INTERNATIONAL LABOUR OFFICE

STUDIES AND REPORTS
Series B (Social and Economic Conditions) No. 25

Some Social Aspects
of

Present and Future Economic Development
in Brazil
By

FERNAND MAURETTE
Assistant Director of the International Labour Office

GENEVA
1937
Published in the United Kingdom
For the INTERNATIONAL LABOUR OFFICE (LEAGUE OF NATIONS)
By P . S. K I N G & SON, Ltd.
Orchard House, 14 Great Smith Street, Westminster, London, S.W. 1

P R I N T E D BY
ATAR, GENEVA

CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION

5

PART ONE
BASIC ECONOMIC PBOBLEMS
CHAPTER I :

Potentialities

CHAPTER I I :

Population

of the Country

7
10

CHAPTER I I I : Agriculture in Brazil
Agricultural Holdings
Visits t o Agricultural Undertakings
Development of Brazilian Agriculture

14
15
17
22

CHAPTER I V : Industry in Brazil
Visits t o Undertakings
Development of Brazilian Industry: Sâo Paulo.

31
31
37

CHAPTER V :

Economic Conditions in Brazil and the Social Problems
arising out of Jhem
42
PART TWO
SOCIAL PBOBLEMS

CHAPTERI:

Conditions of Employment
Conditions of Employment in Agriculture . . . .
Conditions of Employment in Industry . . . .

CHAPTER I I : Land Settlement
Various Types of Settlement
Present Problems of Land Settlement
CHAPTER I I I : Immigration

Importance of Immigration in Brazil
Present Needs
Principles of Present Policy
Internal Migration
Foreign Immigration
Japanese Immigration
CONCLUSIONS

45
45
53
57'
57
64
71

71
73:
75
79
81
9097

INTRODUCTION
The present volume is simply a report submitted to the
Governing Body of the International Labour Office as the
outcome of a three weeks' visit to Brazil. Modest in bulk
and cautious in tone though it is, it might seem pretentious
after so short a time spent in so large a country had not that
time been spent under very special conditions.
I visited Brazil at the invitation of the Federal Government, and in particular of Mr. Macedo Soares, then Minister
for Foreign Affairs. At the seat of the Federal Government
I was in contact and had long and fruitful conversations with
all those who were in a position to give me information and
assistance in my investigations and conclusions. My all too
brief journeys to certain parts of the country were carefully
planned to avoid any possible loss of time; and thanks to the
support of the Federal Goverment and to the intelligent assistance of local authorities and personalities, I was able to gather
an ample supply of selected material, printed, written and oral.
This is one reason which leads me to hope that this brief
survey may be found to contain more matter than it would
have been possible to assemble in the course of so short a
journey without the intelligent assistance I actually received 1.
1

It would take several pages of this report to mention every
individual and institution from whom I received active and valuable
assistance. All of them will find in this report traces of what they
told or showed the writer. I can only express my gratitude publicly
here to those persons without whose support this study would never
have seen the light of day: President VETULIO VARGAS; Mr. MACEDO
SOARES, who, as I have said, was the deus ex machina of the journey;
Mr. AGAMEMNON MAGALHAES, Minister of Labour; Mr. ODILON BRAGA,
Minister of Agriculture; Mr. A. BANDEIRA DE MELLO, Director-General
of Labour; Mr. D. PINHEIRO MACHADO, Director of Emigration;
Mr. ALVARO VIANNA, Director of Agriculture; Mr. ARMANDO DE SALLES
OLIVEIRA, Governor of the State of Säo Paulo; Mr. JORGE STREET,
Director of Labour, and Mr. HENRIQUE DORIA, Director of Emigration
of the same State. I should also like to mention those who were my
guides and companions for part or all of the journey: Mr. ROBERTO
MENDES GONÇALVÊS, a high official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
and Mr. TANCRÊDE DE SOUZA, correspondent of the International
Labour Office. Although this list is far from complete, the many
persons who gave me their assistance and who are not mentioned here
may be assured that none of them have been forgotten. And lastly,
my cordial thanks are also due to my collaborator, Dr. ENRIQUE SIEWERS,
of the Unemployment, Employment and Migration Section of the
International Labour Office, whose attentive, enlightened and loyal
companionship I enjoyed throughout the whole of my journey.

— 6 —
The second reason is that, despite the many temptations
assailing an inquisitive eye, an attentive ear and a hungry
note-book in a country with so rich a variety of aspects, I
deliberately held to my purpose, which was to elucidate as
many as possible of the social aspects of present and probable
future economic development in Brazil. Here again, I was
unable to complete the whole of my task, but I pursued my
investigations as far and as thoroughly as possible in a single
direction along two parallel lines: investigation of the effects
of the economic development of this great country on the
conditions and possibilities of human labour, and investigation
of the probable effects of the present conditions and possibilities
of this labour on the economic development of future years.
This report is therefore divided into two parts which are
closely linked and interrelated. The first deals with some of
the economic problems of the day and the social conditions
which form their background, and the second with current
social problems and the influence of economic conditions
upon them.

PART ONE
BASIC ECONOMIC PROBLEMS

CHAPTER I
POTENTIALITIES OF THE COUNTRY

There is no need to describe once again the vast and varied
potentialities offered by Brazil, but a few facts may be recalled
which have long been familiar and are confirmed by every
fresh advance made by civilisation in that huge country.
It will be remembered that the area of Brazil is over 8%
million square kilometres, and that it measures about 4,300
kilometres at its widest part both from North to South and
from East to West. The Brazilians like to point out that
their country comprises one-twentieth of the whole land
surface of the globe; that it covers a bigger area than the two
next largest Latin American countries, the Argentine Republic
and Mexico, together with the territories of France, Spain,
Germany, Poland, Great Britain, Italy, and its mother-country
Portugal. If it is also remembered that Brazil extends over
more than 40 degrees of latitude from the equatorial to the
temperate zone, that it comprises every variety of climate
(except polar conditions) whether maritime or continental, and
finally that its vast territory, which is comparable only to that
of the U.S.S.R., China, the United States, Australia and
Canada, comprises a far smaller area of desert than any of
these other five countries, some idea will be obtained of the
boundless potential riches of Brazil, as regards both quantity
and variety of vegetable and animal production, including
timber, plants of all kinds, various crops, and stock-raising.
Owing to the natural wealth of the vegetation in the tropical
and subtropical parts of Brazil, there was for a long time a
tendency in most of the country to leave the task of feeding

— 8 —
the population entirely to nature without requiring any persistent effort of work or adaptation from the inhabitants
themselves. It is often cited as an illustration of this that the
many species of palms in the tropical zone supply the inhabitants with every possible kind of product, including food —
bread, milk, vegetable fats, fruit, drinks — textile fibres, fuel,
wood, and even practically ready-made vessels in the form of
calabashes. It is not long since a Brazilian was able to say
to Albert Thomas with a touch of irony but not without some
show of reason: "Here we have the sun and bananas, and so
the social question is solved." But this is a lazy half-truth to
which day-by-day reality is more and more giving the lie in
a country that is determined on action and on taking its place
in the civilised world. Nevertheless it is true that this vast
and wealthy land offers wide and varied scope for agricultural
development.
There is also scope for industrial development. Not only
do a number of raw materials, and above all, textiles — cotton,
wool, various fibres, oleaginous plants — figure among its
vegetable and animal products in addition to foodstuffs, but
Brazil also has large mineral resources: its wealth of precious
ores, gold and precious stones will possibly be eclipsed within
a few years by its production of useful minerals. The State
of Minas Geraes is even now said to have the largest deposits
of iron ore in the world, and the progress already made in
industrial development in the State of Säo Paulo will be described later in this report.
Thus the possibilities of production in Brazil are as varied
as they are extensive. Their development depends, however,
on certain definite conditions.
These conditions are determined by the very vastness and
richness of the land itself.
The first is the conquest of distance. This is the problem
which arises in all very large countries; it has confronted the
United States and Canada in the past, and now faces Brazil,
as well as China and the U.S.S.R. It is not enough that latent
wealth should be available in the soil and underground; facilities
are also necessary for removing if from where it lies and transporting it to those places within the country or abroad where
it can be consumed. For this purpose roads are necessary,
and above all railways. At the present time, however, Brazil
has only some 33,000 kilometres of railways, representing rather

— 9 —
less than two-fifths of a kilometre per 100 square kilometres,
as compared with 4.6 kilometres per 100 square kilometres in
the United States, 9.8 in France, and 12 in Great Britain and
Germany. The conquest of distance which has now been
achieved in some of the States in the temperate zone such as
Rio de Janeiro, Sào Paulo and Minas Geraes, and in the southern
States, which are moreover smaller in extent, is still in its
initial stages in the interior of the country and in the northern
States, where, owing to the equatorial climate, the vast basin
of the Amazon is covered with a tall, dense, and almost uninterrupted expanse of forest.
But this conquest of space is useless, or practically so,
unless it is consolidated and permanently maintained. In a
country in which two-thirds of the land is at the mercy of
luxuriant and all-invading vegetation, a road which is not
regularly kept up, or an estate which is not regularly cultivated,
is rapidly overwhelmed; if development is interrupted for a few
years^ everything has to be begun again from the beginning.
Further, although a settlement in the interior of the country
may be endowed with the best possible economic equipment
— being properly cleared, irrigated, and provided with good
housing and local roads — its development will be difficult and
precarious if it is cut off from the consumption or export centres
by undeveloped territories. Continuous occupation and development of the country, in space as in time, is one of the primaryconditions for the economic exploitation of all these resources.
This condition implies a further one: that of population,.
dealt with in the following chapter.

CHAPTER II
POPULATION

Compared with the area of the country, the population of
Brazil is very small. The last general census, taken in 1920,
gave the total population as only 31 million. Until 1935, the
Federal authorities appear to have estimated the current size
of the population on the basis of an annual increase of about
3 per cent. Estimated by this method, the population of
Brazil in 1935 was over 45 million. But it is now generally
Tecognised that this estimate is too high and that it should be
reduced to not more than 42 million, or about the same as the
population of France in an area fifteen times larger. The
average density of the population is 5 persons per square kilometre, whereas of the five countries mentioned above as being
comparable with Brazil in size, the density of the population
in China is 41, in the United States 26, and in the U.S.S.R. 8.
Only Canada and Australia have a still sparser population, but
they also have a much smaller area of cultivable land than
Brazil.
No doubt the population of Brazil has grown considerably,
especially during the past fifty years. Between 1830 and 1930
it increased seven or eightfold; but it must not be forgotten
that during the same period the population of the United
States had become 24 times larger. Since 1872 the population
•of Brazil has increased as follows:
1872
1890
1900
1920
1930
1935

10,112,000
14,334,000
17,318,000
30,635,000
40,477,000
42,000,000

The figures show an advance which, though steady, is
comparatively slow. The increase appears still more modest
when it is remembered that it has benefited the different parts
of Brazil very unequally, and when the real possibilities of
settling the country are considered.

