Word: braziller
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Paulo, which have absorbed $2.1 billion so far, are the most expensive per mile in the world. Runaway deficits led to more and more foreign borrowing and fueled relentless inflation, which already averaged 20% a year in the early 1970s. When the global energy crisis hit in 1973, Brazil was overextended and vulnerable. Over the next six years, the country had to pay $35 billion, all of it borrowed, for oil imports...
...Brazil is still a country rich in resources. Since the mid-1970s, huge new deposits of iron, manganese, nickel, copper, bauxite and gold have been discovered deep in the Amazon basin. To exploit this mineral wealth, the Brazilians have launched a mammoth development scheme, called the Carajas Project, that includes dozens of mines, a 550-mile railroad and a giant dam on an arm of the Amazon, all to be completed by 1990. The cost will be staggering: $61 billion. But the eventual income from the project, estimated at $14.6 billion annually, may be worth the initial expense...
Only 121 million acres, or about 10% of Brazil's arable land, is used to grow crops. Over the next three years, the Brazilians hope to plant 2.5 million more acres with wheat, sugar cane, soybeans, rice, vegetables and fruit. Tens of thousands of poor farmers are moving into the fertile but undeveloped cerrados savannah region in the central plateau. In one area, the government is giving away 1,250 acres to each of 150 homesteaders...
Fully developing Brazil's natural resources will take more time and money, two things in short supply as long as international creditors are besieging the country. Even if the IMF comes through with more loans, they will be only a stopgap. Brazilian officials are convinced that the only salvation is a fundamental restructuring of their debt. The average maturity of most loans was eight years, and 22% of the debt was due this year. The bulk of this load must be replaced, the experts argue, with long-term credit stretching over 15 to 20 years at reduced interest rates...
...main problem with a stretch-out of Brazilian loans is that it would be followed by pleas from other debt-laden countries, including Mexico, Poland, Argentina, Chile and Nigeria, for similar concessions. Brazil's difficulties are only part of a much larger global pattern, and the major creditor and debtor nations have yet to come up with a coherent long-range plan to ease the debt burden that is crippling the world economy. So far, temporary IMF bailouts on a case-by-case basis have only kept the international financial system lurching from crisis to crisis...