(7 of 10)
Some fear that Costa may try to build too much, or that he will be more concerned with winning friends than winning the battle against inflation. He was no sooner in office than he counter manded a Castello Branco order and rehired—at least temporarily—1,500 surplus social security workers who had just been fired. He also suspended a special 15% profit tax that Castello Branco had put through, held up a fare hike on some government rail lines and hinted that he might even double the country's minimum wage to $148 a month. But the military hard-liners are there to see that he does not slide too far.
Uprooting Bushes. The inflationary rise is getting a strong tail wind from the country's primitive agriculture, which is failing to keep up with the annual increase in the birth rate. Last year, Brazil's population increased almost roughly by the equivalent of the total population of Uruguay (pop. 2.7 million). Yet Brazil's farm tools and techniques are so antiquated that the country actually produces less corn and wheat per acre than it did 30 years ago. Moreover, one-fourth of what it does produce spoils before it reaches market because of poor transportation and storage facilities. One of the few crops that Brazil produces in abundance—coffee—is too abundant; saddled with $220 million a year in coffee supports, Costa's government is paying farmers to uproot thousands of acres of coffee bushes and cut production 18% by 1968.
Costa has made a point that he will vigorously push "all measures that increase agriculture and cattle production, as well as raise productivity." To expand Brazil's backward agriculture, he plans to step up the pace of a two-year-old land-reform program, aimed at extending credit to small farmers, providing them with technical guidance and breaking up the country's huge estates. It will be a much harder and longer task to eradicate the inevitable result of Brazil's farm troubles: the sprawling belts of poverty and misery throughout the countryside, where 50% of Brazil's people try to scrabble out a living. In the Northeast, a barren, beaten land more than twice the size of Texas, average per-capita income is down to $100 a year, illiteracy runs 75% and the life span of the area's 28 million people has been cut by hunger and disease to an appalling 35. As the Northeast's Composer-Singer Geraldo Vandre wails:
I've seen death without weeping.
The destiny of the Northeast is death:
Cattle they kill.
But to people they do something worse.
Looking for a better life, thousands of peasants pack up every month and head for the big cities, where they find only deeper poverty and despair. In the Northeast's bustling port of Recife, 40% of the city's 1,000,000 people live in squalid, malodorous mocambos (shanties) strung out along the city's Ca-piberibe River. There is no fresh water, sanitation or electric light, and crime and disease are as oppressive as the millions of horseflies that swarm everywhere. In Rio, more than 600,000 people—15% of the city's population—live in the festering favelas that pock the surrounding hillsides.