Brazil in the News, aka Buying Some Time

This next week will be my busiest yet here in Brazil. Papers due Monday and Wednesday, final tests Monday and Tuesday, and a presentation to give at a local military school Wednesday (which I will definitely write about afterward) all spell long hours of studying and short hours of sleep until 8 days from now. Thus, serious writing won't get done here until after the storm has passed. Yet, I can't deny that I have been neglecting my audience. So here is what I'll do. Below are some links to interesting news articles related to Brazil that also have relevance for us Gringos. I hope you find them enlightening, or at least something a bit more than a cop-out for me buying another week-and-a-half's worth of blogging time.

June 2006 Washington Post article about how Wal-Mart is trying to dip into the Fair Trade Coffee market, starting with specialty coffee growers in the south of Minas Gerais. The location in the article reads "Poco Fundo" though it should instead be "Poço Fundo," meaning "Deep Well."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/11/AR2006061100813.html


April 2005 article about Brazil's dominance in the Ethanol Market, domestically and internationally.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0417-23.htm


February 2007 National Geographic article about the environmental downside to the bio-fuels market.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070208-ethanol.html


July 2007 BBC News article about the "trade row", as the British would call it, between the U.S. and Brazil.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6920189.stm


July 2007 NPR News report about the unorthodox alliance between the U.S. agro-biz corporation Cargill and environmentalists working toward the common goal of curbing the deforestation of the Amazon.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11375220


May 2008 BBC News report on Brazil's dilemma of how to simultaneously develop and preserve the Amazon. On this page there are a dozen or so links that can help clarify the "Amazon Paradox" facing Brazil and the rest of the world. Basically, as I stated in an earlier post ("Anti-Americanism in Brazil"), the battle over the Amazon goes like this:

The Amazon is "the lungs of the world," absorbing vast amounts of the world's carbon and producing between 1/6th and 1/5th of the world's oxygen.

Brazil has legal sovereignty over a good 2/3rds of the forest, the rest belonging to Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana.

Deforestation of the Amazon is increasing at an accelerating rate.

Wealthy and powerful agro-businessmen, many of whom are prominent politicians in Brazil, are behind the deforestation, following behind a "manifest destiny" banner of pushing the frontier that has existed in Brazil's national identity since it was a colony.

Brazil does not have the infrastructure nor the political integrity to take on the developmentalist agro-biz interests.

The world, led primarily by the U.S. and the E.U., wants Brazil to hand over some of its sovereignty of the Amazon so that international measures can be taken to help stop deforestation.

Brazil, forever caught between "1st and 3rd worlds", interprets this international plea as a neo-colonialist trick that will see American and European MNCs strip Brazil's forest of its valuable resources.

Brazil has retorted that it will internationalize the Amazon only if the world agrees to internationalize the oil fields of the Middle East, all museums throughout the world, and while we're at it--as one Brazilian columnist put it--how about we do away with all international boarders for good.

The conflict thus ends in a bitter stalemate.

But that's just my interpretation. You can read for yourselves below.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7399109.stm


Until next "real" post! I hope you enjoy!