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PRODUCTION EXPANSION

Brazil's next agricultural frontier is not in Brazil

Area in the Paraguayan Chaco. Photo: DLR (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Cattle held the Chaco for most of the last century. Thorn scrub, saline groundwater, rainfall that runs from roughly 400 mm in the driest western reaches to around 900 mm in the central colonies, and 211,586 people spread across 24.7 million hectares made Paraguay's Western Region a place to run steers, not combines. It is now the address Brazilian farmers, land funds and agribusiness executives name most often when asked where the next affordable hectare might be…

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