— 11 —
In the coastal States, from Pernambuco and Bahia to Rio
Grande do Sul, the density of population varies from 11 to 45
persons per square kilometre, excluding the Federal District,
.'which consists solely of the town of Rio de Janeiro and is therefore much more closely inhabited. In the States in the interior
oí the country, on the contrary, the density of the population
is nowhere higher than 4 persons per square kilometre and is
as low as 1 person to every 4 square kilometres in the most
westerly States.
Nowhere is this unequal distribution of the population more
evident than in the State of Säo Paulo, which will frequently
be taken as an example throughout this report, since in many
ways it illustrates the lines along which the other Brazilian
States should develop. The number of immigrants landed at
Santos, the port of Säo Paulo, from the beginning of the oversea immigration movement until 1930 represented 57 per cent.
of all immigrants to Brazil. It is true that all the immigrants
landed at Santos did not remain in the State of Säo Paulo, but
that State nevertheless attracted the largest proportion of the
newcomers. In 1872 the State of Säo Paulo contained 8.3 per
cent, of the total population of Brazil, and in 1935 15.7 per
cent., with an area of rather less than 3 per cent, of the whole of
Brazil. The population of the capital of the State, the city
of Säo Paulo, which in 1934 had 1,060,000 inhabitants, doubles
every fifteen years. What is said here about Säo Paulo applies
to a lesser extent [to the other Brazilian States bordering on
or near the sea — Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catharina, Paraná,
Minas Geraes, Rio de Janeiro, and Espirito Santo — and even
to the equatorial States extending to the mouth of the Amazon.
The four regions in which industrial production has already
iegun to develop — the Federal District, the States of Rio
de Janeiro, Minas Geraes, and Säo Paulo — alone account for
43 per cent, of the whole population of Brazil, although they
cover only a little more than 10 per cent, of its territory.
But although this unequal density of the population throws
the emptiness of the land in the interior into relief, it does not
mean that even the coastal or semi-coastal States have a population large enough to exploit their resources to the full. No
doubt it is an idle game to estimate, as Ratzel did in the nineteenth century and Fischer at the beginning of the twentieth,
the population capacity of a country on the basis of its natural
resources above and below ground without regard to the other

— 12 —
factors, such as means of communication, public works, credits,
etc., necessary to ensure their development and consequently
to allow the land to be adequately settled. These estimates
are valueless unless compared with similar estimates for other
countries. In this connection, it may be recalled that, according
to Fischer, whereas Argentine could support a population of
150 million (its present population being 14 million), the
U.S.S.R. 220 million (present population over 160 million),
China 475 million (present population probably about 450
million) and the United States 500 million (present population
125 million), Brazil, which now has 42 million inhabitants,
could support 900 million, or a population 21 times larger than
its present one. These figures are mentioned merely to indicate
the magnitude of the population capacity of Brazil as compared
with other countries of similar size.
It may indeed be said that of all the big Latin American
countries, Brazil is, as regards either the inland States or even
only the coastal States, that in which after fifty years of immigration there remain by far the largest vacant areas of fertile
land and unexploited mineral resources. Thanks to the abundance of land capable of development, Brazil has been able
during the past fifty years to admit and maintain millions of
immigrants, as will be seen below. The same factors may
also enable it to admit the further huge contingents of human
beings necessary for the full exploitation of the country, if this
is to be carried out rapidly.
But before these prospects can be translated into fact, after
a period in which immigration, at least from Europe, has been
almost entirely suspended in consequence of the depression,
and doubtless also of the nationalistic policy pursued by some
European countries, the following two questions must be
answered :
(1) Does Brazil really wish to develop its economic potentialities rapidly, steadily and fully, by rapidly increasing its
population through large-scale foreign immigration, or does it
prefer to progress at a slower rate, drawing the necessary
human labour solely from the excess of births over deaths and
from internal migration from regions temporarily neglected to
those selected for immediate development ?
(2) If the first of these two methods is adopted, is Brazil
willing and able to offer to its future immigrants the living

— 13 —
conditions which they will undoubtedly demand, since it is
impossible to find to-day, at least in Europe, men or families
ready to make long journeys with the sole prospect of satisfying
their elementary needs of food and shelter, as they were still
willing to do until about 1920 ?
An attempt will be made to reply to these two questions
in the second part of this study.

CHAPTER III
AGRICULTURE IN RRAZIL

Agricultural production is the principal occupation in Brazil
and is likely to remain so for a long time to come, if not for ever.
The country's population represents about 2 per cent of the
total population of the globe. Although its output of rice is only
1.2 per cent, of world production, and that of wheat 0.1 per cent.,
Brazil already supplies 4 per cent, of the cotton (and its cotton
output is rising both absolutely and relatively from year to year),
4.5 per cent, of the maize and tobacco, 6 per cent, of the sugar
cane (and this, like the cotton output, is steadily growing),
15 per cent, of the cocoa, 55 per cent, of the coffee, and 60 per
cent, of the maté produced annually throughout the world.
Some of these products are consumed wholly or almost
wholly on the home market; these include maize, wheat, rice,
and, for the time being, most of the maté, cotton, and sugar
crops. As regards the last-mentioned products, however, Brazil
aims at becoming a great exporting country; it already holds
sixth place in the world production of cotton, after the United
States, India, the U.S.S.R., China, and Egypt, and fifth place
for sugar, after India, Cuba, the Netherlands Indies, and the
Philippines. Other products are already produced for export
on a large scale ; they include coffee, cocoa, citrus fruits, bananas,
and tobacco. It is common knowledge that Brazil is far ahead
of all other countries in the world production of coffee, the
cultivation of which has been the greatest economic problem of
Brazil during the past 40 years. Its output of cocoa is second only
to that of the Gold Coast and higher than that of Nigeria. As
regards oranges, its exports hold fourth place after the United
States, Spain, and Italy, and seem likely to rise to first place in a
very short space of time. The same applies to bananas, Brazilian
exports of which are exceeded only by the Canary Islands and
are already larger than those of Guatemala. And lastly, as
regards the production of tobacco, Brazil is surpassed only
by India and the United States.

— 15 —
It may be added that Brazil also grows certain specialities
of its own, of which it has the exclusive monopoly. These are
guaranà, which furnishes a drink used throughout South
America; carnaùba, which yields wax; babassú and Brazil nuts,
from which commercial oils are obtained. Other oleaginous
plants, such as sesame, castor oil, and above all, the " t o u n g " ,
which has recently been introduced from the Far East, are
beginning to be cultivated on a large scale in the subtropical
region. Finally, the largest herds of cattle in the world,except
for those in India, are to be found inBrazil, chiefly in the Southern
States and on the high central plains ; these supply Brazil with
draught and saddle animals and leather, and are beginning to
furnish meat for the refrigerating plants and preserving factories
of Santa Catharina and Rio Grande do Sul.
I shall revert to some of these products later in order to
enquire into the influence they may have on the demographic
and social conditions which are the main concern of this report.
All that I have tried to do here is to give some notion of the
extent of agricultural production, both vegetable and animal^
in Brazil.
AGRICULTURAL HOLDINGS

Even to-day large agricultural estates predominate throughgut the cultivated part of the country.. It is easy to prove the
truth of this statement, by taking as an example the State of
Sào Paulo, which I studied with particular care. The choice
of this example is not an arbitrary one. In the first place, Sao
Paulo is the biggest agricultural State in Brazil, supplying as it
does 17.5 per cent, of the sugar, 28.3 per cent, of the maize,
31 per cent of the cotton, 33.5 per cent, of the beans, 43 per cent
of the oranges, 49.6 per cent, of the rice, and 65 per cent, of the
coffee produced by the whole of Brazil. Above all, however,
Sào Paulo is the most densely populated and advanced State
in the Federation. If, in spite of the singularly dense population and high standard of living obtaining in this State, the
proportion of large estates there remains high, this proportion
is likely to be still higher in other States where a sparser
population and a lower standard of living imply a priori a
still more concentrated system of land tenure.
In Brazil a holding of less than 60 hectares (25 alqueires) is
regarded as a small holding, one of between 60 and 240 hectares
as a medium-sized holding, and anything above 240 hectares

— 16 —
as a large estate. On this basis there is in the State of Säo Paulo
a preponderance of small holdings (61 per cent.) in the immediate
vicinity of the capital, these holdings being engaged in cultivating
fruit and vegetables, cereals and maize, and raising dairy
animals to supply the needs of the city.
The proportion of small holdings is still fairly high, although
much lower than in the Säo Paulo area, in the regions adjacent
to the two railways running from Säo Paulo to Rio de Janeiro
and to the north-west, and in the coastal plain surrounding the
port of Santos, where the tropical heat and damp are favourable
to the cultivation of bananas and rice, both products which can
be grown on small or medium-sized holdings. In these three
regions small holdings represent a proportion of 28.6, 33.2,
and 37.9 per cent, respectively, and medium-sized holdings 28.6,
26.3, and 32.4 per cent.
As soon as the interior of the tableland is reached, however,
large estates again predominate. Even in the region around
Campinas they represent 61.5 per cent, of all developed land,
although there is a fairly high proportion of small and mediumsized holdings in the immediate vicinity of the town, which,
with its 100,000 inhabitants, offers an important market for
fruit and vegetable produce. The proportions are more or less
similar in all parts of the interior; in the neighbourhood of
Araraquara, Rio Preto, and Ribeirào Preto large estates form,
according to the district, between 52 and 79 per cent, of all
property.
To find small or medium-sized holdings in any considerable
numbers, or rather holdings without any fixed boundaries and
limited only by the scarcity of the labour available to cultivate
them, one must penetrate far inland to the borders of Paraná,
where, except at certain spots, there are no properly equipped
development schemes, no systematic settlement and no land
survey, but only more or less isolated pioneers who carry on at
the confines of the civilised zone the out-of-date tradition of the
heroic age of immigration and settlement, when the State itself
recognised occupation as a valid title to ownership.
The persistent survival of large estates in Brazil is explained
by the system on which the land was originally distributed. They
are relics of the large domains or sesmarias granted to white
settlers by the Portuguese Crown and developed with the aid
of Indians, and especially of black slave labour imported from
Africa. It was not until about fifty years ago that, owing to the

— 17 —
mass imimgration of European settlers, some of these domains
began to be broken up, either for direct sale to the immigrants,
or, more often, with a view to the establishment of settlements
by private, and later public, enterprise. Generally speaking,
the breaking-up of the land into medium-sized and shall holdings
was promoted by the five factors given below in ascending order
of importance :
1. Official settlement schemes, undertaken by the public
authorities with a view to installing immigrants on small
holdings ;
2. Private settlement schemes, oganised for the same
purpose by companies;
3. The granting by some of the big estate owners of parcels
of their land to cultivators, who were thus established
close to the estates and furnished a ready supply of labour
for seasonal work;
4. The organisation of chácaras or small market gardens for
supplying a neighbouring town, such as Sao Paulo, Santos,
Campinas, Rio de Janeiro, Petropolis, Bello Horizonte,
etc.;
5. The decay of some of the big plantations or fazendas
owing to the exhaustion of the soil which made it impossible to continue extensive cultivation, the reconditioning of the soil requiring care and the use of fertilisers
beyond the scope of the management of a large estate.
These, then, are the causes of the present developments.
The rate of the latters' progress naturally depends on a number
of conditions, prominent among which are the organisation of
credit, the carrying out of public works and equipment work,
and above all, a fresh influx of population. The system of
land tenure in Brazil is, in short, evolving at the present time
between the two poles of the large estate or fazenda and the
small holding, which usually forms part of a settlement. A brief
description of the examples of both these types which I was able
to visit is given below.
VISITS TO AGRICULTURAL UNDERTAKINGS

I was able to pay detailed visits to three large plantations
or fazendas, all in the State of Säo Paulo, and two settlements
2

