Seth Kugel

Seth Kugel covers Brazil for GlobalPost, examining the country's booming industry, immense natural resources, complicated politics and growing role as a player in the globalized economy. Kugel has...

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Seth Kugel's Notebook:

May 14, 2009 09:18 ET

Cheese bread: Brazilian again

After the black bean stew known as feijoada and the lime-and-cachaca caipirinha cocktail, perhaps the best known Brazilian culinary creation is pao de queijo, the little balls of cheese bread made from manioc root flour.

But since 1999, the biggest producer of frozen pao de queijo has been ... American.

Yesterday, in news long expected in cheese-bread-eating and business-press-following circles in Brazil, General Mills announced it was selling its Forno de Minas brand back to its creator, Helder Mendonca. (That's a guy, not a company.) Mendonca had originally sold the company to Pillsbury in 1999, which was acquired by General Mills soon after.

The frozen product is especially popular among Brazilians living in the United States, who don't have the luxury of picking up a fresh-made and dirt-cheap pao de queijo at the corner bakery or bar. Little did they know they were buying a product whose international headquarters were based in Minneapolis.

But that's the way things go these days; how many Americans know their six-pack of Bud is produced by what is now called Anheuser-Busch Inbev, based in Belgium but mostly run by, you got it, Brazilians.

 

May 12, 2009 09:09 ET

Did Brazil's Central Bank hear my orange juice lament?

The Brazilian Central Bank bought up US$92 million yesterday afternoon in an attempt to shore up the dollar against the strengthening real, an apparent reaction to my outcry yesterday about the increasing cost of orange juice for Americans in Brazil. (I apologize for anything bad I've ever said about them.)

But it could not stop another slight weakening of the dollar to 2.059 reais. That's the lowest value in seven months, and bad, of course, for Brazilian exporters; some economists are predicting the exchange rate will soon sink below 2 to 1. It is great, however, for the Disney-World-loving Brazilian teenage set. I would bet my entire devalued savings account that the strength of the real correlates directly to the percentage of Brazilian kids who get to go to Orlando on their 15th birthday. Note to Disney: prepare for traffic on your Portuguese language site.

May 11, 2009 11:20 ET

Imports from Mexico, exports to China, goodbye to dollar orange juice

Last night, the Brazilian Ministry of Health confirmed two additional cases of swine flu in Brazil, raising the total number of cases to 10. The new cases including the second person infected in Brazilian territory, the mother of the friend of a Rio de Janeiro man who had traveled to Cancun.

As reports have noted in the last few days, China is now the top purchaser of Brazilian exports, pulling ahead of the United States in the first quarter of 2009. Lula will arrive with a delegation of government officials and business leaders to China a week from today, and according to today’s Valor Economico, both the Brazilian aeronautics giant Embraer and Brazilian producers of chicken and pork meat have pressured the government to push their interests in China. Embraer has been frustrated recently in attempts to close deals with China, and the meat exporters want to open Chinese markets to their products. The Valor article is only in their print edition, but the aptly named website Porkworld reprinted it.

Meanwhile, the dollar is tanking here in Brazil. It starts the week worth just 2.07 Brazilian reais, down from 2.22 on April 23. That’s good for some Americans, and bad for others ... like me. April 23 is not just when the dollar peaked, but also the day I rented a car for a 17-day trip. When I returned it this morning and charged it to my Amex card, it was $80 more than I would have been if I had pre-paid. (And that doesn’t include the charge for hubcaps stolen in Rio de Janeiro). Fresh off that loss, I stopped off at the cafe down the block from my apartment, where it is getting harder and harder to think of the R$2.50 glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice as “just a dollar.”

April 29, 2009 10:29 ET

Obama in Brazil

After 100 days, Obama maintains his celebrity status in Brazil (and in Latin America, where a recent poll showed him to be more popular than any of the local leaders, beating Brazil's president, Lula, and trouncing Venezuela's Chavez).

Planning troop withdrawals from Iraq was popular, as were overtures to Iran. The first signs of a relaxation of America's Cuba policy were seen as a hopeful sign (not to mention the other “Cuba policy” — plans to close the prison at Guantanamo). But nothing worked better than when Obama certified Brazil's place as a regional power by having Lula to the White House and then, in an event that has perhaps been forgotten entirely in the United States but will live on in Brazil for years, calling Lula “the man” in front of the press at the G20 conference in London. That translates nicely as “o cara” in Portuguese, and even engendered a brief debate on the popular Letterman/Leno-like "Programa do Jo" about whether calling him “the man” and “my man” was any different.

The Brazilian press ranged from thinly veiled adulation to measured praise of Obama's first 100 days, which one paper explained to a perhaps mystified Brazilian audience as “a date considered vital by anxious Washington politicians and journalists.” O Globo vaguely cited analysts but seemed to be expressing its own conclusions as it noted that Obama has been “more inclusive, less arrogant, more conciliatory, less doctrinarian and more pragmatic” than his predecessor. Estado de Sao Paulo said the word that summed up his first hundred days was “audacity,” noting that instead of concentrating just on pulling the country out of the recession, Obama used his first three months in office to advance a wide-ranging reform agenda. (They also quoted Warren Buffett criticizing Obama’s multi-tasking.) 

Folha de Sao Paulo, the third major paper, used its three U.S. correspondents to fill three pages and got its graphics department working on the special report. “Democrat Undoes Bush’s Legacy, But Economy Stalls,” reads the top headline, pointing out that 20,000 people were laid off every day Obama was in office and that just the $800 billion stimulus package alone is equivalent to two-thirds the gross domestic product of Brazil (and thus, of course, way more than the GDP of most countries in the world). It’s a mixed report card, but here (and, I would imagine, in most of the world), the “Undoes Bush’s Legacy” part still trumps all.

April 18, 2009 19:52 ET

Cuba 2013?

Twice Saturday, according to BBC Brasil, Lula pushed publicly for progress in US-Cuba relations, first in a closed meeting of Unasul, the Union of South American Nations, where he said it would be "hard to imagine" the next Summit of the Americas without Cuba, foreign minister Celso Amorim told reporters afterwards.  Then, in softer tones in his afternoon speech, he said that "relations with Cuba would be an important signal of the disposition of the United States to connect with the region."

Lula also suggested that Obama send emissaries to other Latin American countries that had troubled relationships with the U.S., including Venezuela and Bolivia.