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Summary
Cutting-edge industry – Located in southern Minas Gerais state and with only 35 thousand inhabitants, the small town of Santa Rita do Sapucaí is home to a high-technology production cluster, comprising electronics, telecommunications and computer-related manufacturing plants, which have secured to the "Electronics Valley" –the nickname the city has adopted for marketing purposes– the state’s highest GDP per head.
Citizenship – The UN Global Agenda 21, an agreement signed in 1992 by 179 countries that affirmed their commitment to finding ways toward sustainable development, has to overcome its main challenge of establishing a social compact for its implementation. In Brazil, scattered initiatives make it clear that much still remains to be done before the proposal yields wide-ranging and effective results.
Agriculture – As an important back-up activity for rural production, agricultural aviation is facing hard times in Brazil. The problems range from the insolvency of farmers who hire crop-spraying services to carelessness with the pilots’ safety and the sector’s oversight in general.
Brands and patents – Brazil’s greatest inventor, Santos Dumont, who invented the airplane, never cared about patenting his inventions. Today, good ideas keep on cropping up in the country, but few are well succeeded because inventors have no official support and suffer to overcome bureaucratic barriers when attempting to register their creations.
Copyrights – The music market is mutating. Over the past years, CD sales have perceived significant drops, not only in Brazil but also all over the world. The causes, according to sector specialists, are the emergence of new technologies, piracy and illegal downloads.
Angola – Quite large is the number of Angolan women who come to São Paulo to shop with a view to reselling the goods in their country. This modality of commerce has acquired such an importance that many São Paulo city shopkeepers and hotel owners offer these customers special treatment.
Biodiversity – Interest in animal and plant species from Brazil –the country holding the planet’s largest biodiversity– is growing more and more. Many companies, mainly in the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries, are partnering up with extractivist communities seeking to develop sustainable forms of tapping into natural resources.
Women – In newsrooms today female journalists are the majority. In the 1950s, however, there were practically no women working in newspapers. It was not easy for them to break through the blockade and enter a profession at a time when all kinds of prejudice were openly declared.
Historical collections – Recent episodes of disappearances of objects kept in important Brazilian public institutions have revealed a situation common to many museums, archives and libraries: the precarious security and conservation conditions of the country’s historical and cultural collection.
Brazil – The Yuba community, formed exclusively by Japanese immigrants and their descendants, is located in the northwestern region of the state of São Paulo. Founded in 1933 by a visionary who proposed allying the everyday work of the fields with the artistic and spiritual development of its members, the community is facing many challenges today, such as inter-ethnical weddings and miscegenation.
Education – Distance education is growing in Brazil driven mainly by breakthroughs in information technology. Several institutions are preparing educators, methodologies and didactic material to offer this teaching modality, which is often the only learning alternative for remote localities.
Student movement – During the military government, a period extending from 1964 to 1985, student demonstrations gathered crowds and had a strong ideological content. Today, their protests have, more often than not, economic motivations, such as the privatization of education, once almost exclusively publicly funded, and increases in public transportation fares.
Interview – Milton Hatoum, one of today’s most successful Brazilian writers, talks about his works, his sources of inspiration and the privilege of being able to live on literature.
Thematic panel – Social Security Minister Nelson Machado debated, at the Economics, Sociology and Politics Council of the Federação do Comércio do Estado de São Paulo, the social security issue in Brazil. He focused on the account deficit, difficulties in controlling frauds and rendering services, private pension plans and the outlook for a future marked by great transformations in the labor market and in the population’s life expectancy.
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