I have been in
That drumbeat seems to me now to have been largely the product of the Brazilian press, locked, as usual, in a love-hate relationship with everything American. A small number of pundits, mainly journalists, intellectuals, and politicos of various stripes, are the ones most eagerly trying to assert Brazil's new geopolitical position in the face of dwindling global oil supplies.
Of course, the leftwing Workers’ Party, to which President Lula belongs, also knows the stakes at play, but appears to accept the realpolitik of ethanol in the U.S., where abolishing the tariff would wreak havoc on the American corn ethanol industry.
But do not expect any ideological or strategic vision from the business community directly responsible for the production of ethanol in
I have spoken with sophisticated businessmen who see no relationship between the price of oil and interest in Brazilian ethanol, even though ethanol is the only remotely viable substitute for gasoline for the foreseeable future. And any talk of more elaborate ethanol production techniques, such as biomass-to-liquids, is usually met with blank stares, with the exception, of course, of some in academia and in a few select research centers associated with large Brazilian corporations.
The dynamics of the ethanol market seem to be dictated either by the necessities of local politics, by the overarching strategy of the Brazilian federal government to milk the ethanol cow until she buckles at the knees, or by varied commercial interests looking to make a fast buck off the unsuspecting foreigner.
Brazil was founded by unsuspecting foreigners – the Portuguese navigator credited with discovering Brazil, Pedro Alvares Cabral, was, or so we are taught in elementary school, on his way from Portugal to India when a storm knocked him off course and led him to terra firma on the coast of the state of Bahia, in northeastern Brazil. Various counter-theories argue that Cabral was, in fact, scouting Spanish possessions in the New World and decided, in 1500, to claim for
While we may never know the truth about Brazil’s discovery, the make-a-quick-buck nature of the Brazilian DNA is evinced by the name “Brazil” itself, derived from the Brazil tree (Caesalpinia echinata), a hardwood containing a red dye for textiles avidly chopped down and hauled off to Europe by the first white men to arrive in the country in the early XVI century. Though not many Brazilians realize it, both the tree that gave the country its name and words such as “blaze” and “brazier” all have the same origin and are related to the color red.
Around 1600, less than one-hundred years later, the Brazil tree was nearly extinct. The Portuguese then turned their attention to the pursuit of gold, green with envy that Spain had found silver (and, to a lesser extent, gold) in its own New World possessions. But the gold jackpot was not to pay off until the late XVII century, when huge deposits were found in the state of Minas Gerais (literally, “General Mines”), where I live when not at the
Between epochs of gold mining and eras of sugar, cotton, rubber, and coffee production, the Brazilian population grew to its present size of almost 200 million. Gilberto Freyre, perhaps the most renowned of Brazilian sociologists, points out in “Casa Grande e Senzala” (“The Masters and the Slaves”) that only the extremes in this perennially makeshift society got fat – the landowners, a minuscule fraction of the population, could afford to import luxury goods and food from Portugal, freshness be damned; and the slaves were fed like so much cattle by their self-interested owners. The middle castes, comprising well over half the population, were left to fend for themselves amidst the monocultures that commandeered every beast of burden available, leaving very little protein for human consumption and making the culture of vegetables, and even chickens, a nearly impossible task in an export-driven society.
And so
