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Toker Villain
Big Wall climber
Toquerville, Utah
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Topic Author's Original Post - Dec 12, 2010 - 08:55pm PT
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After the 60 Minutes piece I wish I spoke portuguese.
0% unemployment
7% annual growth rate
with a GDP bigger than all other South American countries combined, Brazil will be one of the three economic giants of the 21rst century along with (also, resource based) Russia, and China
But they don't have an army and haven't been in a war for 140 years.
They fight on the soccer field not the beaches.
Climbing ain't bad either.
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Disaster Master
Social climber
Born in So-Cal, left my soul in far Nor-Cal.
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Dec 12, 2010 - 08:59pm PT
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Ah, Brasil...
Hit pubery there, in the amazon...Carnival...good times.
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Crimpergirl
Sport climber
Boulder, Colorado!
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Dec 12, 2010 - 09:06pm PT
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High crime rates.
Large population of extraordinarily poor living in cardboard towns on hillsides.
A beautiful place though. And some gorgeous folks.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Dec 12, 2010 - 09:09pm PT
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Well, Ron, Brasil is a relatively rosy picture for S America but surely you
don't really believe the 0% unemployment?
They have made large strides in their education system in the last decade.
There are some serious structural economic problems which I don't have the time to go into.
They have done some wondrous things in agriculture thanks to the state research center. They've created a new variety of soybean that can grow there.
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Toker Villain
Big Wall climber
Toquerville, Utah
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 12, 2010 - 09:10pm PT
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Lets see who has larger cardboard towns in 10 years, them or us.
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Dec 12, 2010 - 09:22pm PT
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"Some gorgeous people"
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Crimpergirl
Sport climber
Boulder, Colorado!
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Dec 12, 2010 - 09:24pm PT
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True Ron. I have wondered for some time if we are not headed in the same direction - at least in the cardboard housing situation. Certainly not headed that way in regards to the people - I saw the MOST gorgeous males and females there.
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Toker Villain
Big Wall climber
Toquerville, Utah
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 12, 2010 - 09:28pm PT
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I was wondering how long it would take before that film showed up. Own the triple pack and STILL don't get it.
The people in cardboard in Brazil need only training to find jobs, but things are getting bleaker here.
The jobs won't be coming back.
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martygarrison
Trad climber
Washington DC
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Dec 12, 2010 - 09:40pm PT
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Ron, you should take a trip. I speak Portuguese and worked there for a number of years. There are some huge structural economic issues, that in the favelas go way beyond just some training. It is gaining a larger middle class however it still has the a large gap between the few very rich, and the large numbers of very poor. Having said that it is my favorite country in south America by far. Beautiful people and country.
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Mimi
climber
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Dec 12, 2010 - 09:42pm PT
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Despite the current reality, isn't the prototype business model potentially viable? Great movie too.
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 12, 2010 - 09:55pm PT
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As I remember it was pretty expensive in Brazil, maybe because I was in Manaus?
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Peter Haan
Trad climber
San Francisco, CA
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Dec 12, 2010 - 10:11pm PT
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PR
I don't think there is any question we are becoming a banana republic, even are one now by many measures such as literacy. Brazil is really exciting!
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john hansen
climber
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Dec 12, 2010 - 11:30pm PT
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Its also a lot easier to live in card board shacks there than say,,
North Dakota, or Manitoba,,
At least it is warm there.
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east side underground
Trad climber
Hilton crk,ca
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Dec 13, 2010 - 01:14am PT
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Have to vote Brazilian girls have some of the most beautful asses in the world- looking real good in those thongs!- ooooh moooonnn!
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Steve L
Gym climber
SUR
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Dec 13, 2010 - 01:16am PT
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Things are booming there, but it will take some skill to keep the economy from over heating. Inflation is a VERY real concern. After all, it is the USA's greatest export these days.
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nature
climber
Tuscon Again! India! India! Hawaii! LA?!?!
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Dec 13, 2010 - 01:17am PT
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I gotta go all locker on this thread....
east side made me do it!
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 13, 2010 - 01:17am PT
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Actually if you want to live deep in the Amazon jungle you don't need no stinkin card board box house.
There's food and shelter out there.
Awesome place .....
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ß Î Ø T Ç H
climber
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Dec 13, 2010 - 03:41am PT
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Good to see _ease side underground__ still on this panel.
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Fluoride
Trad climber
West Los Angeles, CA
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Dec 13, 2010 - 05:36am PT
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We were listening it to the broadcast on 1070Am in LA driving home from JT. Was amazing how much my b/f said about Brazil in the past that came out in that piece. It's a country to be reckoned with in the future.
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edejom
Boulder climber
Butte, America
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Dec 13, 2010 - 10:37am PT
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The concept, history and architecture of its capitol city Brasilia is along the lines of fascinating--a designed city from the "ground up"...
Brasilia, Brazil has a special history. It was built "from scratch" in the late 1950s and now has a population of 2 million. The layout of the city was carefully planned so as to have broad streets and open parks and clean, modern government buildings. Look first at two aerial oblique views of the central area of this city, provided by Auguste Areal:
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Dec 13, 2010 - 12:47pm PT
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Roses and thorns (excerpts from "The Economist"):
Hard as it is to believe Brasil's GDP/person is lower than Mexico's.
