Jun 15, 2011 | Escobar Advocacia
by Tim Rogers.
Everyone should love Brazilian tourists. They spend more per capita than any other nationality. Worldwide, Brazilian tourists shell out an average of $43.3 million a day, dropping a gigantesco $1.4 billion last April alone, up 83% from the same period last year, according to the Brazil's Central Bank. In 2010, 1.2 million Brazilians visited the United States, injecting $5.9 billion into the U.S. economy. Even exclusive ski resorts in Vermont are scrambling to hire Portuguese-speaking ski instructors to meet the unexpected and rapidly growing demand from thousands of adventurous Brazilians who want to samba down the slopes. "Brazil is our fastest growing international market — up 20% from last season," says Chris Belanger of Stowe Mountain Resort.
Not that the U.S. has made it particularly easy for os turistas brasileiros to visit. Instead of rolling out the red carpet for the travelers from the increasingly wealthy South American nations, the U.S. makes Brazilians — and every other Latin American nationality — undergo a lengthy and expensive visa-application process that takes months of planning and can cost thousands of dollars in travel, lodging, food and other expenses — all before leaving the country.(See how an American company cultivated South America's favorite drink).
In all of Brazil, a country larger than the continental United States, the U.S. has only four consular offices: in the capital Brasilia, Recife, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. That means a family living in Porto Alegre would have to spend hundreds of dollars on domestic airline tickets to fly everyone 700 miles to São Paulo, then drop hundreds more on hotel rooms, food and taxis, just to get a visa application interview, which costs an additional $140 each.
While the State Department claims the average international wait time for a visa interview is 30 days, in Brazil it can be as high as 141 days, according to Steve Joyce of the U.S. Travel Association. That's not due to bureaucratic laziness. The overworked consular staff in São Paulo is currently processing an average of 2,300 visas every day, more than any other U.S. consulate in the world. And they hope to nearly double their production level by next year to keep from falling farther behind. Brazil represents the fastest-growing non-immigrant visa demand in the world, up 234% over the past five years, eclipsing even China's 124% increase in U.S. visa issuances, according to the State Department.
Tourist industry officials say Brazil should be on the list of countries whose citizens do not need a visa to enter the U.S. There are currently 36 countries on Washington's visa waiver list, but none of them are in Latin America. Some argue it's hampering the U.S.' economic growth and global competitiveness. For example, Chilean tourism to the United States is down more than 30% from 10 years ago, while globally the number of Chileans traveling overseas to other countries is up 50%. Martha Pantín, communications director for American Airlines, notes that many Latin American travelers have started connecting through other destinations since the U.S. suspended the Transfer Without a Visa program following 9/11. She says the Miami-based air carrier "strongly supports" the extension of visa waiver status to Argentina, Brazil and Chile and is "hopeful that this will occur in the very near future."(See pictures of depressing tourist destinations).
Indeed, the visa hurdles are at odds with a $200 million PR blitz led by the Corporation for Travel Promotion, a public-private partnership created by congressional law in 2010. While much of the campaign will target traditional markets in Canada and Europe — countries where people don't need a visa to travel to the U.S. — there will also be a new focus on emerging Latin American markets that already are playing an important role in the recovery of the country's $134 billion tourism industry.
The most lucrative target is Brazil, Latin America's largest economy. In the past, most Brazilians used to come to the United States looking for work; now they come to spend money and create jobs. The spending would help the U.S. economy tremendously. The American tourism market has recovered slowly since 9-11, but it missed out on a decade of growth, according to Roger Dow, president of the U.S. Travel Association. "We call it the lost decade. If we had just stayed on pace with the rest of the world, we would have generated $606 billion more dollars and have 467,000 more jobs right now," Dow said recently at the Pow Wow tourism trade show in San Francisco.
The good news, he says, is that the problem is still fixable, and has some inexpensive solutions. By just extending the visa-waiver program to Brazil and Chile, he says, the United States could double visits from those countries in one year and quickly generate $10.3 billion in new tourism revenue while creating 95,100 new American jobs. The Travel Association has also proposed a simple, four-point plan for "common sense entry reforms" that Dow says would create an estimated 1.3 million new jobs and bring in $858 billion into the U.S. economy by 2020. He insists the entry reforms, visa waivers and other "trusted traveler" initiatives would not compromise U.S. national security, rather streamline it and let Homeland Security "focus more on finding bad guys rather than harassing the good guys." "If you want to find needle in haystack, you shrink the haystack," Dow says. But, he adds, "If you treat every traveler as a terrorist, [security work] becomes very difficult."
Indeed, despite U.S. visa policies that treat all Latinos as immigrants vying for American jobs and their piece of the "American Dream," many are just tourists from down under have already achieved their own Brazilian or Chilean dreams and just want to visit the U.S. and spend their money here. So by not doing more to welcome them, it might just be Uncle Sam who is denying more Americans a better shot at living the dream themselves.
Firs posted here: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2075717,00.html?xid=fbshare
Jun 09, 2011 | Escobar Advocacia
IN 1983 Jornal do Brasil, a newspaper in Rio de Janeiro, sent a reporter to Brazil’s north-east to cover a drought. He found starving residents eating rats and lizards. Since then, the country has made strides. Yet the north-east remains Brazil’s poorest region: it has 28% of the country’s people but just 14% of its GDP. A fifth of the area’s adults are illiterate, twice the national rate. And it holds more than half the 16m Brazilians who live on less than 70 reais ($43) a month. For decades it has exported workers to the kitchens and construction sites of the rich cities in the south-east.
