Reuters Investigates

Will Brazil be ready for kick off?

Everybody knows Brazil is booming these days. But they don’t always see the dark side of that progress: some of the world’s worst traffic jams, blackouts, and trucks that sit in lines for several days at harvest time because seaports are so full.

Hoping to fix those problems, Brazil plans more than $1 trillion in infrastructure improvements in the next decade, and the scope is pretty amazing. The government wants a bullet train between Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo; a huge new hydroelectric dam in the Amazon; and a railroad criss-crossing Brazil’s northeast, a region that is a bit like the American Deep South in that it has historically lagged behind the rest of the country in investment.

The news isn’t all good though. Reuters did an investigation  of several high-profile projects and discovered that the plans aren’t coming together as hoped. Red tape, corruption, and a lack of leadership mean that as few as half of the projects might get completed on time.

Some of the problems could be resolved by the government, like a reform of procurement laws — which sometimes make auctions take longer than the actual construction process! But some of them are structural, like an unemployment rate of about 6 percent, near all-time lows, which has caused a shortage of skilled labor.

With Brazil due to host the soccer World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016, time is running out.

We don’t know if FIFA President Sepp Blatter read our report, but this is what he said today:

“I would like to tell my Brazilian colleagues about the 2014 World Cup, it’s tomorrow, the Brazilians think it’s just the day after tomorrow,” he told reporters.

Weird weather and the Amazon

As scientists from around the world gather in Cancun for the latest U.N. conference on climate change, Stuart Grudgings reports from Caapiranga, in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, for his special report “Weird weather leaves Amazon thirsty.”

This year’s drought in the Amazon was the kind of thing experts call a ”once in a century” event. Unfortunately, it was the second one in five years.

It’s not just Brazil that is feeling battered by extreme weather. As this graphic shows, extreme events have become far more commonplace in recent years. 

To see the special report in multimedia PDF format, click here.

It’s all Brazil, all the time

Another day, another Brazil story. No, not Petrobras, though that is worth reading too.

Luciana Lopez has a story about soy and shoes. It might seem like an odd combination but the two are important industries in Brazil which is undergoing an economic transformation as it comes to terms with China’s growing global clout.

Agriculture is booming, helped by China’s appetite for soy, but factories that used to produce shoes for the global market are struggling to compete with cheaper Chinese goods.

The question is will Brazil be able to take advantage of the huge benefits from China’s growth without seeing its manufacturing industry wiped out. Read the full story here.

And if you missed our special report on Dilma Rousseff yesterday, here it is again.

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.