|
China consumes over a third of the world's cotton crop and imports over 40% of the volume traded on the world market. Chinese textile exports totaled US$ 84 billion last year, compared with Brazil's US$ 2 billion, which was still record-breaking.
This information was provided today in São Paulo by the president of the National Association of Cotton Exporters (Anea), Antônio Esteve, who participated in the seminar, "Chinese Agriculture - Evolution, Trends, and its Impact on International Trade," sponsored by the Commodities and Futures Exchange (BM&F) and the Brazil-China Business Council. "China is fascinating in its apparently endless capacity to consume and frightening in the voracity with which it produces," Esteve remarked, referring especially to the Chinese textile sector. "With the end of international quotas, Chinese exports exploded, to the point where the United States, the European Union, and Brazil are discussing restricting the entry of its products," he added. For Esteve, the Chinese textile industry, while it may threaten the sector in Brazil, could also be a big market for the country's cotton producers. "The production and exportation of cotton, a crop that is expanding in Brazil, could increase greatly in the wake of the global advance of Chinese textiles and clothing," he pointed out. Esteve talked about the challenges faced by Brazilian producers to export more to the Chinese. He affirmed that the adoption of safeguards against Chinese products should not have any impact on Brazilian cotton exports there. According to Esteve, the Chinese prefer to import cotton with fewer leaves, cleaner, and of superior quality, and the cotton that Brazil is producing is of average quality. The Brazilian product, however, could easily be improved through slightly more careful harvesting and processing, and, to the extent that Brazil improves its quality standard, the country will have more access to this important market. Last year Brazil exported 330 thousand tons of cotton, of which only 15 thousand, a very low sum, went to China. 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.