Brazilian economic challenges are vast – and the endless analyzes. Experts come up with criticism and solutions to the mountains, including the one who speaks to you. Fiscal balance, tax framework, fiscal responsibility: expressions that occupy headlines, dominate social networks, guide meetings and coffee conversations. But all this discussion, as technique as it may seem, quickly flows into a political, short and often passionate analysis.
Today we celebrate Agro, the phenomenon that represents almost 50% of trade balance and more than 20% of Brazilian GDP (CEPEA/USP, 2024; Map, 2024). But in living with these numbers, we forget that Agro do Brasil is the result of Portuguese Navigations, Entries and Flags of Colony, the last century National Integration Programs, Imperial Bank of Brazil, Embrapa’s creation and so many generations of Brazilian families who have broken the soil, working hard and far from today’s glamor.
But what are the links between the Lusitanian caravels and our crop records? Risk, investment and time.
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These same links explain the creation of Embraer, Petrobras, Itaipu and all the renewable energy matrix we celebrate today. It was these factors that boosted unlikely achievements, such as 14 BIS, Copacabana Palace, Brazil-Bolivia pipeline and Rio-Niterói Bridge. Or, which allowed Brazil to operate the largest railway composition of ore in the world.
Monteiro Lobato and Oil, Ozires Silva and the Aeronautical Industry, Juscelino Kubitschek and Brasilia. Examples so immense that they intimidate our generation. We couldn’t face them in front, as we are looking down and down. Today we discuss – each in its circle and its proportions – how much it yields x reais in fixed income per year.
Brazil has been financially. Finally is a good deal when the country is already built. Ours is not yet. We have more than 49 million people without adequate sewage collection (IBGE, 2022) and about 33 million without regular access to drinking water, the inability to integrate Brazil into the Pacific and export to Asia, metropolises that do not develop because they are congested and an economy that continues to export iron and importing steel.
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We have suffered a great economic and political rupture in the last decade and, with it, our dream of Brazil is gone. Last year, while no relevant opening occurred (B3, 2024). BNDES, which has already injected the economy of 5% of GDP per year, today injects just over 1% (BNDES, 2023). The Cris, who could finance a possible Copacabana Palace 2, would only do so if the building was ready and rented. Pension funds, which have once funded Greenfield projects and much of the national infrastructure – many with success – today can no longer take this risk.
What is missing to Brazil is not capital or savings; It is direction and intention. Fixed income blooms over an unfinished country, and liquidity rests where sanitation, railways, ports, houses and industrial parks are still lacking. The challenge, therefore, is less technical than philosophical: Who will build Brazil when everyone is occupied by cultivating their income?
Like FGTS, which today is the almost only inductor of popular housing construction in Brazil, whenever possible it is withdrawn and all sorts of projects are constantly presented to eliminate it. In the recent past there was even a battle in the Supreme Court to define its profitability, claiming that it was unfair to the worker. Now, being the only funding source with interest appropriate to housing in the country, which is more unfair: the taxpayer is slightly less paid or never gain access to his own home?
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The use of FGTS is the proof that investment induction can be made seriously and effective, a model where the public power acts by inducing investment and credit to the population and private companies develop and hire projects. The world is full of winning models like this. South Korea, for example, has municipal structural funds that finance technology and urban mobility; Arab countries, with HDI and economies smaller than ours, created sovereign funds focused on developing. In addition, public and private pension funds lead infrastructure and innovation in various nations.
Brazil can and owes more. We gather numerous potentialities essential to the world of the future. Looking with greatness to our still underdeveloped ills is the gift of a past we neglect, but our challenge is not even there. The future has come: AI, Green Hydrogen, Global Food Safety – not to mention the unexplored potential of our biodiversity, which represents a new path from the Indian to the contemporary world. We urgently need to reverence and believe again, who invests in the uncertain because it is right to do. The nation comes before governments. No one remembers who ruled the Dutch people when they created the Eastern Indian Company and the most modern investment so far, but we have all benefited from this advances to this day.
The future will not be built by those who only manage the present, but by those who dare to imagine what does not yet exist.
