April 15 (Bloomberg) -- Brazil can protect its Amazon rainforest and boost agricultural output by planting crops in areas now used for low-intensity ranching, Minister of Strategic Affairs Roberto Mangabeira Unger said.

“For every acre under cultivation in Brazil, there are more than four acres given over to low-intensity ranching,” Mangabeira Unger said in an interview yesterday in New York. “If we could recover even a small part of that territory, we could double the area under cultivation and triple our agricultural output in a brief time without touching a single tree.”

Known as “the Minister of Ideas,” Mangabeira Unger, 62, said he’s seeking to disprove the notion that development and preservation can’t co-exist. His plan for the Amazon region is to accelerate development in some areas to expand opportunity for its 25 million inhabitants and discourage wildcat mining, logging and cattle ranching, that degrades the rainforest.

The plans show Brazil’s government is pushing for a more sensible policy in the Amazon, Erasto Almeida, an analyst with the Eurasia Group, said in a phone interview. Bit by bit, the government appears to be increasingly aggressive and self- confident that it can bolster deforestation-control policies and meet its goals for economic growth, he said.

Mangabeira Unger spent three decades teaching at Harvard Law School, where his students included President Barack Obama. He went back to his native Brazil in 2007 to join a government that two years earlier he’d called “the most corrupt in Brazil’s history.”

Long-Term Thinking

As Minister of Strategic Affairs, a position created for him by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, he’s charged with thinking about long-term policies for the country that range from environment and military defense to education and entrepreneurship. The Amazon, an area 15 times the size of Germany, is at the center of his planning.

Comprising 62 percent of Brazil’s territory, the Amazon has been under strain from soaring Asian demand for the country’s beef, soy and other commodity exports, which encourages farmers and ranchers to seek out new areas to expand production. Deforestation in the world’s biggest rainforest from logging and slash-and-burn agriculture increased last year for the first time since 2004.

“He’s right to say it’s necessary to create new activities and economic incentives,” Almeida said. Brazil needs to create a new “model” for the Amazon, he said.

Brazil, the world’s second-biggest soybean grower, yesterday renewed a ban on sales of the oilseed planted illegally in the Amazon rainforest. Trading companies that purchase and sell about 90 percent of the country’s soybeans renewed a 2006 agreement with the Environment Ministry and non- governmental organizations, said Carlo Lovatelli, head of the Brazilian Association of Oilseed Industries.

Brazil is also the world’s biggest beef exporter and the biggest coffee and sugar-cane grower.

To contact the reporter on this story: Fabiola Moura in New York at fdemoura@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: April 14, 2009 23:01 EDT