Global News Journal

from Reuters Investigates:

Enter stage left — Brazil’s next president?

Not every president has a police mugshot, but it's not so surprising in Latin America.

A special report out of Brazil today sheds new light on Dilma Rousseff, a former guerrilla leader who is likely to be elected the booming country's next president. She spent nearly three years in jail in the early 1970s and was tortured by her military captors. She's come a long way since then.

The product of more than a dozen interviews with Rousseff and her top advisers, the story gives a glimpse of how Rousseff could govern at the helm of a country that, with India, Russia and China, is among the worlds few economic bright spots.

The upshot: while Rousseff is not the leftist-in-waiting that many investors fear, there is legitimate concern that hers could be a status-quo presidency, unable or unwilling to push through major reforms to Brazil's tax, labor or fiscal structure. As a result, there is a risk that Latin America's biggest economy could eventually stagnate under her administration.

Watch Brian Winter discuss the October 3 election on Reuters Insider here.

Haiti and “the bad dream of newspaper headlines”

By Tom Brown

MIAMI – Since my return from Haiti, many have asked me what it was like that first week after its devastating earthquake. Here are but a few impressions:

     ANGER What were the 9,000 United Nations police and troops already stationed in Haiti supposed to be doing there in the immediate aftermath of the quake? It flattened the headquarters of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti, known by the acronym MINUSTAH and killed dozens of U.N. employees, including the mission chief, Hedi Annabi.

     But the Blue Helmets were still visible everywhere, clutching assault rifles as they lumbered around the capital in convoys of heavy white trucks. I never saw any of them wielding picks and shovels. Rather than helping or trying to rescue the living, they clogged chaotic, rubble-strewn streets with more traffic.      “You can’t spell unhelpful without UN,” one Haitian told me angrily.      HOPE

What about Berly Renfort and others like him? A bright 21-year-old I met just after the quake, he looks and sounds like comedian Chris Rock but also has a good command of Creole.      Born in Haiti but a resident of South Florida, he was deported recently after a run-in with the law. Renfort told me he would rather spend 10 years in Miami’s Krome Detention Center than another day in Haiti. But he also said there was hope — if U.S. President Barack Obama could lead the reconstruction efforts himself. Of Haitian President Rene Preval, Berly said, “Who is that guy? Where is he, in hiding?”      For my part, I have some hope for young Berly and others like him, if U.S. officials reached out to him, offering incentives like a return to the United States if he pitches in to help pull Haiti out of its misery. Renfort and thousands of Haitian-Americans like him could prove to be valuable. To start, they could serve as interpreters, construction workers or community liaisons for U.S. troops and others trying to distribute aid in the shattered country.   GRAHAM GREENE

Many journalists may feel like the ghost of Graham Greene is looking over their shoulders as they seek to chronicle the suffering in a seemingly hopeless country. Greene helped put Haiti on the map, after all, when he wrote about the horrors of rule under Papa Doc and the dreaded Tontons Macoute in “The Comedians,” which was published nearly half a century ago. In “Ways of Escape,” one of his memoirs, Greene wrote that “Haiti really was the bad dream of the newspaper headlines.”      THE SCREAM As night fell on my last night in Haiti, a high-pitched scream cut through the din of the traffic. It came from a half-naked boy, no more than about 8 years old and was the most bone-chilling sound I’d heard in my week covering the earthquake. The barefoot boy seemed to be running aimlessly, as he raced past crowds of stunned-looking people on nearby street corners. No one reached out to stop or embrace him, or to find out what was wrong, as he disappeared in the darkness still wailing.

China’s Long March into Latin America

A $16 billion oil deal between China and Venezuela signed this week illustrates Beijing’s growing economic might and political influence in Latin America.

Trade between the region and China has swelled from $10 billion in 2000 to more than $102 billion in 2008.

Latin American leaders — not just leftists like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez but also moderates such as Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — have beaten a path to Beijing and Chinese officials are frequent visitors in return.

China is gobbling up Latin American commodities from soy to iron ore and at the same time eyeing a market of 500 million people while growth in its traditional trade partners remains flat.

And increasingly, China is a source of financing and investment in a continent that the United States has traditionally considered its backyard.

“It is important to recognise the Chinese engagement is significant and is having a significant effect,” R. Evan Ellis of the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies in Washington said at a presentation at London’s Canning House. “Latin American politics and economics are coming of age and the region is looking to a number of players, not just the United States.”

Former U.S. President George W. Bush’s government is widely seen as having paid too little attention to Latin America during its eight years in power. Some U.S. politicians have raised the alarm about communist China’s intentions, warning that it poses a security threat. So should the United States be afraid?

from MacroScope:

Why the BRICS like Africa

There is little doubt that the BRICs -- Brazil, Russia, India and China -- have become big players in Africa. According to Standard Bank of South Africa, BRIC trade with the continent has snowballed from just $16 billion in 2000 to $157 billion last year. That is a 33 percent compounded annual growth rate.

What is behind this? At one level, the BRICs, as they grow, are clearly recognising commercial and strategic opportunities in Africa. But Standard Bank reckons other, more individual, drivers are also at play.

In a new report, the bank looks at what each of the individual BRIC countries is trying to do. To whit:

-- Brazil's immediate intererest in Africa is securing access to natural resources, particularly oil. But is also motivated by a desire to create a new "Southern Axis" with itself at the forefront.

-- Russia is also interested in Africa's natural resources. But it faces a problem because of the sullied reputation of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. So Moscow has also embarked on a rebranding programme within the continent by ramping up its aid programmes.

