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 Brazil will offer a ten billion reais credit line from BNDES, the National Development Bank to support activities in agribusiness, Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega announced. He added the funds would go mostly to support Brazil's ailing meatpacking sector and would be offered at an annual interest rate of 11.25%.
The measure, the latest of a series of Brazilian government initiatives to boost local credit circulation, was approved Thursday in an extraordinary meeting of the National Monetary Council.
Brazil's meatpacking industry has been particularly hard hit by falling demand during a slowdown of the global economy. This includes JBS SA, the world's largest beef producer and Sadia SA, the country second-biggest food company.
The decision to pump US$ 4.7 billion in the industry helped to rise share prices of most meatpackers particularly JBS, Marfrig e Comércio de Alimentos SA and Minerva SA, the three leading companies in the industry.
With the credit line "the government aims to avoid further deterioration in the production chain, which has been under pressure" due to weak global demand, high debt levels and costlier credit, Credit Suisse AG analyst Marcel Morares wrote in a press column.
The credit line will likely provide the most benefit to the most indebted companies such as Sadia, Banco Bradesco SA analyst Fábio Monteiro pointed out in a note. Sadia apparently is in talks to sell assets or be taken over after reporting a fourth-quarter loss of 2.04 billion reais (US$ 930 million) on wrong-way bets on the Brazilian currency.
Sadia, which is a popular brand, lost nearly one billion reais (US$ 456 million) in short dollar futures positions starting in mid-September. The losses have put Sadia in a bind, leading Credit Suisse to say that the financial aid "might only provide short-term relief."
"It definitely does not solve the company's urgent need of a capital injection in order to balance its extremely leveraged balance sheet," pointed out the Credit Suisse report. Sadia stock is listed on both the Bovespa stock exchange and in New York.
Mercopress
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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.
Has Robbing Hook not said time and again that developed nations AGRICULTURE subsidies are UNFAIR ???????
Hey...hey !
Never ever trust a Brazilian remains a golden rule !!!!!!!