— 18 —
organised by the Federal authorities, one in the State of Rio de
Janeiro, the other in the Federal District.
Fazendas. — The fazendas I visited were those of Chapadäo,
Itaquere, and Brejào. Each of these represents a special type
of organisation among Brazilian plantations.
The Chapadäo plantation is scarcely one kilometre from
Campinas, a town of over 100,000 inhabitants which is one of the
chief agricultural markets of Brazil and the seat of the Agronomic Institute of the State of Sào Paulo, to be described later.
The fazenda is about 16,000 hectares in extent. The products
grown are many and varied; they include coffee, the original
source of the fortune of the owner's family, which introduced
Sao Paulo coffee into Argentina and particularly to Buenos
Aires; cotton and sugar cane, which are steadily gaining ground
at the expense of coffee; and also fruit, including citrus fruits
(oranges and lemons) and bananas, and vegetables, market
gardens having been planted, together with some rice fields,
in swampy areas by Japanese tenants for whom the plantation
owner has nothing but praise. The variety of the produce grown
is explained by the ease of communication with the capital
(Sào Paulo and Campinas are linked by the principal railway
and the best road in the State) and by the vicinity of Campinas,
which is a big consuming market. All innovations and experiments can be essayed here at small risk, and the fazendeiro
has not neglected his opportunities. Of all the fazendas and
settlements I visited, this is the one on which mixed plantation
has been most boldly introduced; this is doubtless due partly
to the character of the owner, but conditions have also permitted and even encouraged him to give free rein to his tastes.
The fazenda of Itaquere is situated much further inland on
the plateau of Araraquara, two hours' journey by car from the
railway station of the same name, which is itself twice as far
from the capital of Säo Paulo as Campinas and offers a very
small market. So far as position is concerned, the plantation
therefore enjoys no special advantages for marketing its products ; it owes the whole of its very modern internal organisation
to the enterprise of its founder and to the facilities afforded by
the excellence of the soil, which is the fertile terra roxa. The
founder of the fazenda was imbued with the pioner spirite. He
fully realised the importance of roads of access and internal roads
on an estate such as his which originally extended over as much

— 19 —
as 100,000 hectares, and he was one of the first to anticipate the
risk to the country involved by reliance on a single crop. He
therefore began by building a network of roads over his property,
then sold a big stretch of it to an English company, making a
large profit thanks to his road improvements, and this profit
he used to finance the introduction of the most modern methods
of development, based on mixed production, on the rest of his
estate.
Fruit and vegetable' produce is obviously of little value in
this case, since the fazenda is far from the railway and from
markets or export centres. The production of the estate is
divided in unequal parts between coffee, sugar cane, and cotton,
of which coffee no longer occupies more than two-sevenths of the
whole estate, while sugar cane covers four-sevenths, and cotton
one-seventh, although its domain is extending. The present
owner, who is also fond of experiment and carefully follows the
fluctuations of his markets, particularly favours the last two
crops, because they are annuals and can consequently easily
be reduced or extended according to the trend of world prices.
At the present time the staple product of the plantation is no
longer coffee, but sugar. The fazenda has a big up-to-date sugar
mill, a refinery, and a distillery which produces alcohol for
mixing with petrol to make the compulsory national motor
spirit. The whole of the organisation of the fazenda is modern,
including the owner's luxurious house. All the products grown,
besides the ancillary industries, demand a large supply of labour,
and the fazenda has a large and varied population consisting of
white and coloured Brazilians, Italians, Germans, Japanese, etc.
The rules and conditions of their employment will be examined
later.
The plantation of Brejao lies much deeper in the interior
of the State of Säo Paulo than the two previously described.
It is situated between the plateaux of Campinas and Ribeiräo
Preto, and is reached by half a day's motor journey from Campinas or Araraquara through the agricultural market towns
of Säo Carlos, Porto Ferreira and Palmeiras, lying right in the
red or "coffee soil " district. This is one of the oldest fazendas
in the region; it was founded more than fifty years ago and the
owner's family is already in the fifth generation. The excellent
quality of the soil led to the almost exclusive cultivation of
coffee from the very outset. Until quite lately the isolation of
the fazenda and the comparative difficulty of communications

— 20 —

have prevented experiments in mixed production. For a long
time the plantation was obliged to be self-sufficient and to
grow, besides its big commercial crop of coffee, all the products
necessary to feed and meet the daily wants of the thousand
persons who lived on it. This accounts for the compact organisation of this little world, which for many years was cut off from
the outer world except for the export of its sole commercial
product, coffee. Between the coffee bushes the workers are
allowed to plant other crops (cereals, etc.) for their own use,
and they may sell any small surplus remaining either to the
plantation owner or to the neighbouring villages, at their own
choice. There are large herds of cattle, comprising zebu stock
for draught animals, Brazilian stock for meat, and Dutch stock
for milk. The draught animals are distributed among the
settlers; the others belong to the plantation owner, who sells
the meat and dairy produce to the settlers. Mules are also raised
as draught animals, and pigs and sheep for meat and manure.
The plantation has its own sawing and carpentering sheds and
workshops for ironworking and coachbuilding. The whole of
this organisation centres in the vital crop of coffee. The big
drying plants are near the owner's house. The settlers' village
lies two kilometres away; it consists of 135 houses built on a
piece of raised ground surrounding an old drained marsh where
vegetables are grown for the use of the village, which has its
little school, chapel, and hospital.
For many years the situation of this fazenda made it necessary
to continue to concentrate on the cultivation of a single crop.
But the roads in the vicinity are multiplying, and the slump
in the coffee trade goes on in spite of temporary recoveries, so
that a dawning tendency towards change is now apparent.
Eucalyptus trees are being planted on those parts of the estate
where the soil is most exhausted after fifty years of coffee
growing; cotton growing has also been initiated, and the introduction of oleaginous plants, such as sesame, castor oil, and
sunflower, is also being contemplated.
These three plantations visited may be taken as fair
examples of the three types of large agricultural undertaking
which are possible in Brazil to-day: the fazenda in the vicinity
of a city, where it is both easy and necessary to cultivate a
variety of products; the fazenda in an intermediate situation,
which must confine itself to big export crops, but which is well
advised to rely on several rather than on one and is enabled to

— 21 —
do so by its situation; and the comparatively isolated fazenda,
on which the cultivation of varied products is necessary for
internal consumption but is subordinated to one or more
commercial crops. As the Brazilian towns grow and means of
communication improve, the last type of fazenda will be more
and more rapidly and extensively supplanted by the first. As
will be seen below, Brazil is tending to change over to the
system of mixed crops. It may be noted that the new crops,
cotton, oil-bearing plants, and fruit, are among those which
demand the most labour.
Settlements. — I visited two settlements in the State of Rio
de Janeiro, both of them official settlements established by the
Federal authorities. One, that of Säo Bento, in the State of
Rio de Janeiro, is still in its infancy; the other, that of Santa
Cruz, in the Federal District, has already been in existence for
some thirty years.
The settlement of Sào Bento was founded in 1932, but the
preparatory work took over two years and the settlement has
been actually running only since the beginning of 1935. The land
it occupies lies some thirty kilometres from Rio de Janeiro and
covers a marsh or baracha, which was more or less open to the
sea and had been drained of its brackish or salty waters and
irrigated with fresh water to make it cultivable, and the somewhat stony hills surrounding the site of the former marsh. In
July 1936 the population of the settlement consisted of 284 persons, of whom 165 were men and 119 women, principally Brazilians, but also including some Portuguese, Germans, Austrians,
Spaniards, Lithuanians, and one Latvian. Of this number,
40 belong to the administrative staff: managers, engineers,
agricultural experts, hospital staff, employees of the co-operative
store. The settlement contained 84 holdings, of 10 hectares each.
Owing to the vicinity oí Rio, the settlement proposes mainly
to produce fruit for city consumption, including bananas,
oranges, grape fruit, and melons.
The promise which Säo Bento holds out for the future is
already fulfilled by Santa Cruz, the older settlement, which has
been established since 1906. This settlement too lies in the
coastal region, 60 kilometres to the west of Rio de Janeiro, on
marshland which was drained, irrigated, and cultivated by the
Jesuits as early as the eighteenth century. Nearby lies the little
town of Santa Cruz, with a population of 4,000, formerly fre-

— 22 —
quented by the emperors of Brazil. The settlement comprises
1,360 inhabitants, including 754 men and 606 women. Here
again most of the settlers are Brazilians, but they also comprise
Austrians, Portuguese, Germans, Poles, Rumanians, Italians,
Czechs, Spaniards, Lithuanians, and one native of Lebanon.
The present settlement has revived and extended the work of
the Jesuits. The whole area is covered by irrigation channels
branching from two main canals. Production is more varied
than in the settlement of Säo Bento; it includes eucalyptus, sugar
cane (there is a sugar mill at Santa Cruz), manioc and vegetables,
and there is also some cattle-raising. Here again, however, the
staple product is fruit — bananas, melons, and especially
oranges — owing to the vicinity of Rio de Janeiro. There are
two crops a year, purchased on the trees by professional pickers.
All the competent persons with whom I discussed this matter
agreed that the future of these settlements in the neighbourhood
of Rio, as of those lying close to all the other big towns, lies
mainly in fruit growing and market gardening. Market gardening
in particular will require a large number of smallholders, but
they must be carefully selected because the intensive cultivation
of vegetables requires knowledge and training.
DEVELOPMENT OF BRAZILIAN AGRICULTURE

The present report does not aim at making a complete survey
of Brazilian agriculture ; the writer has not the material, nor is
it his purpose to do so. All that will be attempted is to point
out certain features of this agriculture which may help to
explain present social conditions in the country and the social
trends of the immediate future.
To-day the agricultural economy of Brazil is still based on
the cultivation of coffee, and will probably continue to be so for
many years to come. The export figures for the past 35 years
show that coffee still retains the predominant place which it
gained at the beginning of the twentieth century and the
relative importance of which has risen since. This is indicated
by the table on page 23:
During the season of 1934 (in the northern hemisphere) or
1934-35 (in the southern hemisphere) Brazil exported 53.1 per
cent, of total world exports of coffee, while the share of the other
exporting countries of America was 33.2 per cent., that of Asiatic
countries 7.5 per cent., and that of African countries 6.2 per cent.

