Brazil’s Sugar Cane: An Emerging Debacle

(Wall Street Journal) – Virgolino de Oliveira SA is trodding what has become a well-worn path for emerging- market companies that built up capacity to meet China’s demand for commodities only to watch it crumble.

The Brazilian sugar producer missed a bond payment in February and hasn’t been able to renegotiate the terms of its debt, according to Fitch Ratings. The company couldn’t be reached for comment, but Fitch analyst Claudio Miori said it is likely to seek bankruptcy protection, joining the roughly one-fifth of Brazil’s sugar-cane mills that already are requesting relief from unpaid bills and debt payments.

“They stopped paying sugar-cane farmers,” Mr. Miori said, referring to Virgolino de Oliveira. “They stopped paying banks. They are only one notch from default.”

The woes of Brazil’s sugar-cane industry offer a stark illustration of the problems confronting emerging markets. The combination of slower growth in China and excess production capacity of many commodities sent raw-materials prices spiraling lower over the past several years.

That led to declines in the currencies of countries reliant on commodity exports. Now companies are struggling to pay back the debt they issued to build up capacity when times were good.

Virgolino de Oliveira sold $300 million in dollar-denominated bonds in 2012 to expand its operations, anticipating that the price of raw sugar at the time—25 cents a pound—would remain at that level. Other sugar executives in Brazil, the world’s largest producer of the sweetener, were making the same bet: that a rising global middle class would keep prices of food, especially sugar, aloft.

They were wrong. Sugar prices hit a seven-year low in August and now hover around 12 cents a pound.

“It wasn’t just the sugar rush in Brazil,” said Rashique Rahman, head of emerging-market debt at Invesco Ltd., which has $776.4 billion under management. “It was a broad-based bull run for emerging markets. You had low interest rates, China was buying everything in sight. It was happy days.

“That cycle is now, we believe, turning.”

Since the start of 2010, investors plowed more than $1 trillion into emerging-market bonds, according to the Institute of International Finance. Ten percent of that went to Brazil.

But inflows into emerging-market bonds slowed sharply this year, to a net $53.8 billion in the first eight months of the year, according to IIF. That is down 49% from the same period a year earlier.

As anxiety about emerging-market growth deepened, investors began yanking money out of Brazilian bonds in June, with $5.9 billion flowing out in the three months through August.

The prospect of higher U.S. interest rates this year, which Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen last week signaled as likely, further dims the allure of risky and high-yielding emerging-market debt. In Brazil, political turbulence is adding to the pressure on government and corporate bonds as well as on the currency. Earlier this month, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services was the first credit-ratings firm to cut Brazil to “junk.”

The Brazilian real has tumbled 33% against the dollar this year, making it among the worst-performing emerging-market currencies.

The epicenter of the carnage can be found in the South Central region of Brazil, which processes 90% of the nation’s sugar cane. Since the commodity boom of the 2000s began to sputter, 80 mills have closed out of 300, according to Unica, the country’s sugar-cane industry group. An additional 10 are expected to close this year, Unica says.

In these factories, sugar cane is shredded and then squeezed under high pressure to extract cane juice. The juice is then converted into crystals, which are then packed and sent to port. Ethanol, which is a widely used fuel in Brazil, is often manufactured at the same plants.

Insolvent mills are attempting to sell as much sugar as possible to stay afloat, traders and producers say, adding to a glut that is driving down world prices. Stockpiles of the sweetener are at their highest in at least 35 years amid the rush to produce, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Sugar production in Brazil hit a record of 38.4 million metric tons in 2010, double the level of a decade earlier. In the next crop year beginning Oct. 1, the country’s sugar output is pegged at 36 million tons, according to USDA estimates.

Meanwhile, there are signs of flagging demand. China imported 25% less sugar in August than a year earlier, according to Price Futures Group.

“Brazil relied too much on commodities,” said Michael McDougall, head of the Brazil commodities desk at Société Générale in New York. “Now you have the aftereffect.”

Some sugar mills in Brazil are thriving despite accelerating inflation and high interest rates inside the country.

“This is a very big industry,” said Andy Duff, head of the food and agribusiness research department at Rabobank Brazil. “There is a tremendous amount of diversity in terms of business models, in terms of financial states.”

Mills that are faring better tend to be more diversified, have larger parent companies to keep them afloat and are close to ports, Fitch says.

Still, the outlook for the industry is grim. On average, sugar mills are carrying 27% more debt this year, in local-currency terms, than last year per ton of sugar cane, according to Rabobank.

And the depreciation of the real versus the dollar since the beginning of the year hasn’t materially enhanced Brazilian exporters’ competitiveness, Fitch said.

In Sertãozinho, a town 200 miles from the city of São Paulo and known as Brazil’s sugar capital, about 10% of sugar-industry workers have lost their jobs in the past two years, said Antonio Tonielo, whose company, Viralcool, owns three sugar mills and has operations in Sertãozinho.

“Five years ago…we started producing more sugar, and when you do that, what happens?” he said. “You depress the price, and we’re paying the price today for high production.”