Emergy, nutrients balance, and economic assessment of soybean production and industrialization in Brazil

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the soybean production and industrial processing stages in Brazil using the emergy accounting methodology and economic cost and revenue estimation in order to assess the environmental and economic inputs to the soybean chain and to evaluate the amount of emergy and nutrients exported to European countries. The main findings of this work were that the agricultural stage uses the highest amount of resources. The emergy exchange ratio shows that farmers are delivering around six times more emergy in the soybean that is being sold than the emergy they are receiving with the money paid for it. Results demonstrate that producing raw soybean and soy meal for international markets makes Brazil lose a great amount of emergy and nutrients. Besides that, soybean production is nowadays providing low profitability to farmers because of low prices for soybean products and high prices for the chemicals used in soybean farming. Therefore, at present conditions, exporting soybean as a commodity results in low profit per unit of area. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.