— 23 —
PERCENTAGE OF VALUE OF COFFEE EXPORTS ON TOTAL EXPORTS
OF BRAZIL
Years
(average)

Percentage

1901-1904
1905-1908
1909-1912
1913-1916
1917-1920
1921-1924
1925-1928
1929-1932
1933
1934

54.34
51.34
54.76
58.12
46.30
66.96
72.05
68.42
73.03
60.77

The question of the potential dangers implied by this predominance of coffee in the Brazilian economy has been thrashed
out to the full; they are the same dangers as threaten every
«conomy founded on the more or less exclusive cultivation of a
single product. Neither does anything remain to be said as to
the origin of this situation; it lies in the existence of the excellent red soil which covers the lower slopes of the Brazilian
tableland, lying behind the most hospitable part of the coast
and having the climate best suited to European immigrants.
The Brazilian planters found here every possible facility for
prosperous settlement, including good land, the means of establishing large bodies of agricultural labour, and a product
which was greatly sought after and in those days commanded
a high price.
Since that time concentration on the one product, overproduction, and the competition of new coffee-growing countries
have damaged the market; exports have fallen below production
and prices have dropped to an unprofitable level. This has led
the Brazilian Government to take various measures (to raise
prices, restrict plantations, etc.) recommended and planned by
expert committees and, more recently, by the National Coffee
Department in Rio de Janeiro, the statistical offices and research
laboratories of which I visited. These measures should not be
ignored and due value should be attached to their results, modest
though they still are. During the coffee season of 1909-1910,
Brazil produced 80.13 per cent, of the world coffee output;
in 1919-1920 this proportion had fallen to. 49.40 per cent. ; in
1934-1935 it had risen again to 68.28 per cent.
Thus coffee is and will probably remain for many years
to come the chief product of Brazilian agriculture and one of
its essential commercial crops. It may even be noted that

— 24 —

although originally coffee was grown exclusively on the plantations of the big estate owners, its cultivation has since attracted
some of the smallholders who have recently settled in Brazil.
The following significant figures are taken from a table of coffee
production in Säo Paulo published by the Statistical Service of
the State of Säo Paulo. Of the 86,451 holdings of land in this
State which include a coffee plantation, 54.38 per cent, are owned
by Brazilians, and as many as 45.62 per cent, belong to aliens,
including 25.96 per cent, to Italians, 7.79 per cent, to Spaniards,
5.03 per cent, to Portuguese, and 4.79 per cent, to Japanese.
Of the 927,737,310 coffee bushes comprised in the whole of these
plantations, 61.68 per cent, belong to Brazilians, 21.45 per cent.
to Italians, 5.92 per cent, to Spaniards, 4.47 per cent to
Portuguese, and 2.94 per cent, to Japanese. Of the sum of
3,382,658,423 milreis representing the value of the produce of
all coffee plantations in Säo Paulo in 1932-1933, 64.42 per cent.
accrued to Brazilians, 19.55 per cent, to Italians, 5.12 per cent.
to Spaniards, 4.15 per cent, to Portuguese, and 2.1 per cent, to
Japanese. These three series of figures point to the conclusion
that foreign immigrants coming to settle in the country as smallholders do not by any means despise the traditional crop.
Full justice must therefore be done to coffee production in
studying the economic conditions of Brazil, in which it is one of
the fundamental factors. From the standpoint with which we
are here concerned, two remarks are called for on this subject.
1. Of all the agricultural products of Brazil, coffee is one of
those which require the most labour, involved by the repeated
attention necessary throughout the year, and above all the picking
of the crop, which has to be done very rapidly when the berries
are ripe. But this labour is very unevenly distributed throughout
the year. On the big plantations it implies the hiring of workers
at picking time, who must find some other occupation during
the rest of the year, while on the small ones other crops must
be grown in addition to coffee. An efficient organisation of
coffee production at a time when its sale is less profitable than
in the past and allows no margin of waste in land or labour thus
demand the cultivation of a variety of crops.
2. During the 1934-1935 season, 63.4 per cent, of the
17,366,000 sacks of coffee (each sack weighing 60 kilogrammes)
produced by Brazil came from Säo Paulo, 19.7 per cent, from
Minas Geraes, 7.7 per cent, from Espirito Santo, 5.1 per cent.

— 25 —
from Rio de Janeiro, and 1.5 per cent from Paraná. This
means that five of the twenty States comprising the United
States of Brazil control the country's staple agricultural product
and that one of them, Säo Paulo, furnishes more than threefifths of the total output. Among the conclusions, both economic
and social, to be drawn from this circumstance, the following
may be specially mentioned. The coffee-growing Brazilian
States have a special interest in a sound policy of coffee production; they, more than any of the other States, must envisage
a prudent policy of compensation variety in production. As
regards the other States, if they wish to develop agricultural
settlement on their own lands, they must turn their attention
to other crops even if their soil and climate favour the cultivation of coffee. This is indeed the line now being pursued by all
the Brazilian States, both coffee-producing States and others;
the watchword of all of them is the development of varied crops.
Of the many products whose cultivation is spreading
almost everywhere, some are mainly, if not wholly, intended
for home consumption; these include manioc, wheat and maize^
rice, starchy products such as beans, potatoes and sweet
potatoes, other vegetables, and maté. The future of these
crops naturally depends on the enlargement of the home market,
the narrowness of which was one of the reasons for the special
severity and harmfulness of the recent depression in all the
South American countries. That the future of the crops
produced for home consumption is bound up with the growth
of the population is therefore obvious.
As regards products other than coffee, which is produced
mainly for export, the most important are cotton, sugar cane,
fruit — especially citrus fruits and bananas — cocoa, and tobacco.
Cotton, which has always been cultivated in the equatorial
and tropical northern States, is now one of the crops most
commonly introduced to replace coffee in the central States as
a result of the depression, particularly in the State of Säo Paulo.
Between 1924 and 1934 Brazil's output of cotton more than
doubled, having risen from 124,775 tons in 1924 to 271,250 in
1934. In the State of Säo Paulo, however, the cotton output
increased 26 times in five years, from 3,934 tons in 1930 to
102,300 tons in 1934. In 1936, over 1,200,000 hectares were
under cotton in this State alone, and the State authorities
estimate that the output of textile fibres will probably rise to-

— 26 —
over 200,000 tons at some future date. As will be seen below,
the cotton is scientifically selected with a view to obtaining
longer fibres than in the equatorial States. It has already
been noted that one of the advantages of cotton-growing from
the planter's point of view is that the plant is an annual and its
cultivation can be abandoned as rapidly as it was taken up in
case of depression on the textile market. But I think it is
none the less true that to-day, with cotton production steadily
expanding and spreading to more and more of the countries
in the tropical and subtropical zones, successful cotton growing
depends in a very large measure on the introduction of a cotton
industry in the producing country, so that it can itself absorb
the greater part of its own output. As will be seen, this is
now the case in Brazil, and especially in the State of Säo Paulo.
In this way the risks of cotton-growing are reduced to a minimum; the cotton industry is, as it were, an insurance against
the vicissitudes of the export trade. But the demographic
consequences of the combination of cotton-growing and the
cotton industry are even more important. In the first place,
few of the crops grown in the tropical zone require as much
labour as cotton; and in the second, every expansion of the
ancillary industry will require additional labour. Here again,
therefore, agricultural development postulates a solution of
the population problem, both rural and urban.
What has just been said of cotton applies almost equally
to sugar cane. The tropical parts of Brazil have always produced sugar and cane spirit. What is new and significant is
the spread of sugar-cane plantations and the sugar industry
to the central States, which formerly grew coffee almost exclusively. Here again the development of Säo Paulo is especially
striking; in 1900 this State produced rather less than 14,000
tons of sugar; in 1910 rather less than 24,000 tons; in 1920
slightly over 34,000 tons; and in 1930 81,285 tons. Since
that date output has been rising practically year by year:
108,000 tons in 1931; 120,000 in 1932; 132,000 in 1933; and
126,000, representing a slight fall, in 1934. In 1934 output
was 426 per cent, higher than in 1920, and 55 per cent, higher
than in 1930. Side by side with this extension of production
the sugar yield of the cane has also risen, from 796 kilogrammes
of sugar per hectare planted in 1925 to 2,929 in 1930 and 4,066
in 1934. The position is the same throughout the sugarproducing regions of Brazil; to-day the sugar yield of a ton of

— 27 —

cane is 9.5 per cent, in the State of Säo Paulo, 9 per cent, in
Rio de Janeiro, 8.9 per cent, in Pernambuco, and 8.5 per cent.
in Alagoas and Sergipe. Here again is a crop the development
of which depends on the growth of the population, both rural
and industrial.
It is not necessary to dwell on the cultivation of cocoa,
«onfined to the tropical northern States, of tobacco, which
flourishes mainly in the tropical and subtropical central States,
of the various oil-yielding plants, and on cattle raising, which
is especially active and capable of economic development in
the south. All these types of agricultural production are developing normally; they will help, and in part are already helping, to confer on the agricultural and economic exports of Brazil
that variety of staple products which they have long lacked.
Something more may be said, however, owing to its special
demographic and social importance, of one other branch of
agricultural production which is already very important and
promises to become still more so — fruit-growing, and in particular, the. cultivation of citrus fruits and bananas. Brazil is
already an important exporter of tropical fruit. Between 1925
and 1934 its banana exports trebled, having exceeded 9,000,000
bunches in the latter year. Exports of oranges, which are
gathered between May and November and which, thanks to
the difference in the seasons between the two hemispheres,
reach the European and American markets at a time when the
supply from Spain, Palestine, and California is exhausted, are
increasing steadily: 812,000 cases were exported in 1930, and
2,630,000 in 1934. The same applies to tangerines, the figures
being 364,000 cases in 1933 and 834,000 in 1934, and to grape
fruit: 5,600 cases in 1933 and 35,700 in 1934. Exports of
pineapple, both fresh and canned, are also rising, 1,111 tons
having been exported in 1933 and 1,755 in 1934.
These products are following the same line of development
as cotton and sugar cane. Their cultivation, both for the
home market and for export, is spreading from the north to
the north central and even to the south central regions. Here
again the case of Säo Paulo is typical. Whereas in the north
bananas are cultivated mainly for home consumption, this
State produces for export over the whole of the low coastal
plain stretching to either side of Santos. In 1906, when the
total banana exports of Brazil amounted to 1,852,000 bunches,
231,000 bunches came from Säo Paulo. In 1934 the grand

— 28 —
total of banana exports from Brazil was 9,012,000 bunches, of
which Säo Paulo exported 8,711,000. This means that Sao
Paulo's share in the total banana exports of Brazil has risen in
less than thirty years from 12.5 to 96.6 per cent. The same
is true of citrus fruits. Sâo Paulo, which only began to cultivate
grape fruit for export in 1930, was exporting 23,850 cases in
1930, or two thirds of the total export of Brazil, and doubled
its export figures between 1934 and 1935, the figure for the
latter year being 48,000 cases. As regards oranges, whereas in
1927 86.8 per cent, of Brazilian exports were shipped from Rio
de Janeiro and only 11.7 per cent, from Santos, the port for
the State of Säo Paulo, to-day the share of Rio in orange exports,
which are now sixty times larger, is 55.2 per cent, and that of
Santos 44.4 per cent.
Special interest attaches to the development of the production and export of fruit from the demographic and social
standpoints for two reasons. In the first place, the cultivation
of fruit plantations, which demands more care than expert
knowledge and ability, is within the powers of every family of
workers, whatever its origin, whether national or alien.
Secondly, fruit is not merely an export product but forms a
most valuable contribution to the food supply of large cities,
of which Brazil already has a certain number, including Rio de
Janeiro, Säo Paulo, Campinas, Santos, Bello Horizonte, Curityba,
Bahia, Porto Alegre, etc. Fruit growing may lead to the
establishment of supply settlements near most of these cities,
either on unused land cleared, prepared and irrigated for the
purpose, or on large estates broken up into holdings. Moreover,
the more these cities develop, either through the enlargement of
agricultural markets or through the expansion of industries,
the greater will be the opportunities for settlements of this
type. Here again, home consumption will supplement, by
stabilising them, the advantages which Brazil may expect to
derive from increased exports.
This rapid survey of Brazilian agriculture shows beyond a
doubt that the trend of its development is towards the introduction of greater variety in production. The Brazilians are
no longer willing to put all their eggs in one basket, as the
saying is. I say "no longer willing " intentionally, because
this new agricultural policy is nothing if not deliberate. It is
in accordance with this firm intention, and on the basis of the
most modern data of agricultural and economic science, that

