Source: Reuters
MARABA, Brazil, Dec 9 (Reuters) - Brazilian Agriculture Minister Reinhold Stephanes will step down in March to run for a seat in the lower house of Congress in elections in October 2010, he told Reuters on Wednesday.
Under Brazilian law, any public official seeking to run for office must resign six months before an election.
"I'll run (for public office)," he said in an interview while traveling to Maraba, in the northern state of Para, to launch a cattle farm monitoring program in the Amazon region.
Stephanes, who took up his post in March 2007, will stand as a candidate for the centrist PMDB party. He has been a fierce defender of commercial agriculture, a stance that regularly put him at odds with Environment Minister Carlos Minc.
The agriculture sector has been a key contributor to the economic boom this decade in the South American country.
Brazil is the world's top producer of coffee, orange juice and sugar and a major producer of soy, corn and cane-derived biofuel ethanol, all of which earn it billions of dollars in export revenue.
The government has been keen to show foreign importers that it is taking measures to protect the world's largest rainforest, the Amazon, while expanding its agriculture with more efficient and ecologically-sound methods.
Stephanes travelled to Para state in northern Brazil on Wednesday to launch satellite monitoring of cattle ranches. Livestock producers who expand their farms by encroaching further into the rainforest will be forbidden from selling their cattle.
The initiative shows heightened consciousness by a ministry often perceived as passive on environmental issues.
Stephanes' ministry made an aggressive intervention in the coffee market this year by seeking to buy about 10 percent or more of Brazil's produce this season to tighten the global supply and drive up the price importers pay its farmers.
During Wednesday's visit to the north, Stephanes also announced that Brazil would offer subsidized credit for farmers who adopt more environmentally friendly farming practices such as zero or minimum tillage.
Zero-tillage farming avoids ploughing up the soil when planting seed, cutting soil erosion and water use and reducing emissions of carbon. (Reporting by Raymond Colitt, Writing by Inae Riveras and Peter Murphy; Editing by Marguerita Choy)