Brasil's murder rate (26/100K) is higher than Mexico's (11/100K) but peanuts compared to El Salvador and Venezuela (58 and 49!). (The US is 6)
Agricultural innovation:
Brazil has the most impressive record of agricultural innovation. In 1973, when the country was still a net food importer, its military government set up Embrapa, an agricultural-research institute. Within six months it had sent 1,200 young Brazilian graduates abroad to obtain further qualifications. When they came back, they adapted plant and animal varieties so that they could thrive in the tropics and especially in the acid soil of the cerrado, the vast, largely flat savannah of the interior. This green revolution hugely increased productivity: over the past 30 years only 20% more land has come into agricultural use but production has risen by 150%, says Pedro Antonio Pereira, Embrapa’s director.
Brazil is now the world’s biggest exporter not only of coffee, sugar, orange juice and tobacco but also of ethanol, beef and chicken, and the second-biggest source of soya products. It is exporting fruit and wine from the São Francisco river region, close to the equator. Its goal, says Mr Pereira, is to become the world’s leading food exporter by 2025, displacing the United States, without inflicting damage on the environment. That means pushing up productivity further, and in particular putting some 70m hectares (173m acres) of degraded pasture to better use. Much of that pasture supports just one cow for every two hectares. With better breeding and improved techniques, each hectare could accommodate three cows as well as some grain and trees.
In São Carlos, in São Paulo state, Embrapa has the world’s only laboratory deploying nanotechnology for agriculture, creating plant varieties that absorb fertiliser more efficiently. Embrapa has a research centre in Central America and is planning to open one in Peru.
Banking woes:
In Brazil businesses find it hard to get loans from private banks for longer than a year, and interest rates remain high. In real terms the Central Bank’s benchmark rate, the Selic, is now only around 6%, down from 11% in 2001. But market rates are higher because the banks are required to lodge up to 60% of their sight deposits with the Central Bank and because of taxes. Many firms finance expansion from retained profits or from state banks, especially the BNDES, which provides ten-year loans at around half the Selic rate.
Oil for the common good:
Brazil’s Congress is considering a bill under which part of the revenues from big new deep-sea oilfields will be placed in a special social fund. But most of the money will be spent on education and anti-poverty programmes rather than saved.
State sponsored monopolies:
Brazil never wholly abandoned industrial policy. Interest on loans made by its giant national development bank, the BNDES, is set at less than half market rates, involving a selective subsidy. Since Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected president in 2003, industrial policy has become more pronounced and explicit. The BNDES supports innovation by providing seed money for ventures in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and information technology. More controversially, it backs mergers and foreign takeovers by big Brazilian companies. These have included the creation of Brasil Foods, a big food company, and the merger of two big meat firms, JBS and Friboi. The petrochemical industry has consolidated in Braskem, a joint venture between Odebrecht, a construction giant, and Petrobras, the national oil company. The electricity industry is reorganising around Eletrobras, the former state monopoly.
Critics denounce all this as the creation of “national champions” that are beholden to the government, either directly or indirectly. Luciano Coutinho, the BNDES’s president, retorts that Brazil’s new multinationals are highly competitive Darwinian survivors of decades of economic volatility. “We have an open economy, it’s different from the model of the 1960s and 1970s. The market is imperfect, but the state also makes mistakes,” he concedes
Social progress:
And there is a long way to go. If Brazil wants to achieve average social conditions for a country of its income level, it must keep up its “fantastic” progress in tackling deprivation over the past 15 years for another two decades, says Ricardo Paes de Barros of the Institute for Applied Economic Research, a government-linked think-tank.
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At least people are becoming more aware of the need to improve the quality of public education. That is particularly clear in Brazil, where the progressive education policies of the governments of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003) have been broadly continued under Lula. Both the government and educational pressure groups are backing a campaign that aims to raise school performance to developed-country levels by 2021, the eve of the bicentennial of Brazil’s independence. The government has introduced a national exam to monitor standards, and some states have followed suit. In São Paulo the state education secretary, Paulo Renato Souza (who was education minister for eight years under Mr Cardoso), has also introduced a standard curriculum, required teachers to submit to a proficiency test and linked big salary increases for them to better school results in the standard tests.
The proof of these policies will be whether they work in places like the Colegio Recanto Verde Sol, a school in Jardim Iguatemi, a jumble of favelas climbing over steep hills next to a patch of virgin rainforest on São Paulo’s eastern fringe. The school, built in 2005, is clean and reasonably well-equipped, with a small library, video room and cafeteria for school meals. But its results are poor. That is partly because its 1,800 pupils study in three shifts: 11- to 15-year-olds in the morning, six- to ten-year-olds in the afternoon, and over-15s in the evening, sometimes not finishing until 11pm. Not surprisingly, many older pupils drop out: “In secondary, we begin the year with seven classes and end with three or four,” says Angela Regina Rodrigues, the head teacher.
Ms Rodrigues is charismatic and committed but somewhat defensive. Her main problem is getting teachers to turn up. Classes are too big, with 40 or more pupils. Ms Rodrigues herself has a second job at night, teaching history at another school. But she is trying to raise the quality of teaching and to get parents more involved.
Good things are happening there but they've a long ways to go.
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