— 29 —
the Brazilians have been guiding their agricultural development along new lines for the past ten years. In proof of this
I may mention the foundation of some remarkable agricultural
institutes, such as that of Campinas, which I visited. This
Institute was set up by the Government of the State of Säo
Paulo. It has fine laboratories for the physical and chemical
analysis of soils and the selection of suitable seeds and species.
It also acts as a centre for linking up twelve experimental
stations, varying between 300 and 500 hectares in area and
scattered in various parts of the State, the Institute having its
own experimental station attached. There I was shown the
process of selecting coffee, oil-bearing plants, sugar-cane seed,
and, above all, cotton seed. These seeds, all of which come
from the Campinas Institute, are sold by the Government,
which has the monopoly of them. A few years ago they produced a plant with fibres not more than 18 millimetres long,
but thanks to persistent selection it has already been possible
to produce a fibre of 35 millimetres, and progress will not stop
there. For the 1936-1937 season, the Institute has had to
prepare 600,000 sacks of seed, each weighing 30 kilogrammes,
or a total of 18,000 tons, to meet the applications addressed to it.
This Institute, like the National Coffee Department at Rio
de Janeiro, illustrates the development which is taking place,
not only in production, but in the methods of Brazilian agriculture. The age when private enterprise, whether that of
the big plantation owners, the settlement companies or the
pioneers adventuring into the wilds, reigned supreme seems
now to be at an end. Agriculture planning has not indeed
yet been introduced, even if it is ever likely to be so, but an
era of agricultural control, advice, assistance, and organisation
has now begun. This is characteristic of a country which has
now reached its majority. Such a policy of control, advice,
care, and organisation is legitimate and should be as fruitful
in the demographic and social spheres as in that of agriculture.
In concluding my remarks on this subject, I may point out
that this policy has before it a wide and almost virgin field of
action. What has been said in regard to the cultivation of
coffee applies to all the products now cultivated or in course
of development in Brazil. At present they have penetrated
only to a depth of a few hundred kilometres inland from the
Atlantic seaboard, this representing an area which would be
considerable for a country of ordinary dimensions and possi-

— 30 —
bilities, but which is almost insignificant for one of the size
of Brazil, which, as already stated, extends over some 4,000
kilometres in both directions. Behind the southern States,
which are mainly devoted to stock-raising, and the central
States, which at present are the principal site of the largescale cultivation of export crops, stretch the Goyaz and the
Matto Grosso, where the area devoted to both these activities
could easily be increased threefold.
As regards the northern States, the greater part of which
is covered by the forests of the Amazon, these play only a
minor part in the Brazilian economy of to-day. Apart from
the exploitation of some species of palms which provide food
products and the raw materials already cited — guaranà, carnaùba, babassú — and of certain kinds of timber, tanning
extracts and dyes, and apart from the cultivation of a certain
amount of manioc and beans for the somewhat sparse population, all these activities being confined to the forest fringe near
the Amazon River, the forest area is at present mainly rich
in promise. Its possibilities are vast indeed, and during the
past few years some fairly thorough attempts have been made
to exploit them. Henry Ford has acquired a big concession
in this area, and some German companies have obtained other
smaller ones. A Japanese company had also acquired a concession of a million hectares in the State of Amazonas, but
the Federal Senate, which has the final word in these matters,
recently cancelled it. The principal object of all these schemes,
both those in course of development and those which have
miscarried, is the same; namely, to plant rubber plantations
in order to restore this product to the position which it previously held in the economic life of Brazil when the rubber was
gathered in the forests, and which it subsequently lost as a
result of the competition of the young plantations in the
British and Netherlands East Indies. The time will doubtless
come, and perhaps in the not very distant future, when the
Amazon country will play that part in the economic life of
Brazil to which its natural resources appear to predestine it.
It must be remembered, however, that the equatorial forest
regions probably have less than one inhabitant to every 10 square
kilometres. Can such a population provide an adequate supply
of labour ? Adequate in quality it may be, but hardly in
numbers. Here again, therefore, a population problem arises..

CHAPTER IV
INDUSTRY IN BRAZIL

What makes all pre-war books on economic conditions in
Brazil obsolete, however great their historical interest, is the
fact that, besides the evolution of agriculture towards a greater
variety of crops, an industrial development is now in progress
which did not exist twenty years ago.
This industrialisation is not indeed general, nor is it comparable in importance to agriculture. Except for the leather
and meat industries which are growing up in the southern
States, following the example of the neighbouring countries of
Uruguay and Argentina, for a few old sugar and cotton mills
in the north, and for some undertakings for extracting precious
ores, precious stones and gold in certain parts of the country,
these new industries are concentrated in the prosperous central
States, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Geraes (the mineral wealth of
which gives promise of a brilliant future), and, above all, Säo
Paulo.
Moreover, unlike agriculture, Brazilian industry at present
markets nearly all its products at home; what small quantities
it exports go to other South American markets within a limited
radius, such as Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, and Chile.
Brazilian industry to-day is in fact more or less in the same
position as the industry of North America about 1880. This
is not the only connection in which the present state of economic
development in Brazil could be compared with that of the
United States over fifty years ago.
V I S I T S TO U N D E R T A K I N G S

Owing to lack of time I was unable, to my great regret, t o
visit any of the industrial undertakings in Minas Geraes. It
was only by hearsay and by consulting the written data that
I was able to obtain some idea of the important part which the
industries of this State — mining, metallurgy, textiles, etc. —

— 32 —
are beginning to play to-day, and the still more important
future which lies before them.
I did, however, visit several big firms in the Federal District
and in the States of Rio de Janeiro and Säo Paulo.
Federal District. — In Rio de Janeiro I visited two textile
factories, one manufacturing wool and the other cotton.
The first of these was the Aurora factory, belonging to a
Belgian family which also owns other undertakings in Petropolis. This is an old firm with well-established traditions; the
premises are old but spaciously built and airy; working methods
are good, and the machinery is modern. This firm only weaves
woollen cloth; it formerly imported the yarn from Belgium and
France, but to-day obtains most of its supplies from Japan.
It has an old-established reputation throughout Brazil and
produces high-class goods. It employs 250 workers, including
a few women. The average daily wage of a weaver is 20 milreis, or 3 gold francs, this being double the wage usually paid
at Petropolis and Säo Paulo.
The cotton firm I visited, America Fabril, is under Brazilian
management. It carries out all the processes of manufacture
— spinning, weaving, dyeing and printing, and finishing —
using home-grown materials. Since 1924 it has even built and
repaired its own machinery. The staff consists of 2,900 workers,
half being men and half women; the sexes are equally represented in the spinning section; women predominate in the
weaving section and commercial services, and men in the other
departments. The wages paid are similar to those in the
Aurora factory.
These two undertakings visited may serve to give some idea
of the part played by industry in the life of the Federal capital.
Although its significance should not be ignored, neither on the
other hand should it be exaggerated. It seems improbable
that industry will ever grow up around this magnificent city
to the same extent that it has developed or is likely to develop
around the manufacturing centres of the three industrial States,
at Petropolis, Bello Horizonte, and Säo Paulo. For one thing,
the cost of living is higher in the Federal capital, and this
requires the payment of much higher money wages than in the
other three cities. In Rio a weaver is paid 20 milreis per day,
whereas in Petropolis or Säo Paulo he can live just as well on
a daily wage of 10 to 12 milreis. Again, in Rio, which is in

— 33 —
the tropical zone and at sea level, work is trying in the summer
months between December and February, whereas it is much
less so on the high tablelands on which the other three cities
are situated. And lastly, even the damp sea-air of Rio is a
handicap because it rusts machinery and thus involves constant
and costly maintenance work. Rio will remain the political
and administrative headquarters of an immense country, its
chief intellectual, banking and commercial centre, and the gem
of the Brazilian tourist trade. But its industrial future seems
to be limited, except perhaps in the sphere of the luxury
industries.
Petropolis. — Petropolis, which lies at a distance of some
50 kilometres from Rio at a height of 1,000 metres, where the
nights are cool even in summer, is an important summer resort
which was created and developed under the patronage of
Pedro II, the last Emperor of Brazil. In spite of its 100,000
inhabitants, this town, with its villas, wide cement roads,
admirable situation and views on the sea, still retains its appearance of a summer resort for the wealthy families of Rio, a
purpose for which it was originally founded and which it still
largely fulfils. But a large number of factories, some of them
very big ones, are hidden away in the valleys surrounding this
attractive town, and Petropolis contains more than 20,000
workers. Originally founded by Germans (the first foreign
settlements were formed by German Catholics from Bavaria,
Westphalia, and the Moselle district and by Swiss Catholics
from Fribourg), the industry of Petropolis has since taken on
a more cosmopolitan character and is now mainly in Brazilian
hands. In this district I visited a paper mill, a silk factory,
and an embroidery and lace factory.
The paper mill, which belongs to the Companhia e Fabrica
de Papel, manufactures ordinary paper and wrapping paper.
It has a powerful and up-to-date plant; the pulp is fed into two
big machines which deliver the finished paper at the other end.
The mill uses 4,000 cubic metres of water daily and 20 tons of
aluminium sulphate per month, its monthly output of paper
being 1,000 tons. The pulp is obtained from Finland and
Sweden.
This mill is highly mechanised and employs only 230
workers, both men and women. As in all the Brazilian factories
which come under the Factory Inspection Service, an 8-hour
3

— 34 —

day is worked with a weekly rest-day and a fortnight's annual
holiday with pay (this applies to all the factories visited and
is therefore not repeated in each case). The average daily
wage is 10 milreis, or 1.50 gold francs, that is to say, half the
wage paid to a textile worker in Rio.
The silk factory of Werner & Co. produces both silk and
rayon. The management is of German origin, and also some
of the staff, which alone among those of all the firms visited
includes no coloured workers. The factory confines its activities to weaving; the silk comes ready spun from Japan (competition in this branch would be impossible), and the cellulose
for the rayon from Sweden. The buildings are either new or
in excellent condition, built one above the other up the sides
of a valley and dominated by the workers' houses. 500 workers
are employed, including both men and women. No worker,
whether male or female, minds more than two looms. Work
is in two shifts; the average daily wage is between 12 and
14 milreis, or between 1.80 and 2.10 gold francs.
The embroidery and lace factory visited was the Petropolis
Fabrica, containing 250 looms and employing 150 workers, the
vast majority of whom are women, especially girls between 16
and 25 years of age. In the embroidery section each worker
is in charge of a group of 8 looms; in the lace section, where
the work is more complicated, there is a worker to every loom.
Two shifts are worked, and the wages are similar to those paid
in the firm of "Werner & Co.
Säo Paulo. — Säo Paulo is a big industrial city comparable
in all respects to her sister towns in the United States and inferior
to them neither in manufacturing capacity nor in the general
organisation necessary in a big city with mechanised industry
(transport, workers' housing, etc.). "Work is directly organised
and controlled in Säo Paulo by the State Department of Labour,
to be described later. Had time allowed, I could easily have
visited several dozen large factories with profit, but I was
obliged to limit and select my choice, and I finally visited a silk
factory, a cotton factory, and a brewery.
The silk factory visited belongs to the Italo Brasiliana
Company. It weaves both silk and rayon textiles, the spinning
and throwing mills being at Campinas. Some of the silk used is
home-produced, silkworm breeding also being carried on at

— 35 —
Campinas, and the rest comes from Italy and Japan. The same
company also has another silk-weaving factory at Campinas
itself and a rayon factory in another part of the State. The
Säo Paulo factory is up to date, well-equipped and airy, and
its machinery is adequately protected. It employs 1,500 workers,
including 1,200 women; few girls are employed, except in the
warehouses. The staff is allowed an hour and a half's break for
lunch ; there is no works canteen, for all the workers live nearby
in small one-storeyed houses built in the old Portuguese style.
The minimum daily wage is 12 milreis, or about 1.80 gold francs;
the maximum, which is earned very seldom and only by the
designers, who are real artists, is 800 milreis per month (120 gold
francs). The principle of "equal pay for equal work " is
scrupulously applied; women are paid at the same rates as men,
and there are a number of forewomen.
The cotton-cloth factory visited belongs to the well-known
Italian industrialist Matarazzo, who owns 83 factories of all
kinds and in all parts of Brazil. Every process of cotton manufacturing is carried on, including spinning, carding, weaving,
washing, dyeing, printing, and selling. Rayon materials are
also woven, the cellulose being produced in Brazil itself. Matarazzo owns three other factories of the same kind in the State
of Säo Paulo; that visited is the largest, with a monthly output
of nearly 2,500,000 metres of cloth, the three factories together
producing 3,400,000 metres. At the time of my visit the
factory was working to full capacity and had sufficient orders
to provide it with five months' work. The whole of its output
is sold to a few big traders in Sao Paulo itself and in Rio
de Janeiro.
The factory is 26 years old, but has rcently been installed
in new buildings. The machine rooms are enormous; one of the
spinning rooms is 147 metres long. All are well-ventillated
and equipped with dust exhausters, and all the transmission
belts run along the ceiling. The plant is good and up-to-date ;
most of the spinning machinery is English, that for weaving
Swiss, the printing machinery French (Alsatian) and Czech,
and the finishing machinery German. The factory has 60,000
spindles and 2,000 looms. It employs 2,400 workers, 1,500 of
whom are women. The minimum commencing wage is between
700 and 900 reis an hour, rising to 1,200, so that the daily wage
varies between 5 % a n d 10 milreis, that is, about .825 to 1.50 gold
francs, the latter rate applying only to skilled workers.

