Brazil: a case study
By Mike Lamont.
Life in Brazil
What you see takes your breath away and leaves you with a feeling of disgust.
The captain’s voice booms over the speakers. We’re due to land in Brazil in five minutes. “YES!” you say to yourself. Nine days in Rio: sun, sand, parties and a sexy language.
But when you arrive in the outskirts of Sao Paulo, what you see takes your breath away and leaves you with a feeling of disgust.
Brazil is a huge country with a population of almost 160 million. Most live in urban areas.
This becomes apparent in San Paulo: you see whole families crammed into tiny shacks made with bits of iron, brick and industrial refuse. Rubbish dumps are thriving with people.
Why do so many live in slums while the inner city is full of skyscrapers and space-age highways?
Brazil’s phenomenal third world debt (US $100 billion) and the ruthless exploitation by other countries of its dwindling natural resources has created a cycle of poverty.
The dependency theory
Economists link this cycle to the ‘dependency theory’. The world economy is organised in a way that makes poorer countries, like Brazil, dependent on the economies of richer ones, which unfairly dictate the terms of the relationship. As a consequence, Brazil is being stripped of its potential income and resources.
Brazil is home to the largest area of rainforest in the world, the Amazon, source of most of our oxygen. Yet the rainforest is being logged and exported at a rate of one soccer field every six seconds. This area also has one of the largest concentrations of iron ore in the world. Over 165 million tonnes were extracted in 1994, most of which was cheaply exported to places like Germany and Japan.
It’s up to you!
The poverty in Brazil is not well known here.
I think the youth of New Zealand need to know what is happening in the world.
By doing so, I hope we can inspire a generation to right previous wrongs, to do something before it is too late.
This article was written as part of Global Focus a collaborative project of Tearaway Magazine and the Global Education Centre. It was first published in Tearaway magazine and is reprinted here with their permission
Illustrator: Gavin Mouldey
