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 The Brazilian government announced it has imposed restrictions on 60% of imports "to soften" the impact of the global crisis in its trade balance, which in the first four weeks of January has registered a totally unexpected deficit of 645 million US dollars.
The Brazilian Foreign Trade Department has begun to demand non-tariff requirements and import licenses for 17 trade sectors which represent 60% of imports.
"The decision means the return to the control of imports which Brazil applied strictly in the eighties and seventies," pointed out the prestigious daily Folha de S. Paulo in its Tuesday front page edition.
The measure is geared to reverse the dramatic drop in Brazilian exports and the difficult situation faced by the domestic industry, where in the state of São Paulo only, last December 120.000 jobs were lost.
Actually 650.000 Brazilians joined the ranks of the unemployed during December allegedly because of the impact of the global crisis and the fall in exports, points out the São Paulo publication.
Some of the sectors which now require an import licence are the wheat and flour industry, plastics, iron and steel, copper, aluminum, capital goods, electric equipments and machinery, textiles, auto parts, automobiles, surgical and optical instruments.
Until this latest round decided by the Foreign Trade Development Office, non tariff barriers in Brazil only applied to 10% of imports.
"Undoubtedly it is a protectionist measure. It's a crisis year and the government is looking how to defend itself in trade terms," said Gustavo Dedivits, president of the importers' association.
Roberto Gianetti da Fonseca, head of the Trade Department from the powerful FIESP, São Paulo's Federation of Industries, said the decision "seems a bit precipitated and taken out of fear."
In the first four weeks of January Brazilian imports were 645 million US dollars higher than exports, a monthly report that has not happened since 2000, according to the Ministry of Development and Foreign Trade.
LatAm's Job Losses
The International Labor Organization (ILO) says as many as 2.4 million Latin Americans could lose their jobs this year due to the global economic crisis.
The ILO says urban unemployment in Latin America will increase for the first time since 2003, to between 7.9% and 8.3%.
According to an advance of the Global Employment Trends report released by the ILO regional office in Lima, Peru's capital, the global slowdown will reverse last year's gains in urban employment.
Joblessness last year dropped to 7.4% from 8.1% in 2007, in the region as a whole. However this was in the context of a regional average GDP growth of 4.6%, while the forecast for 2009 is 1.9%.
ILO is expected to issue its full annual Global Employment Trends report (GET) assessing the impact of the global financial crisis on employment, unemployment, working poverty and labor market vulnerability in 2009 later this week.
Mercopress
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)!. Though I am yet to find my degree in a Detergent pack ( 
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.
For anyone who is keeping track of the Stats during the past 3 months and has read about the economic history of Brazil in the 70´s and 80´s, this news does not come as a big surprise. What the article does not say is that it will take about 2 months to get an import license.It means the government is temporarily closing the market for imported goods including the essential ones ( like capital goods,machinery,etc
There are many questions that will be answered only in the coming months:
1) Do the license requirements apply to the products imported from our Mercosul partners?
2) Will it further increase the domestic prices for essential items like beef, poultry and dairy products some of which have undergone almost 70% increase at retail level between Jamuary 2007 and now?
3)Will it delay the reopening of Doha round of talks?
4)Will this arrest the growing number of job losses in the industries ?
It would be interesting to hear the opinion of our fellow bloggers.