Lack of Capital for Rural Producers Cuts Jobs in Brazil
Written by Stênio Ribeiro
Monday, 19 September 2005
The Brazilian Confederation of Agriculture (CNA) called attention last week to the decline in rural job offers. According to the organization, these numbers reflect the decline in agricultural income, the consequence of the most damaging droughts to Brazilian agriculture in the past four years.
When only the formal jobs listed in the Ministry of Labor and Employment's General Registry of Employment and Unemployment (Caged) are taken into account, the agricultural sector generated 219.94 thousand new positions between January and July of this year. This is 19% less than during the same period last year.
This is the smallest increase in formal rural employment since 2002, when the Caged registered the creation of 231.6 thousand jobs in the first seven months of the year.
This figure remained practically stable in 2003, when 232.5 thousand new jobs were created in the sector. There was a considerable increase in 2004, when the countryside witnessed the creation of 271.58 thousand new formal jobs.
These figures are part of a public alert issued by the CNA on the crisis that threatens to reduce the country's agricultural harvest, in consequence of the scarcity of capital available to rural producers, according to the head of the CNA's Economics Department, Getúlio Pernambuco. And this "will certainly affect agribusiness as a whole," he says.
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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.