Will Brazil destroy their arable land like China did ? "Brazil is not for beginners" -

Brazil is like an arm without a shoulder, thinking to be the whole body: South America currently is the most sidelined continent in the world, because it never was able to generate the economical gravity to attract business from outside and contribute to a self sustaining South American market. Brazil cannot do anything without merging economically with Argentina, Chile and Peru, as it cannot develop everything to be competitive on everything. Argentina has the large plain, Brazil has the Amazon rain forest and mineral deposit, Peru and Chile has the mountains with metal deposits and access to the Pacific while Colombia and, eventually, Venezuela have large oil reserves and access to the Caribbean sea.
Unlike Africa, South America is not fragmented into a miriad of unstable states and has been independent for centuries, often more then some European countries.
If they just could cooperate like some sort of CEE and coordinate their infrastructures and social development, South America could finally "ignite" a self sustaining economy inside the continent, that would eventually appear on the radar of the world's Business centres.
Otherway, all that south America will ever be is a "pick up" continent for cheap goods, cheap to buy but expensive to trade due to distances. The Geographical area is just too far away and with an internal GDP too small and too pyramidal to bother to seriously trade with. South Korea, and pretty much any small yet relevant nation, show that it is human labor and ingenuity that defines progress, not resource wealth. South America would indeed benefit from integration, but that does not mean Brazil cannot become powerful on its own. Still using SK's example we see a nation surrounded by former and present enemies. Israel is the same. Yet both are developed nations.

