|
In July, at a meeting in Spain, Brazil plans to present a proposal to convert part of the country's foreign debt into investments in education.
The Brazilian Ministers of Finance and Foreign Relations will discuss options for this conversion with representatives of financial institutions, as well as the establishment of a benchmark to guide other negotiations.
The deputy executive secretary of the Ministry of Education, Jairo Jorge, judges that "the international atmosphere is favorable to this idea, because the world is aware of the importance of education to a country's sustainable growth."
The idea consists in applying on education funds that would be used to pay debts to other countries and multilateral organs (such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the International Monetary Fund), which hold nearly 20% of Brazil's foreign debt.
Brazil's foreign debt currently amounts to around US$ 200.4 billion (545 billion reais).
Proposals already exist for debt conversion on behalf of heavily indebted countries, such as Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia, but they don't cover countries like Brazil.
According to Jorge, Spain's initiative in pardoning 60 million euros of Argentina's foreign debt demonstrated that countries that don't belong to the group of heavily indebted countries are also in need of this kind of support.
The secretary says that there will be no stumbling blocks to negotiations with multilateral financial institutions.
"These organs already hold the view that education is not an expense but, rather, an investment."
According to World Bank data, Latin America's foreign debt was US$ 728 billion in 2002, 63% more than in 1990.
For the representative of the United Nations Education, Science, and Culture Organization (UNESCO) in Brazil, Jorge Werthen, indebted countries face difficulties in investing on social policies.
He says that the proposal to negotiate part of the debt does not jeopardize the country's relationship with other creditors.
"Brazil has an excellent international image, and the world is convinced that it is necessary to make investments in education, science, and technology. The returns are very great."
Translation: David Silberstein
Agência Brasil
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
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.