00:00In northeastern Brazil, nearly half of the country's family farms have been left out
00:06of the mechanization process. Less than 2% have access to it. In response to this gap,
00:11a partnership launched in 2021 with China Agricultural University led to the deployment
00:17of 62 small-scale machines. Manuel Ramos, a reporter for Brazil de Fatto,
00:22in collaboration with CGTN for Telesur, provides the details in the following reports.
00:30Now, family farmers from Brazil northeast are starting to run agricultural machines that
00:35came from China. For many, it is the first mechanized equipment to reach their plots.
00:40The machines were specifically designed and built for the scale of small holdings.
00:45Nearly half of Brazil's family farming operations are concentrated in the northeast, spread across
00:51two million small holdings. Fewer than two out of every hundred of those farmers have any access
00:57to mechanization. Holes, sickles, machetes and other manual tools are still the primary
01:03implements for the vast majority. Brazil's agricultural sector grew around larger-scale
01:09equipment designed for export commodities. Family farmers in the northeast were almost entirely
01:14excluded from that development path. The northeast has half of all Brazilian peasantry. There are two
01:23million rural establishments in the northeast with 1.7 percent mechanization. So it is a complete
01:30absurdity. It is a crime when you see that the basis of the country's food production is still done
01:36with technologies from 150 years ago. In 2021, the International Association for Popular Cooperation,
01:44known also as Baobab, brought a Brazilian delegation to Beijing. The group included representatives from the
01:50Landless Workers Movement and the Northeast Consortium. Their destination was China Agricultural
01:56University, one of the world's top institutions for agricultural sciences. The university has spent decades
02:03designing small-scale equipment for family farmers. Yami Lee, who directs the university's Mechanization
02:09Research Center, was among those who hosted the Brazilian visitors. In September 2022, we signed with
02:17the alliance of nine northeast Brazilian state governments. The Northeast Consortium, our first
02:24cooperation memorandum with Brazil on agricultural mechanization and rural energy.
02:34Four years in, 62 Chinese machines had been deployed across five Brazilian states. The equipment included
02:40rice harvesters, power tillers, precision seeders, and vegetable planters. Two model farms were established,
02:47one in the northeast and one in Brasilia, integrating mechanization with AI and digital monitoring. A joint farm
02:55data platform developed in collaboration with the University of Brasilia was recognized at the 2026 World
03:02Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai as one of the 10 landmark global AI cases.
03:11For farmers growing vegetables such as lettuce and coriander, productivity increased six to seven times.
03:20Labor costs dropped by 80 percent. Family income grew between 80 and 90 percent, nearly doubling.
03:29Our rice harvester increased local harvesting efficiency by almost seven times.
03:37Women represent more than half the agricultural labor in northeast Brazil's family farming sector,
03:43yet their mechanization rate stands at 0.52 percent, less than a third of the rate recorded for men.
03:51That gap was central to how the testing program was designed. When Yamin Li visited Apoji in July 2023,
03:57she brought a painting of Lianjun, China's first female tractor operator. Researchers from the Federal
04:04Institute of Rio Grande do Norte tracked not only yields and labor hours, but what changed for women farmers when
04:11a machine replaced the hole.
04:13We, as women, suddenly started noticing and coming across situations like, for example, when I was going to assemble a
04:20piece, they'd tell me,
04:22no, bring this wrench here, bring that over there, as if they were saying, you can only do this, because
04:28we supposedly wouldn't understand or wouldn't be able to assemble it, or as if we wouldn't have the strength to
04:34pick up a piece here and put it over there.
04:36And we had a conversation and said, look, we're going to take part in this. We're not here just to
04:40assist. No, we're going to take part in building these machines, because we know we're capable of handling this.
04:48The Landless Workers Movement was among the organization that has been pushing for cooperation with China. Deborah Noon is one
04:55of the movement's national coordinators.
04:59It's almost revolutionary how a machine can change not only the perspective of the people involved, of peasants and landless
05:06peasants, but also the efficiency and effectiveness of production.
05:10And here I bring up an example that was shocking to me, the rice harvester, a small machine the size
05:15of a combi van, and that machine there in Maragnon, a task that the family used to take four days
05:21to do, still with a sickle, right? It was done with a machine in four hours.
05:26For the Northeast Consortium, the partnership with China aims to strengthen the region's industrial sector.
05:32We want to master the technology and the technological knowledge for producing these machines, so that Brazil can produce and
05:40use these machines.
05:42We have enormous potential. Around 1.2 million machines need to be produced for us to reach at least 70
05:50percent mechanization in this kind of agriculture.
05:53In March 2026, three contracts were signed in Beijing for the first factory dedicated exclusively to family farming machinery.
06:02The plant is to be built in Maricar, Rio de Janeiro, through a partnership between Sinomac, one of China's largest
06:09state industrial conglomerates, and Brazilian company Oss Earth, with the MST as a strategic partner.
06:16Production capacity is projected at up to 5,000 units per year.
06:22We cannot accept that youth should see a hoe as their future.
06:25We want science, technology, and all the knowledge the world has developed for agriculture,
06:30with the necessary responsibility and adaptation for building agroecology to be accessible to family farmers across our country.
06:38While Global North Powers condition cooperation on market access and political alignment, Baobab, the Northeast Consortium, China Agricultural University, Sinomac,
06:48and both governments are showing that technology transfer and local industrial capacity for food security can be built without conditions.
06:57This cooperation on agricultural mechanization and food sovereignty may be what a community of shared future for mankind looks like
07:06in practice.
07:07Based on the
