Miller Magazine Issue 146 February 2022

87 COUNTRY PROFILE MILLER / FEBRUARY 2022 World corn markets are riding a wave of high speculative interest, providing histor- ically high prices to producers worldwide. These prices are incentivizing production growth as in Brazil’s Safrinha this year and weather permitting will bring a lot of corn to world markets very soon. Will demand be high enough to counter such potential growth in production? SAFRINHA: Most grain traders in the world know what that word refers to, but do you ever wonder where the name came from and why it has been ad- opted around the trade in its original form? Safrinha is an old name given to the country’s second or “winter” corn crop, meaning “small crop”. In the early 2000’s it represented as little as just under 20% of Brazil’s total corn production, hence the name “small crop”. That however is no longer true, by a large mar- gin! Brazil’s Safrinha surpassed the 50% share of pro- duction in Brazil in 2012, and never looked back. In Brazil’s corn exports could see a 115% increase in 2022 Pedro H. Dejneka MD Commodities