Brazil is not for beginners

The Brazilian journey has often faltered, giving rise to the nostrum that this was a country with a great future condemned to its eternal contemplation. Annual murder figures in the tens of thousands testify to enduring social problems. Tom Jobim, who composed “The Girl From Ipanema,” noted that Brazil is not for beginners.

Still, as Lula has intuited with his astute pragmatism — is anyone else a friend of both Chávez and President Bush? — the tide is flowing this country’s way. Brazil’s future is now. There are five reasons: land, raw materials, energy, the environment and China.

Vastness defines Brazil; the agricultural use of its territory is nowhere near exhaustion. Already the world’s largest exporter of coffee, beef, sugar and orange juice, it is fast increasing exports of other foodstuffs, including chicken ($4.2 billion worth in 2007, up from $2.9 billion in 2006) and soya. More than 220 million acres — an area greater than that currently under cultivation — remain unexploited outside rain forests.

Another fast-rising export is iron ore. China, which is investing heavily here, wants all it can get, just as it wants food (as does India) and energy. Brazil has an abundance of the latter, and could have much more.

Set aside for a moment Brazil’s vast hydroelectric resources and its recent discovery of a huge deepwater oil field off the southeastern coast.

What will count over the long term is its world leadership in plant-based fuels, particularly ethanol from sugar cane, which produces eight times as much energy per hectare as the corn from which most U.S. ethanol is made. Combine that with near limitless farmland, and Brazil’s important future-to-present shift comes into focus.

As Reid writes, “If China was becoming the world’s workshop and India its back office, Brazil is its farm — and potentially its center of environmental services.”

The country’s leadership in nonfossil fuels and the unparalleled biodiversity of its Amazon rain forest make it a natural leader in the 21st-century struggle with global warming.

None of the above would be significant if Brazil were unstable. But like most of the continent, it has become more predictable. China has realized this and is rapidly developing its commercial relations with Brazil and other Latin American countries. The United States has also pursued a range of free-trade agreements, with uneven results.

Over all, however, the continent has been left with a sense of U.S. neglect, sharpened by Bush’s unfulfilled pre-9/11 promise of a new focus that would reflect the presence of more than 40 million Latinos in the U.S. The next president should make looking south a priority, with Brazil as pivot for intensified engagement.

Latin America’s transformation in recent decades has been underestimated. It has been political and economic but also cultural. Deep prejudices against indigenous, mestizo and mulatto populations have been confronted and, if not defeated, undermined. In historical terms, this has been a time of empowerment for the dark-skinned.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/opinion/06cohen.html