— 36 —
The brewery visited was the big Antarctic Brewery, said to
have the third largest output of any brewery in the world (the
first two being in Germany and Argentina respectively). The
undertaking is of German origin. It manufactures not only
various kinds of beer, but also aerated waters, lemonade,
vermouth, and local drinks such as guaranà and agua tonica.
In South America as in the Far East, beer has become a popular
drink. In the summer the Antarctic Brewery sometimes washes
and fills as many as 500,000 bottles of beer daily, and it has an
average annual output of 110,000,000 bottles. It has a powerful
plant, including German machines for making the beer, American
machines for bottling it, workshops for manufacturing metal
caps and cork stoppers, packing cases, nails, coachwork, etc.
The firm owns 200 motor vehicles and 200 horses. The malt and
hops come from Germany and Czechoslovakia, but the barley
is beginning to be supplied by Brazil!
The Antarctic Brewery employs 4,000 workers in the main
works at Säo Paulo and in the branch factories at Rio, Bello
Horizonte, Ouro Preto, etc. : 1,800 of these workers are employed
in the Säo Paulo factory, all being men. The conditions of employment and wages are similar to those in the textile industry.
These are the factories I visited during my stay in Brazil.
Let me try to summarise the general impression derived from
these visits before saying a few words about Brazilian industry
as a whole. All have very fine premises, mostly with up-to-date
equipment. The conditions of employment are very reasonable ;
they include an 8, and sometimes even a 7 %-hour day, a weekly
rest, and annual holidays with pay. Wages are low, but this
statement needs some qualification, because, although they are
low if converted into gold and compared with the wages paid in
Western Europe and in the United States (they are little higher
than wages in Japan), the real wages they represent more or
less correspond to the general standard of living of the country,
which is somewhat low, and are adequate to the mode of life
dictated by natural conditions.
It must be remembered, in fact, that owing to the warmth
of the climate the item of heating is entirely absent from family
budgets in Brazil, and that of clothing is also comparatively low.
Moreover, except in Rio de Janeiro (where, as already stated,
wages are higher), food is also fairly cheap, even in big cities
like Säo Paulo. There is possibly room for improvement in the

— 37 —
popular diet in Brazil, as in many other countries, but this
improvement can probably be obtained from education without
requiring a much larger outlay. Further, the earnings of industrial workers, however low, are still much higher than those
of agricultural workers, and the emoluments of civil servants
and members of the liberal professions are also very moderate.
My own impression is that in Brazil everyone lives simply. If
the habits of the country change and new needs arise, if the
general mode of life becomes more complicated, all earnings will
rise and those of industrial workers with the rest. It is none the
less true, however, that at the present time the low level of wages
has probably been one of the factors, although no doubt, as will
be seen below, not the principal factor, which have enabled
Brazilian industry to develop and to sustain the competition
of foreign imported goods.
DEVELOPMENT OF BRAZILIAN INDUSTRY: SÂO PAULO

I had the opportunity of making a detailed study of industriai
development only in the State of Säo Paulo, but no doubt what
I have to say on this point will provide the basis for a general
judgment on Brazilian industry and its future prospects. Säo
Paulo is indeed by far the foremost industrial State in Brazil
to-day; it affords an accurate picture on a small scale of the
present situation or future prospects of industry in the other
States on the Atlantic seaboard of Brazil.
The industrialisation of Säo Paulo is a recent phenomenon,
having begun not more than twenty years ago. As in all the
other extra-European countries, it received its first impetus
during the world war, when the inability of the big exporters
of Western and Central Europe to maintain supplies, and the
deflection of practically the whole stream of North American
exports to the belligerent States of Europe, forced their former
customers to try to supply their own wants. Once this movement had begun, industry in Säo Paulo steadily developed
during the subsequent boom years and even during the years
of depression. The average annual value of industrial production
in Säo Paulo during the successive five-year periods from 1910
to 1934 was as follows:1

1

Take
n
f
r
o
m:
SECRETARI
A
DA
AGRI
C
ULTURA,
I
N
DUSTRI
A
E
COMMERCI
O
,
DI
R
ECTORÍ
A
DE
ESTATI
S
TI
C
A,
I
N
DUSTRI
A
E
COMMERCI
O
:
Estatistica
Industriai
do
Estado
de
Säo
Paulo.
Estado de Säo
Anno de 1934.

— 38 —
Period

1910-1914
1915-1919
1920-1924
1925-1929
1930-1934

Average annual value
of industrial production
(in millions of milreis)

220
493
1,090
1,725
2,041

Thus in the course ol 20 years the value of the industrial
production of Säo Paulo increased almost tenfold.
It has already been stated that one of the causes which
encouraged this rapid progress was the moderate rate of wages.
The influence of this factor should not, however, be exaggerated.
It can only be decisive if it lowers costs of production to a
point enabling competition to be successfully sustained against
importers on the home market or exporters on foreign markets.
But although the wage factor helped to lower Brazilian costs of
production, especially at the beginning of the period of industrialisation, other factors (e.g. the prices of raw materials, credits
for the installation of plant, etc.) helped to raise these costs.
Above all, however, the problem of competition ceased to play
any part at a comparatively early stage. Except on a very small
scale and to neighbouring countries only, Säo Paulo does not
produce for export, and its home market has been safeguarded
by a deliberate policy of protection.
The protective tariff legislation now in force in Brazil does
not merely impose fairly high duties on those types of imported
goods which can be supplied by home manufacturers; it also
seeks to hinder or even to prohibit entirely the importation of
foreign machinery. This is admittedly a double-edged weapon,
and it is possible that at the outset these import restrictions
retarded the equipment and organisation of new factories. But
on the other hand they provided an incentive for the creation
of an engineering industry within the State. I received striking
proof of this during my visit to the America Fabril factory in
Rio de Janeiro; all the machines acquired prior to 1924 came
from British engineering centres such as Manchester, Bolton
and Bradford, whereas all those purchased after that date were
home-produced. Similarly, the Antarctic Brewery at Säo Paulo
does all possible repairs and even constructs its new equipment
itself (e.g. it builds the coachwork of its own motor vehicles,
only the chassis, which are not yet manufactured in Brazil,
coming from abroad).
It is no doubt true that the policy of protection has promoted

— 39 —
the development of industry in Säo Paulo and, together with the
boldness of investors and the ingenuity and industry of the
population, is one of the reasons for the great variety of its production, which is so astonishing to the visitor who reflects that
its industrialisation is of recent date. The following table gives
some idea of the variety of industrial production in Säo Paulo.
In 1934 this production was turned out by 8,575 factories and
involved investments of 2,911 million milreis. It employed
202,900 workers, used 232,000 h.p. of motive power, and
represented a productive value of 2,346 million milreis, or more
than four-fifths of the value of the invested capital. The table
shows the proportion of the total number of factories, capital
invested, number of workers employed, motive power used, and
value of production accounted for by each of the groups of
industries existing in Sào Paulo in 1934.
COMPARATIVE TABLE

OF

VARIOUS GROUPS

OF

INDUSTRIES

IN

THE STATE OF SÂO PAULO E X P R E S S E D IN PERCENTAGES ( 1 9 3 4 )

1

Percentage of total
Industrial group

Textiles :
Spinning and weaving. . .
Hides and leather
Wood
Metallurgy, construction of
machinery, apparatus and
equipment
Pottery
Manufacture of building materials
Chemical products
Food and drink
Clothing and spun or woven
goods
Distribution of power and
light, heating and refrigeration
Unclassified industries . . .
Total

Number
of
factories

Capital Workers

Motive
power

Value
of production

6.54
4.16
13.08

29.62
1.05
2.72

37.76
1.27
6.14

37.42
1.56
8.91

34.26
1.72
3.87

21.59
2.57

8.86
1.75

17.40
4.26

19.98
3.26

14.65
2.28

16.09
6.03
7.27

2.86
5.47
5.78

4.37
3.23
4.24

5.94
4.98
3.63

. 3.05
7.85
7.52

9.62

3.18

7.24

1.98

10.04

1.97
11.08

33.11
5.60

5.10
8.99

1.17
11.17

6.32
8.44

100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00

1

SECRETARIA DA AGRICULTURA, INDUSTRIA E COMMERCIO, DTRECTORIA DE ESTATISTICA,
INDUSTRIA E COMMERCIO. Estatistica Industriai do Estado de Säo Paulo, p. 29. Estado de
Säo
Paulo, Anno de 1934.
This table shows that the most important industrial group
in the State of Säo Paulo, as in the whole of Brazil, is that of the

— 40 —
textile industries, including the spinning and weaving of cotton,
wool and jute, hosiery, silk spinning, rayon manufacture,
weaving of all kinds of silk goods, trimmings, dyeing, manufacture of packing cloth, rope, etc. This group accounts for 37.8 per
cent, of all the industrial workers in the State of Sao Paulo and
for 34.3 per cent, of the value of its industrial production.
Besides being the dominant industry, it is said on certain hands
to be the only natural industry, the only one that could stand
up to free competition. This point is referred to again below.
Next in importance, with reference to the number of workers
and the value of production, come the following groups: metallurgy and the construction of machinery, apparatus and
equipment; clothing; food and drink; chemical products (pharmaceutical products, phosphorus products, soap, vegetable oils,
perfumery, etc.); building (including the big cement industry);
and lastly, miscellaneous industries, chief among which are
paper making and the manufacture of rubber goods. An analysis
of the production of the other industrial States of Brazil would
probably have shown the same series of products in the same
order, except in the case of Minas Geraes, where, as might be
expected, the mining industry now occupies first place.
Reference has already been made to an opinion advanced by
certain leading figures in Brazil to the effect that the variety
of industrial production in Säo Paulo is partly the result of
artificial and not natural conditions, namely, the high cost of
importing raw materials from abroad, low wages, and tariff
protection, which lead to very high prices on the home market,
representing a heavy tribute paid by the consumer to the
industrial development of Säo Paulo. The writer is bound to
record this opinion, since he actually heard it expressed, but he
has neither the material nor the authority to pass judgment on
its accuracy. Something has already been said on the question
of wages and the part they play in determining costs. As regards
tariff policy, without passing an opinion on its merits, it may be
pointed out that the policy followed is that which has been or
is still being pursued by many countries in process of developing
new industries. As for the alleged artificial character of certain
industries, which are obliged to obtain all their supplies — raw
material and fuel — from outside the State, this accusation seems
to apply only to a small number of the existing industries, at
least so far as raw materials are concerned. Of the 73 groups
of industries covered by the statistics of the State of Säo Paulo,

