Brazil, In a Nutshell
December 28-January 4, 2019, along the Amazon in Brazil — I have to say ‘in Brazil’ because this 4200-mile river has its headwaters in Peru and stretches across nine countries. The Amazon constitutes 1/5 of the river flow of all the rivers flowing in all the countries in all the world.
Brazil, which Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral ‘discovered’ in 1500, is the world’s 5th largest country by land mass: Russia, Canada, U.S., and China rank above it. Today it has 210 million inhabitants, most of whom live along the Atlantic coast. When the Portuguese first settled here, there were an estimated 3 million to as many as 10 million indigenous people: today there are 900,000, and half of them live in the Amazon area.
Brazil was the first country to have a ‘sugar economy,’ from the 1500s up into the 1700s, when little Barbados stole their market share. Of course, the industry was dependent on slave labor. Slavery existed here before ‘the white man’ came, when indigenous tribes would capture and enslave members of rival tribes. Slaves from Africa were brought here starting around 1550, and during its colonial period, 4 million African slaves were imported. Brazil did not abolish slavery until 1888 — the last Western country to do so. Today some 50% of Brazil’s population are of African descent; the only country with more is Nigeria.
The Brazilian Gold Rush began in 1695... their Diamond Rush, in 1729. As Portugal’s fortunes declined, Brazil’s wealth in natural resources became more important to the motherland’s economy. This included timber and medicinal plants. Today much of the mining and logging in the rainforest is done illegally. And the new president, Bolsonaro, is not opposed. He wants development, doesn’t care about environmentalism and, consequently, doesn’t care about the 450,000 indigenous people who have always lived here. Scholars believe there are still indigenous tribes deep, deep in the rainforest who have never had contact with ‘white men.’
Some South Americans made their fortunes in rubber — the ‘rubber barons.’ The industry was huge — until it wasn’t. It boomed from around 1850 till 1915. Its demise was due to an English planter-naturalist named Henry Wickham (1846-1928), who ‘removed’ 70,000 rubber seeds from Brazil and brought them to Kew Gardens in London. From whence they were transported and transplanted to Southeast Asia, where growing conditions were actually better than in South America. The Brazilian rubber boom became the Southeast Asian rubber boom. The top 5 rubber producing countries today are, in order: Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, India and mainland China... Brazil is now #10.
Though he never visited Brazil, in 1927 Henry Ford founded a utopian town he named Fordlandia, just south of the city of Santarém. It was designed to be an American-style town filled with American workers and families involved in the rubber industry, plus some logging. Because Model A’s and Model T’s needed rubber tires. Ford did not want to import his rubber from British, French and Dutch controlled companies in Southeast Asia, he wanted his own source. Being a pioneer in efficiency, he wanted it run his way. Ford believed American workers were more efficient than local Brazilian workers who did not share his work ethic. However Fordlandia was short-lived: Labor disputes, rubber tree blight, and the invention of synthetic rubber led to the utopia’s demise in the mid 1940s.
Today the soy bean business has replaced sugar and rubber and has, our lecturer said, ‘transformed Brazil.’ Quite literally. China is now their major market, and farmers are burning the rainforest to create new farmland. Beef is another major export, and ranchers are burning the forest to create new grazing land. Brazil suffered an economic recession in 2014-17, and the government’s comeback strategy is to exploit the Amazon. In doing so, it is destroying it to the tune of 350,000 square miles of rainforest each year. Since the 1970s, that amounts to an area the size of France.
One scientific theory is, if the percentage of land that is deforested reaches 25%, it will not be able to regrow as rainforest — it will become savanna. Dictionary.com defines savanna as ‘a plain characterized by coarse grasses and scattered tree growth, especially on the margins of the tropics where the rainfall is seasonal, as in eastern Africa.’
Next up: Sunday’s excursion gave me a glimpse of Life on the Amazon... which bears some resemblance to Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, and also to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling. Tell me if you agree... #
