Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

The largest herds of sheep — Brazil has some 22 million head — are also in Rio Grande do Sul, and crude wool is beginning to rank as an important export. With cotton, a major export for years, these herds also provide some material for the textile industry, which has grown enormously in the last decade.

The country’s immense coastline and teeming rivers should make fishing and processing fish much more important industries than they are. But commercial exploitation has just begun, and fish still represent one of the greatest undeveloped resources of the country. In the States of Pará and Amazonas there is, for example, the pirarucu, the “fresh-water codfish,” weighing up to five hundred pounds.

The commercial catch in the Amazon runs to only 90,000 tons a year, largely because fishing techniques used in the river are still primitive, as are those of many of the coastal fishermen. The beautiful, traditional jangadas of the northeast are merely rafts made of balsa trunks lashed together. They have one sail, and every object aboard must be tied fast to the deck. The fishermen venture on the high seas aboard the jangadas, but the hauls of fish they bring back are usually so small that it has been said that the real place for the picturesque jangada is the folklore museum.

Some modernization has been taking place in the fishing industry. Several Japanese firms have formed motorized fleets in the south, specializing in tuna and whale. A whale-processing plant has been built at Cabo Frio, a coast town east of Rio. Whales are abundant, and whale meat is being urged on a somewhat reluctant public in the coastal markets as the cheapest form of meat. Lobster fishing has also been increasing, chiefly in Pernambuco and Ceará. Canning factories are being built along the coast.

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Coffee has been subject to as many ups and downs as any other Brazilian resource, but it has certainly not been troubled by underexploitation. For many years it has been Brazil’s best-known product; coffee has been the greatest item of export and the biggest source of income. Brazil produced almost 4 billion pounds in 1960. It supplied the world with nearly half its coffee, earning the country 56 per cent of its total foreign-trade income.

Brazilian coffee had modest origins. Early in the 18th century, a Brazilian stole shoots from French Guiana, where the French had started coffee plantations. The trees were first cultivated in the State of Pará. Later, seeds and shoots were distributed throughout the country. Cultivation remained small-scale until the 19th century, when coffee had its first great phase in Rio de Janeiro and Minas. The cultivation of coffee in these states, particularly in Rio de Janeiro, depended directly on slave labor, and coffee profits made the fortunes of the Rio de Janeiro barons. With the abolition of slavery in 1888 the barons went bankrupt.

São Paulo did not have as much slave labor and was far-sighted enough to encourage immigration. In the crucial years before and after abolition, immigrants — principally from Portugal and Italy — came in great numbers. In addition to this labor supply, São Paulo had its marvelous terra roxa (“purple earth”), which according to the Paulistas, God created especially for the raising of coffee. Also coffee, which already had been named “the vampire,” since within a few years it exhausted the soil, had declined in the State of Rio. In the year of abolition, for example, the States of Rio and Minas produced twice as much coffee as São Paulo; ten years later São Paulo was producing much more than both states together. Nevertheless, even with improved methods of cultivation, the terra roxa of São Paulo in turn began to be exhausted. Coffee continued its march to the south and to the west; in the late 1920s tracts of the precious dark red soil were found in the wild country of northwestern Paraná. Like a green army, the coffee trees of the planters triumphantly took over, pushing back the virgin forest and driving the wild animals farther into the interior. In the shade of the coffee trees new towns were born. A typical example is Londrina, a modern and prosperous city located where only a few decades ago stood the untouched forest. At present the coffee trees are penetrating into the State of Mato Grosso.

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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.