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As the mainstay of the Brazilian economy, coffee has suffered various crises, during which the entire national life has been threatened. The appearance of Africa among the coffee producers created one of the most serious of these crises in the 1950s. Although still the coffee leader of the world, Brazil has had to face previously unknown competition, and the competition is constantly becoming more acute. Brazil cannot today sell all its coffee; in 1960 it had an accumulated stockpile of more than 5 billion pounds.
Repeated crises in the coffee market are having the effect of arousing the country to the necessity of agricultural diversification; Brazil is attempting to expand exports of other products like sugar, tobacco, and fruit. The coffee problem has also stimulated the growth of industrialization, chiefly in São Paulo, Brazil’s most prosperous state. It had undergone a tremendous boom since World War II. There was no heavy-machinery industry before the war; today there are more than forty-five major plants in São Paulo. In 1959 alone, the state manufactured more than 15,000 machine tools. It produces 53 per cent of the country’s paper, 54 per cent of its textiles, and 58 per cent of its chemicals, and it is a major bulwark of the foreign market, exporting more than 1.6 million tons of manufactured goods a year. With the nearby State of Guanabara, São Paulo contributes almost half of Brazil’s domestic income.
At the center of this industrial complex lies the city of São Paulo itself. Only 80 years ago, it was a quiet town of 25,000 people. Today it covers 535 square miles and, with a population of 4.8 million, is the eighth largest metropolis in the world. Its traffic problem is even worse than that of New York, and it has a bustling, cosmopolitan atmosphere.
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Unlike the prosperous south, the states of the northeast remain almost wholly agricultural. There sugar, which had its earlier heyday of monoculture before being dethroned by coffee, is still the basis of the economy — although cotton and cacâo are grown in large quantities. Sugar developed even as Brazil itself developed; it could almost be said that the first Portuguese arrived with shoots of sugar cane under their arms. The rich northeastern sugar plantations of Pernambuco and Bahia were major factors in luring the Dutch to invade in the 17th century. Most of the profitable sugar growing is now done in the south, but in Pernambuco, Alagoas, and Paraíba, the cane fields still stretch to the horizon. Great refineries, which are beginning to take the place of the primitive old ones, are improving the product. But the methods of cultivation are extremely primitive, almost semifeudal; and the sugar workers are among the poorest and most long-suffering of Brazilian peoples. There is today a strong movement among enlightened Brazilians for reform of the agrarian situation throughout the northeast. It is indeed a highly explosive area, ripe for Communist exploitation.
One product of the sugar cane is aguardente, generally called cachaça or pinga. A clear, fiery, powerful drink made since colonial times, it is known as “the brandy of the poor.” Cachaça is now being exported. There is no Brazilian product surrounded by so much folklore as cachaça; a whole cycle of songs celebrates it. The names by which it is called, mostly affectionate nicknames—“the grandmother,” “the little blonde,” “the thread of gold”—show the esteem in which cachaça is regarded. When a man takes a drink at the nearest corner bar, he always spits out a little of the first mouthful onto the floor, as an offering to whichever saint he believes to be the donor of the liquor.
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Rubber, too, once played a major economic role. The source of great but brief wealth, Amazon rubber suffered a blow in 1910 when the plantations in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies began to outproduce and undersell it in the world market. The towns that had flourished in the valley of the Amazon were rapidly transformed into dead or dying communities. The city of Manaus, situated near the meeting point of the Amazon and the Rio Negro, was the rubber capital of the world until the collapse of the market. Rich and luxurious, with a huge opera house, it imported troops of singers and dancers. Large ships made it a regular port of call. To the east of Manaus, Henry Ford established experimental plantations, Fordlândia and Belterra, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but, finding the project unprofitable, abandoned it. Today owned by the government, the project still produces a small amount of rubber.
During World War II, when Japan seized the plantations of Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, there was a brief resuscitation in Amazonian rubber. But Brazil today imports some $40 million worth of Asian rubber each year. The Amazon, deprived of the market for its principal wealth, has also been attempting diversification in recent years. The area now produces substantial quantities of Brazil nuts, jute, lumber, sugar cane, and vegetable oils as well as manganese.
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Like other Brazilian resources, lumber has had its brief fling, but it, too, has yet to reach its potential. In the Amazon basin alone, there are at least 5 trillion cubic feet of timber, and there are vast forests of prime woods in the south. One of the most attractive features of the national landscape is commonest in the States of Paraná and Santa Catarina — the groves of araucarias, the Brazilian pine tree. They are very tall trees with straight trunks and arched, bare branches terminating in characteristic cup-shaped bunches of needles. Besides being beautiful, the araucaria is extremely useful; its wood constitutes the principal wealth of the region in which it grows. So sought after was this wood that the government was forced to pass a law in 1942 prohibiting excessive cutting and providing for replanting.
With more than 600 known varieties, Brazil has more palm trees than any other country in the world. They are rich sources of fiber, oils, and fuel. From the leaves of the carnauba, an elegant, tall palm that flourishes only in northeast Brazil, comes a sticky deposit rather like beeswax which, when gathered, powdered, and melted by a difficult and primitive process, produces the famous carnauba wax. It was used in the manufacture of phonograph records, polishes, and varnishes. The carnauba is one of the principal economic supports of the States of Ceará, Piauí, and Maranhão, and the people of the dry sertão say that is the compensation given them by God for the scourge of drought — since when there is rain the palm produces no wax.
Tobacco is raised in most of Brazil, and has been for centuries an important trade merchandise for the slave dealers. It had developed into an industry in Bahia, whose cigars are famous and good enough to be compared with those of Cuba. Bahia cigarettes are also widely distributed, but the greatest number of cigarette factories is in the State of Rio Grande do Sul.
The European grape, introduced by Italian immigrants, grows very well in Rio Grande do Sul. The wine industry has developed rapidly and today Brazilians are proud of some of their wines, champagnes, and cognacs. In 1960 nearly 8 million gallons were exported to France. Also important to Rio Grande do Sul is wheat, although far from enough is produced to make Brazil self-sufficient. The country usually manages to produce enough corn, beans, and rice for domestic consumption.
Only recently has there been much interest in making use of Brazilian fruit for exportation or canning. Oranges are now exported on a large scale. Bananas, of which Brazil is the world’s largest grower, are principally grown in São Paulo. The cashew fruit of the northeast provides the valuable cashew nut, and the fruit is processed in the form of syrups and pastes. And then there is the guava. Guava paste, accompanied by cheese, is a standard dessert all over Latin America.