Brazilian agriculture is historically one of the principal bases of the country’s economy. While its initial focus was on sugarcane, Brazil eventually became the world’s largest exporter of coffee, soybeans, and crop-based ethanol. The agricultural sector is extremely important as a generator of income, employment and foreign exchange.
Brazil is currently one of the world’s largest exporters of beef and chicken meat and one of the world’s biggest producers of beef, milk, pork and eggs.
The Brazilian food production and food processing industries are among the largest in the world. These sectors are characterized by their great diversity, both in size, products and levels of technology. In Brazil, a country famous worldwide for its barbecues and steakhouses, the sector of meat derivatives was the highest-grossing segment in the food industry.

Brazil is a mining sector global powerhouse, long occupying a place among the top five mineral producers in the world and possessing reserves of several strategic commodities. Mining in Brazil is centered on the extraction of iron, copper, gold, aluminum, manganese, tin, niobium, and nickels. In terms of gemstones, the country is one of the world’s largest producers of amethyst, topaz, agate, tourmaline, emerald, aquamarine, garnet and opal.

The country produces the majority of its petroleum and some natural gas, mainly from offshore fields along the continental shelf. Brazil extracts more than two-thirds of its petroleum from the Campos basin on the continental shelf off Rio de Janeiro state. There Petrobrás has developed some of the most advanced deepwater drilling technology in the world. Most of the country’s natural gas comes from Bahia and Sergipe states, and there are petroleum and natural gas reserves throughout the Amazon basin.

The country has been producing steel since the 1920s and 1930s, when companies were established in the states of Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro. Brazil was once a great importer of steel, but modernization processes and the entry of foreign companies allowed the country to increase its productive capacities. The exportation of the alloy is now one of the largest in the world.

Brazil’s pulp and paper industry is one of the country’s leading industrial sectors. Brazil is one of the major pulp producers in the world and one of the world’s top exporters. The country is also among the 10 largest paper producers in the world. The sector is also one of Brazil’s biggest energy consumers.

Since the mid-20th century Brazil has been a major world supplier of automobiles, producing nearly two million vehicles per year. The Brazilian automotive industry is coordinated by the Associação Nacional dos Fabricantes de Veículos Automotores (Anfavea), created in 1956, which includes automakers (cars, light vehicles, trucks, buses and agriculture machines) with factories in Brazil. The ABC Region in São Paulo is the first center and largest automobile hub in Brazil. The country hosts a lot of global companies as well as national companies. Some traditionally produced modern equipped replicas of older models. Brazil is also a key player in the aircraft market: Embraer is one of the largest producers of civil aircraft in the world.

Tourism in Brazil is a growing sector and key to the economy of several regions in Brazil. Brazil offers for both domestic and international tourists an ample range of options, with natural areas being its most popular tourism product, a combination of leisure and recreation, mainly sun and beach, and adventure travel, as well as historic and cultural tourism. Among the most popular destinations are beaches at Rio de Janeiro and Santa Catarina, beaches and dunes in the Northeast Region, business trips to São Paulo city, cultural and historic tourism in Minas Gerais, the Iguazu Falls and the Pantanal in the Center-West Region.