Brazil today and tomorrow

by L. E. Elliott Joyce

CACAO

Cacao culture and preparation is the great absorbing industry of southern Bahia, where soil and climate, particularly along a couple of river valleys, combine to render the pretty little cacao tree fruitful. Not even coffee presents a more charming sight than a good cocoa plantation ready for harvest, the sun filtering through the light branches, and these, as well as the trunk thickly clustered with the big heavy red or yellow pods, looking something like elongated melons attached, almost stemless, to the strongest parts of the tree. Methods in use on many native plantations in Brazil are fairly primitive, and it is the exception to see the elaborate machinery for fermenting, washing, and drying such as is common in Trinidad; but the cacao produced is good, has a ready sale in a market which never seems to have too much cocoa and chocolate, and has made remarkably good prices since the European War began. Bahia is the great producing state, but Maranhão, Amazonas and Pará also send contributions to the export lists; the chief Bahian centres of production are Ilhéos and Itabuna, which send two-thirds of the crop, the rest coming from Cannavieiras and Belmonte primarily. The groves run inland for more than two hundred miles along the river valleys, full of the red triturated paste which is the base of Brazilian soil.

The cacao year is reckoned from May the first to April the thirtieth, and there are two gathering seasons: the safra proper begins in September and goes on until April, while the summer crop, the temperão, begins in May and has a less important yield. Practically, picking goes on all the year.

Cacao is native to the Americas, but its first cultivation and export from Bahia appears to date no earlier than about 1834, when there are records of shipments of 447 sacks of sixty kilos each. In 1840 the export was nearly 2,000 sacks, and in 1850 had risen to more than 5,000 sacks. In 1915 Bahia shipped about 750,000 sacks, as a result of the enthusiastic planting which has gone on in this favourable region for the last twenty years.

Until the war broke out the average price for six years for Brazilian cacao was about 725 reis a kilo—about seven cents a pound. It was at this price that Brazil sold an average of thirty-two thousand tons. In 1915 the price soared to 1$248 a kilo, or about twelve cents a pound, and Brazil with the biggest crop then on record exported 44,980 tons, a total exceeded in each of the following five years, 1919 showing exports of 93,000 tons, at 1$500 per kilo.

Cacao is a very good business, because there is seldom a surplus in world markets; a demand exists for every pound, and the populations of great centres seem to consume it in increasing quantities; it is a valuable food, against which as yet no analytical chemist has laid one of the charges that seem designed to warn us from most things that are agreeable to eat and drink.

Anyone accustomed to warm climates, with a little capital to invest, and able and willing to wait three or four years for his first returns, could do worse than to take up cacao planting in Brazil.

Agricultural methods in Brazil are in many regions quite primitive. When wild land is taken up, it is denuded by the axe of its big trees, and the small scrub disposed of by burning the land over. Frequently the next process is little more than that of making holes in the ground with a stick, dropping in seed, and waiting for it to come up: a fertile land, Brazil gets her crops with a minimum of trouble. That is all very well for the little owner of a small property, but it has already given way in more advanced districts to sound agricultural methods. Modern scientific agricultural implements of American and European make are commonly seen in the centre and south, but in the extreme north and the deep interior they are more rare. There is an excellent market for small, light hand ploughs, harrows and cultivators, for in some parts of the country, such as interior Rio, the land in the bottoms of valleys is very good, has been neglected because only coffee, planted on the hilltops, has pre-occupied the small farmer, but there is not sufficient flat space for the use of large motor or animal operated machinery. A campaign of agricultural instruction has been inaugurated for some years by the Department of Agriculture, some good statistics and maps and literature sent out, but perhaps less theory and more practical instruction is needed. A recent writer in the Estado de S. Paulo remarked upon this, rather caustically: “... instructions for the culture of squashes—plough the ground with a plough with a disc of such a number, harrow it with such or such a harrow, drill it with such or such a drill; afterwards fertilize it with so many tons of phosphate of lime, so many of potash, and a few kilos of powdered gold; cultivate it with such a cultivator, harvest the crop with such and such methods, and take it to market in a certain kind of motor-truck, et cetera, this ‘etcetera’ meaning that the farmer must hand over his farm to his creditors and go to hunt a job as sanitary inspector....”

Other countries have also suffered from a plethora of agricultural theory, but there is plenty of room for instruction of a practical character and several good agricultural schools in Brazil, notably that at Piracicaba, São Paulo, are leading the way.