# Trade Audit — Brazil

> Brazil runs one of the world's largest commodity trade surpluses — but it is shrinking, not setting records.

Publisher: The Quant (https://thequant.market)  
Published: 2026-10-04  
Section: trade  
Language: en  
URL: https://thequant.market/articles/trade-audit-003-brazil  
Cite as: The Quant, "Trade Audit — Brazil", 2026-10-04, https://thequant.market/articles/trade-audit-003-brazil

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Brazil runs one of the world's largest commodity trade surpluses — but it is shrinking, not setting records. The 2025 surplus was $68.3 billion on the official Secex/MDIC basis ($59.7 billion on the World Bank balance-of-payments basis), the third-largest on record, down for a second consecutive year from the 2023 peak of $98.9 billion. The surplus rests on three commodities — crude oil, soybeans and iron ore — that together account for roughly a third of exports and are sold heavily to China. Oil is now the #1 export product for a second year, but by only about $1 billion. Meanwhile the 2021-23 manufacturing recovery has faded, and with R&D spending flat for two decades, the oil windfall is more likely to deepen commodity dependence than to fund reindustrialisation.

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This is the opening of the article. The full text is at https://thequant.market/articles/trade-audit-003-brazil (a free account opens some articles, a subscription opens all). Please cite: The Quant, "Trade Audit — Brazil", 2026-10-04, https://thequant.market/articles/trade-audit-003-brazil