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From the earliest years of the colonial era, agriculture has held centre stage in Brazil's economy. Plantation agriculture was the country's link to the world economy. The agrarian economy was based on large holdings dedicated to a single export crop and dependent on slave labour for its production. Beginning with sugar cultivation in the 16th century, the country's economic trends have been susceptible to a series of "boom-bust" agricultural cycles. Cotton, cocoa, rubber, and coffee followed sugar. The 1970's saw a general rise in the number of agricultural products exported. Soybeans outpaced Brazil's traditional agricultural earners - coffee, cocoa, and sugar. The volume, value, and variety of semi-processed and manufactured agricultural products increased substantially, largely as a result of government incentives favoring processed goods over raw crops.
Agriculture in the 1980's continued to play a significant role in the country's economy, but no longer did a single crop dominate in the way sugar, coffee, or rubber had at their peaks. Through fiscal incentives and special credit facilities, the Federal Government strongly promoted greater efficiency in rural areas. Furthermore, efforts were made to alter the movement of people from rural communities to urban areas by extending equal social benefits, establishing rational schemes for agrarian reform, stimulating hitherto uneconomical small holdings and, in general, improving the quality of life in areas that are quite remote from the main centres. Between 1980 and 1992 farm output grew (38 percent) more rapidly than population (26 percent). This has permitted Brazilian farmers not only to produce more for the domestic market, but also to increase their exports.
 In the early l990's Brazil is still the world's largest producer of coffee and sugar (from sugarcane), second among the cocoa producers, fourth among tobacco growers, and sixth in cotton growing. The various programmes undertaken in the last two decades to promote diversification of crops have borne impressive results. The production of grains has grown consistently, including wheat, rice, corn, and particularly soybeans. Forest products, especially rubber (once a vital element in Brazilian exports), as well as Brazil nuts, cashews, waxes, and fibres, now come mostly from cultivated plantations and no longer from wild forest trees as in earlier days. Thanks to its wide climatic range, Brazil produces almost every kind of fruit, from tropical varieties in the north (various nuts and avocados) to an enormous output of citrus fruit and grapes in the temperate regions of the south. In 1992, 83.6 percent of Brazil's orange production was exported in the form of concentrated juice earning US $1.5 billion. Brazil is the fourth largest beef producer in the world and it ranks fifth in beef exports.
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