Now, farms in the cerrado plant smaller, more resistant bushes and machine-harvest them.

ECONOMIST: Brazil

Recent climate-vegetation models suggest that excessive cerrado clearance could lead to the drying up and loss of rainforest in south Amazonia.

ECONOMIST: Letters

The explosive recent growth in the cultivation of another oil seed, soyabean, has led to an onslaught on Brazil's dryland cerrado savannah, which is often disregarded as a forest, though it contains two-thirds as much carbon as the rainforest, mostly in its roots.

ECONOMIST: Seeing the wood

Patient crossbreeding created a variety, called braquiarinha in Brazil, which produced 20-25 tonnes of grass feed per hectare, many times what the native cerrado grass produces and three times the yield in Africa.

ECONOMIST: Brazilian agriculture