Brazil today and tomorrow

by L. E. Elliott Joyce

Until the development of the meat industry for export Brazil sold nothing abroad as the product of her vast herds except hides, just as in the early days of Texas when only the skins of her cattle were worth anything. Today the cow-hide leather industry of North America in particular is largely dependent upon South American production, the three republics of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay together furnishing fifty-five per cent of all the hides sold in world markets. Now and again the export of hides leaps for reasons that do not mean good business, as when Ceará in 1914–15 shipped out, in addition to her normal sales, the hides of animals that died of the terrible drought to the number of eight hundred thousand head; looking north to Mexico we find another big leap of hides exports after revolution invaded the cattle states, owners slaughtering their stock to avert theft by bandits.

Rise in sales by the Argentine and her neighbours since the European War has, however, been largely on account of increased slaughter in response to calls from the meat market: in two years Argentina has doubled her export of hides, Uruguay has multiplied her contribution by five, while Brazil between June, 1915 and March, 1916 shipped out thirty-seven million pounds of hides as against two and a half million pounds in a corresponding period two years previously.

The total value of Brazilian hides exported in 1915 was $13,260,000 U. S. currency; the amount was thirty-seven thousand metric tons. Of this nearly twenty thousand tons went to the United States, Great Britain taking 6,000 tons, France less than 3,000, and Uruguay 3,400 in round numbers.

War orders account for the marked stimulation of the leather business which is dependent to a considerable degree upon supplies of cattle-hides, the United States alone increasing her exports of leather from thirty-seven million dollars’ worth in 1914 to eighty million dollars’ worth in the fiscal year June 1915–16.

COTTON GROWING AND WEAVING

Cotton is native to Brazil, as to other regions of northern South America, Central America and Mexico, the south of the United States, and the West Indian islands. Wild, or carelessly cultivated Brazilian cottons are despite neglect of such excellent quality that George Watt, in Wild and Cultivated Cotton of the World says that when they are properly selected and standardized they will “make Brazil as famous as Egypt in the production of excellent fibres.” North American cotton buyers, visiting Brazil early in 1916 were astonished to find cotton of long silky fibre produced here, and made arrangements for shipping quantities of the Seridó variety to the United States; England has for a very long time been a purchaser of the same fine qualities of raw cotton, for mixing, as Egyptian cotton is mixed, with the short-fibre product of the United States.

Cotton of one kind and another is grown all over Brazil. There seems to be no region which refuses to mother it. But the best lands, yielding most prolifically and with large areas suitable for cultivation on a great scale are in the centre, on the north-east promontory, and all along the coast to the mouth of the Amazon. Comparatively very small fragments of this belt are under cotton culture, although wild cotton and patches of cultivation of more or less merit are widely scattered; Todd, in his World’s Cotton Crop says that Brazil “might easily grow twenty million bales, but her actual crop does not yet reach half a million bales.” Now, with the encouraging measures taken by the Brazilian Government as well as the enterprise of individual firms and planters, and the new realization of the opportunity waiting for the farmer with small capital but large technical skill, experience and good sense, cotton culture should open up great spaces of land suitable for this well-rewarding form of agriculture. Brazilian cottons or their Peruvian and West Indian kin have endowed the world with fine varieties; it remains for their standardization to benefit the land of their origin.

Cotton was used by the Aztecs for making elaborate clothes, richly dyed and embroidered, long before the Spanish Conquest in 1520. Farther south, the carvings of the Maya show that that race was using textiles hundreds of years previously—as early as the beginning of the Christian Era, if the dates assigned to the Copán and Quiriguá temples are correct. In Brazil, where the inhabitants were much less socially and industrially developed, small domestic use was made of the fibre, but it had its name, amaniú.

Cotton (Gossypium) belongs to the natural order of the malvaceas, claims more kin in the New than in the Old World, and its parents are genuine tropical dwellers; there seems to be little doubt that the first of the fine, long staple cottons introduced into North America were perennials, and that they became annuals only because they were unable to survive the winter cold. Names of cottons grown in Brazil leave the searcher after details rather hazy on account of the many local appellations given them, but the scientist has classified them by the characteristics of their seeds, dividing them into eleven kinds. The first, Gossypium herbaceum, is not a tropical native, was brought in from Asia both here and to the United States, is not common or successful, and so may be dismissed.

G. mustelinum again “is only interesting for botanical reasons,” but is found wild in the hilly interior of Brazil; G. punctatum is said to be identical with the wild cotton of the United States; G. hirsutum is a true native of South America and the West Indies, and is the lineal parent of the “Uplands” cottons of North America. G. mexicanum is, together with hirsutum, which it resembles, grown all over the coastal cotton country of Brazil; it is a small plant with a prolific yield. The writer has seen in the vicinity of Campos, State of Rio, tiny plants of this variety not more than eighteen or twenty inches high, bearing forty and more bolls and forms. It is true that the district had suffered from lack of rain and thus the tendency to run to growth rather than production, the agricultural curse of the tropics, had been checked. The field yielded over a bale to the acre.