The Brazilian minister of Agriculture, Livestock and Food Supply Blairo Maggi is going to show NASA's data in Berlin, Germany, demonstrating that Brazil only uses 7.6% of its territory as croplands, a total of 63,994,479 hectares. He has been asked to give the opening speech for the panel discussion “Shaping the Future of Livestock – sustainably, responsibly, efficiently”, at the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture (GFFA), to take place during the International Green Week in the period from January 18 to January 20. In 2016, the Embrapa unit then known as Embrapa Territorial Management had already calculated land used with agricultural production at 7.8% (65,913,738 hectares). The figures from NASA date from November 2017, indicating a lower percentage, but according to Evaristo Miranda, the general head of the unit and PhD in Ecology, the small difference of 0.2% between Brazilian and American data is normal. Both NASA and Embrapa sets of figures will be used by Minister Blairo Maggi to rebate the international community's recurrent criticism that “Brazilian agricultural workers are deforesters”. The NASA study demonstrates that Brazil protects and conserves native vegetation in over 66% of its territory and cultivates a mere 7.6% of lands. Denmark cultivates 76.8%, ten times as much as Brazil; and Ireland, 74.7%; the Netherlands, 66.2%; the United Kingdom, 63.9%; and Germany, 56.9%. Evaristo Miranda explains that the joint work of NASA and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) has provided comprehensive mapping and estimation of the planet's cultivated areas based on satellite monitoring. For two decades, the Earth was surveyed in detail, in high definition imaging, by researchers of the Global Food Security Analysis, which corroborated the data anticipated by Embrapa. Cultivated areas varies from 0.01 hectare per inhabitant – in countries like Saudi Arabia, Peru, Japan, South Korea and Mauritania – to over 3 hectares per inhabitant in Canada, the Iberian Peninsula, Russia and Australia. Brazil has a small cultivated area of 0.3 hectare per inhabitant, and is in the range of 0.26 to 0.50 hectare per inhabitant, which is the case of South Africa, Finland, Mongolia, Iran, Sweden, Chile, Laos, Niger, Chade and Mexico. The NASA survey also sheds light on food security in the planet, with calculations on the extent of cultivations, irrigated and dryland areas, and land use intensification with two/three harvests or even continuous cultivation. Planted forests and reforestation have been left out of such estimates. In Brazil, only croplands were measured. According to the study, the area of the Earth taken up by croplands is 1.87 billion hectares. The world population has reached 7.6 billion last October, so that each hectare, in average, would feed 4 people. In reality, yield per hectare varies a lot, just like the type and quality of the crops. “Europeans have intensely deforested and explored their territory. Europe, without Russia, used to contain over 7% of the planet's original forests. Today there is only 0.1%. The sum of France's cultivated area (31,795,512 hectares) with Spain's (31,786,945 hectares) is equivalent to the onecultivated in Brazil (63,994,709 hectares)”, explains the Embrapa specialist. Most countries use between 20% and 30% of their territory with agriculture. Those in the European Union use between 45% and 65%; the United States, 18.3%; China, 17.7%; and India, 60.5%. “Brazilian farmers cultivate only 7.6%, with a lot of technology and professionalism”, reassures Evaristo Miranda. The largest cultivated areas are in India (179.8 million hectares), the United States (167.8 million hectares), China (165.2 million hectares) and Russia (155.8 million hectares). These four countries combined total 36% of the planet's cultivated area. Brazil takes the 5th place, followed by Canada, Argentina, Indonesia, Australia and Mexico. Translation: Mariana Medeiros