You wanna know why Brazil doesn't succeed? Because most Brazilians think that wealth is dug out of the ground, instead of labored for and won through effort. You work with the tools you have. But the keyword here is work . The political elite is only interested in subsidizing the growth and export of commodities (plant food, cattle, minerals), in line with Brazil's historical extractive culture. Geography is definitely the main culprit for Brazil's problems. Much more than any other issue. There is corruption, social inequality and political problems? Certainly, but even many of these can very easily be traced back to geographical problems. The tremendous difficulty with which the colonizers conquered the interior of the country is a great demonstration of that. It took a very long time to transpose the grand encampment (the mountains in our coast) and reach the interior. It's important to note that this is not just some mountains, that can be traversed by a valley. This is a steep elevation in the terrain by about 800-1000 meters, covered in thick tropical jungle. Not only terribly hard to physically transpose and build roads, but also very defensible by native peoples. Tropical diseases also inflicted a tremendous death toll. Old documents can often feel like terror stories, and the Portuguese didn't know why so many maladies were afflicting them, and theorized that demonic forces were at play in the land. Literally, at some point, Jesuits started believing that after the conquest of Europe by Christianity the Devil had fled across the ocean to Brazil. So they were literally the last stronghold of the Devil. Some native tribes practicing cannibalisms help to contribute to this theory. The infertility of the soil, even in coastal areas, made it very hard to increase the population size of the settlements. The only things that could be grown well were sugarcane and cotton, but you don't feed a society with those. They also require huge amount of labor, which was the reason for importing so many slaves. You could feed them poorly and work them to death. The fact that Portugal had a much smaller population than other colonial powers also made it hard to export a lot of settlers. The same difficulties can be seen in pre-colonial times. Most indigenous peoples in Brazil belong to one of two linguistic groups: tupi-guarani or jê. Jê tribes had an older settlement in the country, and at one point dominated almost all of the Brazilian territory. Tupi-guarani tribes originated from the Southern Amazon, and at some point in history started migrating. They followed two direction: one South, following the Paraguay river, going to the Southern coast of Brazil (actually they reached very near Buenos Aires, in Argentina), and then going up the coast; the others migrated North through the Amazon river, then went all the way around Brazil, following the coastline. The two migrations eventually met around a region in the South of the state of São Paulo. As they migrated, they fought the Jê tribes, winning and pushing them out of the coast, and into the Brazilian highlands. But except for some exceptions, they mostly didn't go up the highlands themselves. It was also very hard for them to transpose the grand encarpment, mainly when there were other peoples trying to defend and push them back. Most of the exceptions are tribes that came from the migration that went South, through the Paraguay river, and entered the highlands from behind, thus not having to transpose the grand encarpment. Also, because of the poor soil, none of these tribes could ever increase their population density by much, unlike Andean civilizations. To compound of that, the Northeastern region of Brazil is a semi-arid environment, prone to periodic droughts. While it is not in the drought period, it is habitable, even if still a very harsh environment. Since the droughts tend to take a considerable time to happen, people end up settling there. When the drought came, there was always a humanitarian catastrophe. There is literally documents from the very beginning of the colonization of Brazil documenting native tribes fleeing the drought en masse, all severely undernourished and dehydrated. If the region was an actual desert, people just wouldn't go there. But as it was habitable is a cyclical pattern, it always ended up attracting people, just to trap them. To compound of that, the Northeastern region of Brazil is a semi-arid environment, prone to periodic droughts. While it is not in the drought period, it is habitable, even if still a very harsh environment. Since the droughts tend to take a considerable time to happen, people end up settling there. When the drought came, there was always a humanitarian catastrophe. There is literally documents from the very beginning of the colonization of Brazil documenting native tribes fleeing the drought en masse, all severely undernourished and dehydrated. If the region was an actual desert, people just wouldn't go there. But as it was habitable is a cyclical pattern, it always ended up attracting people, just to trap them.Due to Brazil's infertile lands, for most of our history they were net food importers. Now, they are one of the biggest players in agribusiness, and growing. What changed? In the middle of the last century the government, completely angered by the fact that they had so much land, but it was almost useless, took the right decision. They made up a team of specialists and told them to devise a long term strategic plan for the development of agriculture in Brazil. And so they did. The plan results in the creation of a state company called Embrapa, which is basically an agricultural science research institution. It basically coordinated the whole agricultural development process of Brazil, in partnership with universities and industries. The results were the creation of several terraforming techniques for Brazilian soil, several biotechnological techniques, and several artificially selected and transgenic crops adapted to their environment. As a result, after the results of these investments and research paid off, we quickly became one of the worlds biggest players in agribusiness. Some people counter saying that their agriculture has high costs because it needs terraforming. Well, that's not entirely true. Terraforming certainly adds to the costs, but other things detract from it. First, because of their climate they have year round harvest. They are not limited by winter. Second, some of this agricultural research led to the creation of low cost techniques that greatly improve the productivity of our farms. Third, constant improvement of crops through scientific research is permanently increasing yields. Last time I checked a cost comparison for their agriculture with the USA, our cost were actually lower, despite more fertilizer use and transport costs. To add to that, despite their lands being naturally bad, they do have the largest amount of potentially arable land in the world. So their potential for expansion is no where near it's limit. rivers flow inward...true, for the La Plata river, which is all most people care about. The São Francisco river flows to the coast, and is the main river in the Northeast of Brazil. The Araguaia and Tocantins rivers also flow to the coast, to the North of Brazil, in a huge natural harbor, in the city of Belém. The is also a lot of minor but very significant rivers. Now, for most of our history, the economic potential of these rivers were very small, since the São Francisco river goes through the semi-arid regions in the Northeast, and the Araguaia and Tocantings rivers go through the cerrado. Since these two lands were basically barren, the fact that they flowed to the coast had little importance, so we ended up making damns to generate hydro power. But now the cerrado is an agricultural powerhouse, and growing constantly. Locks are being built to transpose the damn we put in these rivers in the past. They also need to destroy some rock formations at once point, that block navigation. Once everything is done, most of our agribusiness will be able to export through navigable rivers to the coast, to a huge natural harbour. It will be like the mississipi river for us. There is no grand encarpment in the North of Brazil. The coast there is perfectly flat, and with lost of natural harbours. It just wasn't economically viable in the past. But it has because so after we learned to terraform the country. I was suprised to learn that you need to pay taxes to transfer goods between states in Brazil. There's also extremely high import taxes for almost everything. Brazil's economic policy is full of local protectionism. It's policy makers lacked vision and planning, ignored the trend of globalization, failed to position Brazil as a manufacturing and export based economy. As a result Brazil deindustrialized over time and ended up finding itself exporting agriculture produces and resources in the global value chain. Brazil doesn't lack potential. I feel like Brazil has a lot to learn from other newly industrial economies, especially the ones in East/South East Asia and Eastern Europe. There are a lot of good economic policies that Brazil can adopt.


It's not that you pay taxes to transfer goods between states, you pay taxes to move goods. It's called "tax over the circulation of goods", it's very similar to the Value-added tax that you have all over Europe. Sometimes you have to pay a little more when you are doing business from one state to the other because each state has a different fare and you need to pay the difference between them. It's the most complex taxation you can think of and business have to employ an accountant 24/7 only to be able to pay it properly, import taxes are extremely high. It's 60% in the lowest end and can reach over 100% in the higher. The only exception is with person to person transactions under 50 US dollars, in which case the fare is 0%