Remineralization for sustainable agriculture: A tropical perspective from a Brazilian viewpoint

Current Latin American tropical agriculture is not sustainable. It has become dominantly large-scale, bringing irreversible environmental damages such as devastation of the flora and the fauna and soil-degradation for vast tracks of land. Instead of bonding man to the land, it is bringing unemployment and rural exit. Furthermore, a land management model has been developed with technology that has been transferred from countries with temperate soils without taking into account basic climatic, mineralogical, geochemical, ecological and cultural differences, which are present in our tropical ecosystem. One such technology has been the indiscriminate use of highly soluble NPK fertilizers. Under deep leached conditions, this strategy does not bring nutrient conservation. As an alternative, or as a support to those `chemical' fertilizers, and as an important step towards sustainable development, we suggest the use of native-rocks (stone meal) as the ultimate way to restore to the leached tropical soils, a balanced inorganic compositionon which plant growth and biodiversity can thrive.