— 41 —
not more than eight obtain their raw materials, wholly or partly,
from outside the State. These comprise five branches of the
textile industry: jute weaving, silk spinning, rayon manufacture,
silk weaving in general, and trimming manufacture; two branches
of the clothing industry : men's and women's hats ; and lastly,
among the miscellaneous industries, paper-making. These
industries together account for only 10 per cent, of all the
workers employed and 13.8 per cent, of the total value of production, so that the industries which can be described as wholly
indigenous employ 90 per cent, of all the workers and represent
86.2 per cent, of the value of the total industrial production of
Säo Paulo. Only in the textile group, where the jute and silk
industries are fairly important, is the percentage of the nonindigenous industries somewhat higher; they employ 22.6 per
cent, of all workers in the textile industry and produce 25.2 per
cent, of the total value of textile production. It should be noted,
however, that it is not to these industries in particular that
objections are raised, but rather to small industries, the products
of which are accused of being especially dear.
It therefore seems justifiable to conclude that on the whole
the industries of Säo Paulo are by no means artificial, especially
when it is remembered that many of the big industrial countries
buy a much larger proportion of their raw materials abroad than
does the State of Säo Paulo, and that it already obtains its
outside supplies, and will do so more and more in the future,
from the other Brazilian States, so that in any case its industry
is, and is likely to remain, national.

CHAPTER V
ECONOMIC CONDITIONS IN BRAZIL AND THE SOCIAL
PROBLEMS ARISING OUT OF THEM

This brief survey of the present economic situation of Brazil
suggest the following conclusions.
1. The major part of the present population of Brazil is
concentrated in a few States in the subtropical and temperate
zones of the Atlantic seaboard. These States supply nearly all
the agricultural exports products and harbour the whole of
large-scale Brazilian industry, an industry which is of recent
development, and the products of which are for the time being
nearly all consumed on the home market. Vast tracts of land
in the interior and northern part of the country, rich in boundless
possibilities, are only awaiting human labour to begin producing.
This situation is similar to that of the United States rather more
than half a century ago.
2. Again like the United States towards 1880, Brazil is
already a world power. Its interests are by no means limited
to relations with a single continent or a single part of the
world. Few people in Brazil claim that their country should
look towards America alone, holding aloof from Europe and
even more from Africa and Asia. A glance at the commercial
statistics of Brazil is sufficient to give some notion of the
universality of Brazilian interests.
It is true that the United States alone receives 46.7 per cent.
of all Brazilian exports (figure for 1933). But of the 16 countries
which import the major part of these products, only 3 are
American countries, whereas 11 are in Europe and 2 in Africa,
and although the American countries received 52.5 per cent, of
Brazilian exports in 1933, the second group imported 39.6 per
cent, or nearly two-fifths, a proportion which is far from
negligible and which Brazil cannot afford to ignore.
Brazil is seeking to export, besides its coffee, increasing
quantities of cotton, sugar, and fruit. It cannot find a market

— 43 —
for these products in the United States, which has its own cotton
and fruit-producing areas, and which buys the sugar it needs
over and above its own output from Cuba, Port Rico, and the
Philippines. Undoubtedly Brazil's market for these new products lies in Europe and perhaps also in the Far East, especially
Japan.
3. As a world commercial power, exporting mainly tropical
products, Brazil is liable to meet, and has in fact already met,
on the European markets with the competition of other tropical
lands, most of which are European colonies. In the course of my
visit I heard apprehensions and complaints which, though
discreetly expressed, seemed to me legitimate, regarding the
danger of this competition from colonial territories where the
Native's conditions of employment are less favourable, and
consequently less costly to the employer, than those usual in the
producing and exporting States of Brazil. The economic development of Brazil therefore raises the question of conditions of
employment in tropical lands.
4. There are vast resources in Brazil which are still untapped,
and vast territories which have not yet been settled and developed. There is no doubt that all this latent wealth will be
exploited at some future date. Two different methods of
development may be contemplated, however. The first is the
slow gradual process of development governed by the rate of the
normal growth of the national population and of the national
income. The second is a more rapid process of general and
thorough development such as took place in the United States
in the space of a few decades, and which would be perhaps even
more rapid in Brazil, other things being equal, owing to modern
methods of mechanisation and credit machinery. It was easy
to observe that both these methods have their advocates in
Brazil to-day. The application of the first, if indeed it is possible
in its pure form, involves only internal problems; but as soon
as the second is envisaged, implying recourse to outside resources, three social problems immediately arise: first, that of
conditions of employment; secondly, that of land settlement;
and thirdly, the problem of immigration
These three problems will be examined in the second part
of the present survey.

PART TWO
SOCIAL PROBLEMS

CHAPTER I
CONDITIONS OF EMPLOYMENT

CONDITIONS OF E M P L O Y M E N T IN A G R I C U L T U R E

The conditions of employment of agricultural labourers on
the plantations may concern two categories of workers: agricultural labourers proper and colonos. Although the use of this
latter term involves the danger of confusion between a worker
established with his family on a plantation in the owner's
service and a smallholder cultivating a plot of land on his own
account, I am obliged to use it here because it is the current
term. In this chapter, therefore, the term colono or settler
is used to describe a man established on a plantation under a
contract of employment with the owner.
There is not much to be said concerning agricultural labourers.
This type of employment is the most precarious of any to be
found in Brazil. It is only the coffee plantations, where the
work is varied but continuous, that engage workers under
contract by the year; everywhere else agricultural labourers
are employed merely by the day. Their earnings are naturally
far from regular, and vary according to the area and season,
and even according to the supply of labour available. Generally
speaking the daily wage varies between 3 and 7 milreis in the
north and 5 and 12 in the centre and the south, between Säo
Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul. Very few of the immigrants
from European countries take up or at least remain in this
kind of employment, except for unsuccessful settlers, whose
failure may be due to various causes, but who only remain in
these precarious circumstances from dire necessity.

— 46

-

Those who deliberately remain in this kind of paid employment are almost exclusively of Brazilian nationality. Some of
them are settled with their families on a strip of land which
provides them with a miniumm, though steady, livelihood
which they must supplement from other sources. Others come
from the north — from the State of Bahia during drought
years, for instance — and being able to live on a very low wage
owing to the simplicity of their mode of life, they prefer not
to be bound by any form of contract so as to be free to return
to their own homes when conditions improve or simply when
they feel so inclined. These are the free-lances, the irregulars
or mobile wing of the army of agricultural workers. They are
perhaps necessary in view of the present state of the labour
market and the conditions under which the agricultural States
are being developed. But with improved and rationalised
development of the land the need for their existence may be
reduced or even wholly removed, or at least confined to the
pioneering belt in the interior.
As regards the colonos, their situation can best be understood by following the course of their daily life from the time
they enter the service of a planter. Let us take as an example
a colono on a coffee plantation in the State of Säo Paulo, whose
position may be regarded as typical, the conditions varying
slightly according to the product cultivated and being somewhat
less favourable in some of the other States than in Säo Paulo.
As soon as the colono arrives, he is supplied with a house
for himself and his family, very often one of a group of similar
houses, which facilitates the provision of general services such
as water, light, etc. On coffee plantations the family is regarded as a team of workers, the father being the head. The
settler is placed in charge of a number of coffee shrubs which
varies according to the number of adults and juveniles in his
family on an average between 4,000 and 7,000. The work is
continuous ; it includes weeding, clearing the soil, and sometimes
tree-felling, and lastly and principally, picking the berries and
packing them in sacks. In some cases the settler is unable to
gather the whole crop of the coffee bushes in his charge with
the sole help of his family. Sometimes, too, he and some
members of his family may find time to do some extra work in
addition to the care of the coffee bushes, such as road maintenance, washing and drying the coffee berries, and sorting them
where several qualities are grown and the better-class berries
have to be separated.

— 47 —
The earnings of the colono may therefore consist of three
different items. In the first place there is the payment for
the care of the coffee bushes for which he is responsible under
his contract. This payment varies according as the settler
and his family are responsible for gathering the harvest or not;
in the latter case, the wage for looking after the coffee plants,
which is the only profit he will make from them, is slightly
higher than in the first, the average annual rate being from
100 to 500 milreis for every thousand plants. The second
item in his remuneration consists of the sums he or the other
members of his family may earn by outside work, the wage
for this work being about 3 or 4 milreis a day. And lastly,
he has a further source of profit in the gathering and packing
of the crop; the rate of pay is between 3 and 4 milreis per
sack according to the size. This is the sum total of the possible
earnings of the colono, except for any profit he may make on
the produce of the small vegetable garden which most of the
settlers have, on the crops he is allowed to grow between the
rows of the plantation for his own benefit, and on the few
cattle, goats and pigs which he is allowed to graze on the
planter's pasture land.
These various items require the keeping of somewhat
complicated accounts in the employment book or caderneta of
each settler. In attempting to assess the total value it is
difficult to give an average figure. It was told, however, and
the information was confirmed by my own examination of a
number of employment books on one plantation, that as a
rule the settler is in debt during the first year of his employment, becomes solvent in the second, and is able to save 1 or
2 contos (1 conto = 1,000 milreis) in the third.
Besides this form of contract binding the worker strictly to
the planter, who retains full responsibility and initiative,
various other forms of share-farming contract are also found.
Share-farming may be more profitable, but it calls for powers
of initiative and decision and for a knowledge of agricultural
methods and local conditions which are by no means within
the capacity of all settlers. Hence most of the settlers, especially immigrants from abroad, prefer the ordinary contract of
employment, not without some justification, since although
their potential profit is smaller, it is more secure.
This profit, which in any case is small, only exists at all
because the colono and his family live on a very modest scale.

