Commercial Geography / A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges

by Jacques W. Redway

Surinam, in addition to its export of vegetable products, contains rich gold-mines, and these contribute a considerable revenue. Paramaribo is the port and centre of trade. Phosphates and gold are among the important exports of Cayenne, whose port bears the same name.

Brazil.—This state, nearly the size of the United States, comprises about half the area of South America. Much of it, including the greater part of the Amazon River basin, is unfit for the growth of food-stuffs.

There are three regions of production. The Amazon forests yield the greater part of the world's rubber supply. The middle coast region has various agricultural products, of which cotton and cane-sugar are the most important. From the southern region comes two-thirds of the world's coffee-crop. There are productive gold-mines in the state of Minas Geraes, but this region is best known for the "old mine" diamonds, the finest produced.

The Amazon rubber-crop includes not only the crude gum obtained in Brazil, but a considerable part, if not the most, of the crop from the surrounding states. The bifurcating Cassiquiare, which flows both into Amazonian and Orinocan waters, drains a very large area of forest which yields the best rubber known. The yield of 1901 aggregated about one hundred and thirty million pounds, of which about one-half was sold in the United States, one-third in Liverpool, and the rest mainly in Antwerp and Le Havre. The price of rubber is fixed in New York and London.

The cotton and cane-sugar are grown in the middle coast region. The cotton industry bids fair to add materially to the prosperity of the state. A considerable part of the raw cotton is exported, but the reserve is sufficient to keep ten thousand looms busy. About three hundred and fifty million pounds of the raw sugar is purchased by the refineries of the United States, and much of the remainder by British dealers.

The seeds of a species of myrtle (Bertholletia excelsa) furnish the Brazil nuts of commerce, large quantities of which are shipped to Europe and the United States.[65] Manganese ore is also an important export, and Great Britain purchases nearly all of it.

The coffee-crop of the southern states is the largest in the world; and about eight hundred million pounds are landed yearly at the ports of the United States. The coffee-crop, more than any other factor, has made the great prosperity of the state; for while the rubber yield employs comparatively few men and yields but little public revenue, the coffee-crop has brought into Brazil an average of about fifty million dollars a year for three-quarters of a century.

Cattle products also afford a considerable profit in the vicinity of the coffee-region. The hides and tallow are shipped to the United States. For want of refrigerating facilities, most of the beef is "jerked" (or sun-dried), and shipped in this form to Cuba.

The facilities for transportation, the rivers excepted, are poor. The Amazon is navigable for ocean steamships nearly to the junction of the Ucayale. The Paraguay affords a navigable water-way to the mouth of Plate River. Rapids and falls obstruct most of the rivers at the junction of the Brazilian plateau and the low plains, but these streams afford several thousand miles of navigable waters both above and below the falls.