The Brazilian Decade
The Brazilian Decade
In terms of a global export strategy, “The U.S. has more at stake in Brazil than in Libya,” AS/COA Vice President Eric Farnsworth told Newsweek.
About 15 years ago, on assignment in Bolivia, I met a pair of local drug-enforcement agents who were kicking back in a hotel bar. The conversation was light and easygoing, until I mentioned I was based in Brazil. “Ah, Braaaazil,” said one of the agents, peacocking for effect. “The land of ‘the biggest in the world.’” I wrote his comment off as Latino envy, that familiar jolt of resentment, which served as the subtext of many conversations about the giant of South America and the neighbors it dwarfed. The comment was also a telling expression of how people viewed the old Brazil, the hemisphere’s large underachiever, a nation that frequently waxed grandiose and then fell short of hype and expectations.
Brazil, Sao Paulo, August 27, 2011.
Much has changed in Latin America since then, nowhere more so than in Brazil. Stable, democratic, stylish, and self confident, this $2.5 trillion economy now has some backbone behind its swagger; it still stirs resentment among its neighbors—Brazilians are the new gringos—but not so many jokes these days. Instead, from inflation control to social welfare policies, from the campaign trail to the catwalk, the state of Latin America in 2013, and in years to come, will most likely be shaped by what happens in this restless country of 197 million. Welcome to Latin America’s Brazilian decade...
Infamous for the social chasm between rich and poor, the region is becoming slightly less lopsided as well. From 2003 to 2010, average incomes in Latin America grew by 30 percent, as some 73 million people climbed out of poverty, according to the World Bank. Once again Brazil is leading the pack. Its innovative cashtransfer program, Bolsa Família, harnesses the latest demographic data to pinpoint aid to the poor, bypassing the traditional scattershot welfare bureaucracy.
Versions of the Bolsa Família are now sprouting up across Latin America and even in Africa, adding “poverty-fiighting technology” to soybeans and iron ore in the portfolio of competitive Brazilian exports, notes economist Marcelo Neri, a social-policy analyst who heads Brazil’s Institute for Applied Economic Research. More than improving their own lives, this rising new demographic is brightening prospects for consumer-goods manufacturers. U.S. exports to Latin America have doubled in the past decade and trade with Brazil is a big part of that spike. “The U.S. has more at stake in Brazil than in Libya,” says Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas and a former Commerce Department official under President Bill Clinton....