-- India is attracted to Africa in part because of long historic ties. Commercial engagement, however, is also motivated by a need to guarantee the natural resources it needs for its own growth. Furthermore Africa is seen politically as a key ally in the pursuit of a competitive advantage over its Asian competitor China.

-- For China, Africa provides a long-term partner in its ongoing bid to gain global economic ascendancy, providing it with the resources, markets, geopolitical support, and, eventually, food and social security in the form of a growing and engaging diaspora.

from India Insight:

India, China leaders move to ease new strains in ties

While Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's meeting with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari in Russia captured all the attention,  Singh's talks with Chinese President Hu Jintao may turn out to be just as important in easing off renewed pressure on the complex relationship between the world's rising powers.

India said this month it will bolster its defences on the unsettled China border, deploying up to 50,000 troops and its most latest Su-30 fighter aircraft at a base in the northeast.

While upgrading the defences has been a long-running objective, the timing seemed to suggest New Delhi's renewed fears of "strategic encirclement" by China by deepening ties with all of its neighbours, not just Pakistan but also Sri Lanka and Nepal.

The chief of the Indian air force, reflecting the anxieties in the security establishment, said China was a far bigger threat than Pakistan because so little was known about Beijing's combat capabilities.

Predictably enough, the Indian military moves and statements drew a strong response from China's official media warning that New Delhi's tough new posture was dangerous if it thought it would compel China to cave in. Beijing was in a different league, both in terms of national power, economic scale and global influence, the media said.

On Monday, Hu and Singh met on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the BRIC meeting that followed in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg. Details from the meeting were sketchy, but the Press Trust of India said the two leaders supported an early meeting of a joint economic group to push trade ties. 

They also touched on the border dispute at the heart of the more than four decades of distrust, noting that top negotiators were due to meet in August. The People's Daily said Hu stressed on expanding economic cooperation and investment flows and aims to take bilateral trade to $60 billion in 2010. It stood at $51.8 billion in 2008, the paper said.

from MacroScope:

Capitalism, Brazilian-style

Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva lays out his views  today on how the world will work in the future. It's part of a Financial Times blog on the outlook for capitalism:

Best reads of February

Exotic animals trapped in net of Mexican drug trade - From the live snakes that smugglers stuff with packets of cocaine to the white tigers drug lords keep as exotic pets, rare animals are being increasingly sucked into Mexico’s deadly narcotics trade.

End of an era for the Amazon’s turbulent priests - They avoid taking buses, make sure friends know their schedules, and rarely go out when it’s dark. For the three foreign-born Roman Catholic bishops under death threat in Brazil’s northeastern state of Para, speaking out against social ills that plague this often-lawless area at the Amazon River’s mouth has come at a price.

West risks repeating Soviet mistakes in Afghanistan - The foreign warplanes swooped in just as the Afghan village of Ali Mardan was celebrating a wedding. Bombs slammed into the crowded village square, killing 30 men, women and children. After the smoke cleared and the dead were buried, all the able-bodied men left alive took up arms against the invaders. That was 1982…

from MacroScope:

Winners in a trade war

Trade protectionism -- or at least the threat of it -- has raised it head as the global economy has declined, bringing with it all the historical fears about the Great Depression. Consider the flurry of concern about a "Buy American" clause in one of the U.S. stimulus bills.

It is traditionally assumed that widespread protectionism would most hurt the biggest economies, the United States and Japan. But Barclays Capital analyst David Woo says this is not so and that Russia, Canada, Australia and Sweden are the most vulnerable.

Woo studied various factors that would play on the effect of protectionism on a country, from openness and flexibility to its dependence on trade and it savings.

Japan turned out to be the least vulnerable. "Its relative closeness, relative flexibility of its labour market, and its terms of trade more than outweigh the negative contribution to its growth from a narrowing of its trade surplus in a global protectionist environment," Woo writes.

As for the United States, "the only reason why it failed to take first place is because of its extremely low saving rate, which will limit the scope for domestic demand to offset falling exports."

Mexico,  India and China took the third, fourth and fifth places, respectively. So it's not all about emerging markets.

Enter the new farmers

What’s with farming these days? The humble, even if slightly romantic vocation, is attracting a new breed of participants as investing in farmland and agriculture becomes the latest fad in the world of investments.   With financial markets in tumoil and commodity prices at record highs, traditional financial players such as investment banks and hedge funds, and even sovereign wealth funds of cash-rich emerging economies are increasingly looking at farm land as the next major investment avenue.

The motivations are varied — from pure financial punting to concerns about food security. Underlying all this is the belief that the rapid economic expansion of China and India could add more than a billion people between them to the ranks of consumers of meat and wheat-based products. And then there is the growing demand for land to grow crops for biofuels.

Morgan Stanley has bought some 40,000 hectares of land in Ukraine , while the New York Times reported this month that Calyx Agro, a division of the giant Louis Dreyfus Commodities, is buying tens of thousands of acres of cropland in Brazil.

Chinese firms are said to be locking up farmland and mineral reserves in Africa, while Saudi Arabia and Bahrain plan to grow strategic grains abroad to protect their countries from crises in world food supply.

According to Asia Times, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousaf Gillani during a visit to Saudi Arabia in early June sought $6 billion in financial and oil aid in return for hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural land, which could be tilled by the Saudis.   All this could present some poor countries with both opportunities and threats. With oil prices at near record highs, they could trade their energy security with the food security needs of their investors and bring millions of acres of non-arable land into use. But contract farming could just as easily boomerang if high prices and domestic food shortages create a backlash against such barter deals.