Brazil is well know for its beaches carnival and Amazon forest and now for its potential for investors seeking low priced real estate abroad The early explorers came to the new world in the 15th and 16th Century in search of cities of gold and the fountain of youth. They came away disappointed finding neither. Unbeknownst to these early explorers they had in fact found both, albeit in unexpected form and failed to recognize it!
The reasons we like Brazil are fundamental. Brazil has all the things the entire world needs and lots of it. Water, food, and energy, the staples of life as we know it are in ever decreasing supply, except here. Brazil is self-sufficient in all these things and is an exporter of all. With food shortages throughout the world becoming more acute each passing year, Soy beans, corn (maiz) wheat, oats, and the like are slowly becoming more precious than fossil oil.
Brazil has taken the place of the United States as breadbasket to the world with scarcely 20% of the available land in production! Brazil is far and away, easily, the richest country on earth and by a wide margin.
Brazil´s offshore oil fields known as “pre-sal,” are conservatively estimated at between 50 and 100 million barrels, putting Brazil on a parity with Iraq and Iran, backseat only to Saudi Arabia. This is with just one field “Tupi,” in the Campos basin currently being explored to be brought on line within the next couple of years. There is a great deal more where that came from.
So we are amused to read investment newsletters citing the 2014 FIFA World Cup, to be played here, and the 2016 Olympic games, also to be sited here, as reasons to invest in Brazil. Yes, that is also nice, but it is not the reason we like Brazil. The reason we like Brazil is the most fundamental reason of all, cited earlier. Brazil has a great good supply of Water, food, and energy.
As if that were not enough, Brazil has El Dorado and the secret of eternally renewable, sustainable life-the fountain of youth, if you will. Brazil has something with the power to transform our world.
What the early explorers did find was a large population settled in cities along the banks of the Amazon. The explorer Orellana wrote an account detailing sailing past cities with houses so numerous and dense there was no space between them. These settlements went on for days of sailing up the Amazon.
Orellana wrote that besides the settlements lining the river, there could be seen in the distance, larger more sophisticated structures like possibly centers of government or religion. But no cities of gold did he find, alas.
The estimated population currently accepted by scientists would have between 1 and 5 million inhabitants in the notoriously inhospitable Amazon region. The question is how did they manage to feed themselves in such large numbers when-as everybody knows-that if rain forest is cleared the agricultural yield is dismal and the soil is played out totally in just a few short seasons. How did they do that?
By the time the Spanish crown sent another expedition to verify what Orellana had seen, there was nothing left. The entire population had been decimated by European germs unknown in the New World. The jungle quickly reclaimed all the days´of sailing past houses with no spaces between in about fifty years´time. An entire civilization was completely obliterated, as the archeological record now shows.
But the legacy of these people who inhabited the Amazon from the year 1000 and perhaps earlier, and whose descendants survive by the scattered handful today is none other than El Dorado.
