizer crisis.

This is the site of the mining project for the Canadian company Brazil Potash. Potash, a potassium-based compound, is one of three materials that go into inorganic commercial fertilizers, the other two being nitrogen and phosphates. Over the past year, the global cost of fertilizers has more than doubled. Brazil is caught in the middle of it all.