At 20:22 14/05/2001 -0700, you wrote:
>Burning issue for coffee growers
>
>Big players are the winners during surplus or scarcity
>Special report: globalisation
>
>Charlotte Denny and Alex Bellos in Rio de Janeiro
>Tuesday May 15, 2001
>The Guardian
............................................
In Colombia and Brazil, farmers were encouraged to
>switch from growing coca - the raw ingredient for cocaine - to coffee.
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This is a grave error. Coca was never grown in Brazil. The only drug crop of economic relevance (though illegal, including the medical one) is marijuana, and, even so, it is cultivated in a certain area far away from the coffee producing ones and from the frontiers with Colombia.
Furthermore, the Guardian's news induce the readers to another mistake.
Though Brazil still is the second or third world largest producer, coffee has not the political and economic importance that it once had between 1870/1960. The country doesn't depend upon it anymore. Coffee growers, however big ones, are now a shadow of their own history. They were called
"coffee barons", since almost all the new barons instituted in the second half of the Brazilian monarchy were big coffee farmers, but even "plebeian" farmers retained this name, because they continued to exert a very important political influence in the pristine republican times.
The "coffee barons" also played an important role in the first waves of industrialization in Brazil, for investing their profits in the country. The best known example was count Francisco Matarazzo (a count from Vatican nobilty, not from the Luso-Brazilian monarchy), who was both a rich coffee grower and a leading industrialist. Now, what seems to be a joke: one of his great-grandsons is a São Paulo state senator elected by the WORKERS Party (PT), the largest left-wing party of Latin America. Oh, he belongs to the PT's Social-Democratic half, not to the Marxist one...
The Guardian article is an interesting, however short, report on the vicious circle linkages among the dependency upon the world market, monoproducing and financial capital.
R. Magellan