WIth Brazil’s global clout comes increased focus on its role as the world’s breadbasket and whether the increasing strain on its land is too high a price to pay.

Two years ago I said that Brazil will define this decade, and 20 percent into the 2010s, I am sticking to my guns. From energy to architecture, Brazil IS the world’s stage.

Once a poor laggard in Brazil compared to the industrial regions surrounding Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Porto Alegre, Bahia has rates of growth that would leave most U.S. states envious.

WWF and the Roundtable on Responsible Soy (RTRS) is trying to make these decisions easier and more lucid for supermarket shoppers in the United Kingdom by directly appealing to retailers.

Yesterday the world’s first standard for sustainably sourced sugarcane production launched in Brazil, the result of collaboration between WWF, Bonsucro, and Coca-Cola.

Brazil’s economic transformation the past several years, including its shift from debtor to creditor nation, is in part due to the development of its cerrado. There is a dark side, however, to the cerrado’s reinvention from wild savannah to agribusiness giant. In the UK, the WWF is trying to raise awareness of the cerrado.

Once seen as a dull and worthless stretch of land, the cerrado’s landscape has transformed dramatically. The huge subtropical region’s soil had been nutrient-poor, but large agricultural firms figured out that farms here could thrive if the land was infused with lime and nitrogen. Thus the subject for my first article on The Guardian.