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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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