Recently, however, the north-east has become Brazil’s star economic performer. In the past decade the region’s GDP rose by 4.2% a year, compared with 3.6% for the country as a whole. Last year Pernambuco state’s economy grew by a China-like 9.3%.
Bolsa Família, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s much-lauded anti-poverty scheme, has been important, says Marcelo Neri of the Fundação Getulio Vargas, a research institute. But other government policies have helped more. Three-quarters of the growth in incomes since 2003, when Lula became president, came from earnings, not handouts. In real terms the minimum wage has risen by around 60% over the same period, with the greatest benefits felt in the north-east. The institute reckons that Crediamigo, the state-owned Banco do Nordeste’s micro-credit programme, has lifted more than 1m north-easterners out of poverty.
Related topics
- China
- Brazil
The region’s new-found buying power is attracting firms. Earlier this month Kraft Foods opened its first factory in the area, making chocolate and powdered drinks. Sudene, a government regional-development agency, has helped to finance 52 malls in the north-east since 2006. And migrants from the north-east are coming back home to work. Pão de Açúcar, a supermarket chain, is expanding in the region, and offering north-eastern natives working in its other stores the chance to transfer.
“Right now, the north-east is one big building site,” says Fernando Bezerra Coelho, the federal integration minister. The government is investing heavily in public works, including widening the Atlantic coastal highway. But the main source of growth is the port and industrial complex of Suape, which is being expanded to handle bigger ships. A petrochemical plant, the southern hemisphere’s biggest shipyard and a refinery owned by Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company, are under construction. Over 100 firms have moved in, lured by tax incentives and what should be excellent transport links. Fiat is spending 3 billion reais on a car factory nearby.
By 2013, if all runs to plan, a new railway will link Suape to the north-eastern interior (see map). The federal government began building it in 1990, but it stalled for lack of money and only restarted in 2006. A second branch will travel north to the port of Pecém, which is also being expanded. There, the Ceará state government is setting up an institute to train 12,000 workers a year, and Petrobras is building another refinery. Paulo Roberto Costa, its downstream director, envisages trains taking soyabeans, corn and iron ore from the interior to the ports and returning with oil. Journey times to Europe and America will be three or four days less than from south-eastern ports. The 1,728-km line will one day carry 30m tonnes of cargo a year.
Odebrecht, the Brazilian firm building the railway, recently flew your correspondent to Salgueiro, where its two coast-bound branches meet. The line’s 3m concrete sleepers are being cast there, and the ballast on which they will lie is quarried nearby. Paulo Falcão, the project director, is preoccupied with a novel problem for the north-east: a labour shortage. Even though word of the grand projects dotted around the north-east is attracting workers from all over the country, the demand is such that Odebrecht is training everyone from carpenters and bricklayers to truck drivers and forklift operators itself. Some have no previous construction experience. A fifth of the employees at Salgueiro are women.
“China is now the Japan of the 1960s,” says Eduardo Bartolomeo, the director of logistics for Vale, a mining firm. In that era Japan’s appetite for metals funded Vale’s big investments in rail and sea transport. Today China’s hunger for iron ore pays for its infrastructure projects. By 2015 Ponta da Madeira, Vale’s private port, will be Brazil’s largest by tonnage, exporting 230m tonnes of iron ore a year. The railway from the Carajás mine in Pará state to the dockside is being upgraded to carry 330-car trains, each 3km long, at a cost of 4.5 billion reais.
The benefits, says Mr Bartolomeo, will extend beyond mining. He points to the Norte-Sul railway as evidence. Since 2007, when Vale started to operate the line, soyabean production in the surrounding region has risen by 8.5% a year, and the price of land has more than doubled in places.
The region’s rapid pace of development, combined with workers’ new-found muscle-flexing, has led to some industrial unrest. The strain is also evident in traffic jams and soaring housing prices. In Ceará Adail Fontenele, the state secretary of infrastructure, says that the municipalities around Pecém are preoccupied with finding homes for the city’s new workers. If decent lodging is not built fast enough, slums may spring up instead.
The biggest risk is that the region fails to tackle its other longstanding weakness: poor education. “We have seen infrastructure booms in the north-east before, and they have helped us to catch up,” says Alexandre Rands of Datamétrica, a consultancy. “But the past 60 years have shown that infrastructure is not enough.” The big firms are training the workers they need. But the north-east spends less on schools than the national average, and has weaker teachers. If its next generation is to benefit fully from what today’s is building, the region’s schools must get an upgrade, too.
Mar 20, 2011 | por Gustavo Escobar
Since 2005, when the former president of Brazil, Mr. Lula da Silva, decided that the Brazilian big oil company, Petrobras, would build an oil refinery plant at the SUAPE port area (http://www.suape.pe.gov.br/home/index-en.php), located in the state of Pernambuco, in the country’s Northeast, many changes have started to take place in that region with a lot of business and investment opportunities.
Petrobras (http://www.petrobras.com.br/en/) is the 3rd biggest energy company in the world (PFC Energy – January/2011) and the 8th largest overall company by market capitalization and the largest in Brazil, valued on U.S. $ 164.8 billion (Ernst & Young – july /2009). This means that the announcement of any new enterprise moved by Petrobras has the capacity to attract several kinds of opportunities for
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