— 48 —
Even on the most favourable hypothesis, the three items of
earnings described above can only add up to a small sum, much
lower than the earnings of a factory worker. No doubt the
colono on a plantation has a safe livelihood, but the standard
of this livelihood, even in the State of Säo Paulo, is not very
high. The situation here described may appear at first sight
to imply a paradox. The fact that the rural populations of
Eastern Europe, for instance, or Japan, have a low standard
of living is easily explained by the overcrowding of the rural
districts, the large excess of births over deaths, and the unemployment which results from this and constitutes a chronic
and endemic scourge. In Brazil, however, and especially in
the State of Säo Paulo, there is a constant shortage of labour.
This feature, to which I shall have occasion to revert later as
one of the factors retarding economic progress, might at least
be expected to serve the interests of social progress by enabling
the workers to use the scarcity of labour as a bargaining weapon
to obtain better remuneration for their work. This is not the
case, however, and we may reasonably consider why.
There are two main reasons ; one derives from the conditions
under which the labour for the coffee plantation was recruited
for fifty years, and the other from customs which grew up
long before this recruiting started and will die out only gradually, since here, as everywhere, conservation is an inherent
feature of rural life.
Coffee-growing, introduced in the State of Säo Paulo nearly
a century ago, has only been developing at a rapid rate for the
past fifty years or so. It was about 1888 that the use of coffee
began to spread rapidly in Europe and the United States, side
by side with the growth of industry, since industrial workers
appreciate this stimulating and refreshing drink; and that this
product, which was still scarce and in ever-growing demand,
began to be profitable. The cultivation of coffee was successfully extended on the red soil of the Brazilian plateau. But
it was precisely at this time that the land in Brazil began to
lose some of its traditional supply of labour owing to the
abolition oí slavery, since the emancipated slaves flocked in
large numbers to the towns. In many cases, where there had
been ten workers before and a hundred would have been needed
to meet the needs of the newly extended plantations, only five
remained. In order to obtain labourers who had become
scarce, and to retain those who were leaving the plantations

— 49 now that they had been emancipated, the planters were faced
with the possibility of having to vie with each other in increasing
wages, thus probably raising their costs and diminishing their
profits. But the plantation owners, who were the most powerful political factor in the State, preferred to suggest another
method to the authorities — that of attracting, by means of
assisted immigration, a large supply of foreign labour. This
was the course actually followed, and between 1889 and 1902
the State of Sao Paulo alone admitted nearly a million immigrants, the exact figure being 990,025, three-quarters of whom
were assisted Arriving in the country without any resources
and saddled with the burden oí the debt incurred on their
installation which they would have to repay sooner or later,
these immigrants were at the mercy of the State and of their
future employers. They were also numerous enough to meet
the immediate needs of the large-scale production of coffee
which was then growing up; and thus the "risk" of a "rise
in the value of labour " which had been feared was removed.
Hence the original rates of wages could be fixed extremely
low.
These rates were satisfactory to the employers, who, it
must not be forgotten, had been served entirely by slave labour
a few years earlier. It was difficult to instil the notion of a
fair wage into the head of the former slave-owner. However
good his intentions, he inevitably tended to regard his duty
as stopping short at the provision of a livelihood-for the men
working on his land The first planters and the leaders of
Government they controlled were therefore naturally inclined
to pay low wages. It was different for the newcomers to
resist this tendency even had it occurred to them to do so.
They were set down in the wilds under the traditionally absolute
authority of the plantation owner, who was entirely free to
fix, at his own discretion, both the piece rates of his workers
and the fines which might be imposed. Moreover, they were
surrounded by natives who had just been emancipated from
slavery and were accordingly naturally inclined to submit to
the plantation owners' conditions (the more independentlyminded having already fled to the towns) and to regard their
present lot as comparing very favourably with that which had
preceded it.
The original rates of wages were therefore very low. They
have indeed been raised somewhat since, but not very much,
-r

— 50

-

and during the depression wages again fell to 30 per cent, of
the 1928 rates Quite apart from the difficulty that a mixed
and scattered population of workers would have found in organising resistance, even had they been so minded, account
must also be taken of a fact which the planters themselves
did not fail to impress upon the Government, namely that the
low level of wages, involving low costs of production, contributed very largely to the successful competition of Säo
Paulo coffee on world markets.
The resultant large fortunes made by the planters placed a
large volume of purchasing power in their hands for the benefit
of the local industries which were just then growing up, so
that in the beginning the nascent industries reaped an indirect
advantage from the low level of agricultural wages, which were
a source of wealth for their only possible clients at the time.
Now, however, that these industries have expanded on a large
scale and are capable of mass production at low cost, they
would no doubt derive greater benefit from an increase in the
purchasing power of the rural workers through the raising of
their wages. I met many people who supported this view,
which appears indeed to be a reasonable one. It is possible
that once the country has recovered trom the effects of the
depression, the Government may adopt a policy of wage revision which will support the social policy on behalf of agricultural
workers initiated by it some twenty-five years ago.
Although it is true to say that the problem of agricultural
wages is still awaiting the solution which economic conditions
in Säo Paulo and Brazil in general demand, this is the only
problem relating to agricultural labour that the State, in the
absence of a trade union organisation which would be difficult
if not impossible to establish, has not yet solved In all the
other departments of the rural workers' conditions of life it
has effectively intervened by a series of decisions culminating
in 1911 with the establishment of the Patronato Agricola
This institution is the outcome of the Government's desire
to put a stop to a state of affairs which, owing to the very
natural inability of agricultural workers to organise, left them
entirely at the mercy of their employers, some of whom took
advantage of the situation to such an extent as to damage the
State's reputation abroad and to prejudice its chances of recruiting immigrants in Europe. The abuses took various
forms; for instance, it was common knowledge that when

—

Ol

—

business was bad some plantation owners omitted to pay their
settlers the wages due to them, and that in the event of their
bankruptcy wage claims were always the last to be paid, if
indeed they could be paid at all. It was against this practice
that the Government first took action. Under a Decree of
27 March 1907, wages were declared to have a prior claim to
payment over all the other debts of agricultural undertakings,
at least in respect of the products of the crop or crops which
the workers concerned had helped to produce. The Decree
also made compulsory the use of the caderneta, a kind of individual employment book issued to each worker, containing the
terms of his contract and his accounts with the employer.
The 1907 Decree was a first attempt to give a legal status
to the work of the agricultural labourer. But the law is one
thing and its application quite a different one, especially in the
field of agricultural employment, since the workers are scattered
over vast areas where supervision is as difficult as it is necessary.
Accordingly the Government of the State of Sâo Paulo set up
in 1911 the Patronato Agricola, an institution having various
duties, the principal being to take and conduct all proceedings
for the recovery of wages due, by providing legal aid, to secure
the observance of contracts, to see that the accounts in the
cadernetas are properly kept, and to bring to the notice of the
competent authorities any complaints made by the workers as
to injury to their property, to their rights or to their own or
their family's persons. Complaints might be addressed to the
Patronato by any agricultural worker, either verbally or by
letter. If the employer was convicted, he was required to pay
the full cost of the proceedings taken in pursuance of the claim ;
and if the claim failed, the worker was only required to bear
a quarter of the costs, the remainder being borne by the State.
This institution did not become really effective, however,
until it was equipped with a staff adequate in numbers and in
quality. This happened when the Patronato was attached to
the regional Department of Labour. I was able to observe for
myself that it is now an admirable piece of fully operative
administrative machinery. The responsible officials are not
only competent, but appear to be fully conscious of the
importance and delicate nature of the social duties entrusted
to them. Legal aid, which is nearly always preceded by an
attempt at conciliation, is at present in the charge of a chief
advocate with eight assistants, assisted by a large staff including

— 52 —
some interpreters, who are especially necessary owing to the
varied origin of the agricultural workers.
In each of the 200 or so municipal districts within the State
the Department is represented by promotores, or public attorneys, whose duty it is to receive complaints or demands from
the workers and to forward them to the Department within
five days. At present the workers to whom legal aid is given
are exempted from all legal costs and fees, whatever the outcome of the proceedings, and if it is necessary for them to appear
in person, their travelling expenses are paid by the Department.
Under a Decree of 19 April 1934, regulating legal aid, associations for the protection of immigrants are permitted to assist
the workers whom they brought into the country, as also are
the consular representatives of the worker's country of origin.
The Department's labour inspectors collaborate with the legal
aid service when inspecting the plantations ; this is only natural
since the protection of the interests of agricultural workers is,
to a very great extent, a question of inspection.
The impression left by even a superficial study of this
organisation is definitely favourable. There is, of course,
room for improvement, as in all other human institutions; in
particular, special courts might be set up to deal with the
disputes which may arise between agricultural employers and
workers in connection with living and working conditions.
Such courts could apply a more summary and reliable form
of procedure and their creation would merely mean extending
to the field of agriculture the principle of special courts for
the investigation and settlement of disputes arising out of the
relations between employers and workers in industry, which is
being generally adopted to-day.
Such is the action taken by the Government of Säo Paulo
during the past twenty-five years to secure better living conditions and more stable and secure working conditions for
agricultural workers. It would be unfair to neglect the
activities which private enterprise has also initiated parallel to
this effective official action. The generation of plantation
owners who had grown up familiar with the slave system and
whose traditions could not be changed overnight by the decree
of emancipation has long disappeared, and their successors are
naturally men of varying character and holding diverse views.
The present legislation and administrative machinery may be
sufficient to bring home to those employers, probably few in

— 53 —
number, who might tend to ignore it a true conception of the
needs of the times. But to the great majority of the plantation
owners it offers support in their personal efforts to improve the
living conditions of the workers in their employment. The
attempts made on many plantations to improve the health
conditions of the colonos and their families deserve special
mention; many of them now have a regular medical service,
each family paying a monthly contribution of 3 or 4 milreis for
ordinary medical attention, while on other plantations cooperative societies for medical attention and the supply of
medicines have been formed on the owners' inititative.
The living conditions of the agricultural worker and especially of the colono, who is the most frequent and characteristic
representative of this class, are improving in every respect,
from the contract of employment to housing conditions and
even diet, although the latter does not always conform to the
standards of modern medical science. It would be idle to deny
that these improvements would probably be more rapid if
there were an organisation for agricultural workers capable of
supporting their claims and, in particular, of securing a fair
adjustment of wages to the economic yield of the plantations.
Trade organisation among agricultural workers has always
been a slow and laborious process, however, even in countries
with a uniform population and an advanced standard of
civilisation. The difficulties are naturally still greater in a
country like Brazil, where the agricultural workers belong to
different nationalities and races and, for the most part, lack
not only experience but even the consciousness of their collective interests. The Federal Government and some of the
State Governments, foremost among which is that of Säo
Paulo, would be quite prepared to promote the organisation
of agricultural workers, but it is the inertia and ignorance of
the workers themselves which are the stumbling-block. The
importance attaching to official efforts to improve the lot of
the workers is, therefore, all the greater on this account.
CONDITIONS OF EMPLOYMENT IN INDUSTRY

Labour legislation in Brazil is enacted by the Federal
authorities and its application is regulated and supervised
under the direction of the Federal Ministry of Labour. The
Under-Secretaries' offices and Departments of Labour of the

— 54 —
various States collaborate in this task and may even initiate
their own local activities, as in the case of Säo Paulo, where,
as has already been seen, industry already plays an important
part. But the incentive and the guiding principles come from
the central authorities, who are also primarily responsible for
inspection.
The labour legislation governing industrial employment in
Brazil has reached a high standard. It is enough to recall here
that it provides for a 48-hour week, a weekly rest, and holidays
with pay. The employment of women is subject to regulation.
The employment of children and young persons under 14 years
of age is prohibited, and those between 14 and 18 years of age
may only be employed if they are already proficient in reading,
writing and arithmetic. Social insurance is not yet fully organised, but it already covers a large number of trades in respect
of accidents, old age, invalidity and death. In general, it may
be said that the legal protection afforded to industrial workers
is fairly thorough.
Does this imply that the protective legislation is equally
strictly applied everywhere ? This is hardly the case. There is
an excellent Federal labour inspection service, but the number
of inspectors is limited and the territory of Brazil is vast. I had
the opportunity of meeting some of the inspectors who had just
returned from their tour of inspection. One of them had just
come back from Amazonas, a State so huge and so distant and
where the industrial centres are so few and lie so far apart that
an inspector from the Central Department can hardly be expected to visit it more than once a year. It is therefore inevitable
that the conditions on distant and isolated undertakings should
be less regularly inspected than those in the establishments in
or near the Federal District. It may confidently be expected that
the present state of affairs, under which all are already doing
their best, will improve when the number of Federal inspectors
is increased, and especially when all the States follow the
example set by some of their number, in particular Sâo Paulo,
of instituting a State inspection service side by side with the
Federal one.
But there is another reason why, in spite of the best of
intentions, the labour legislation of Brazil cannot be fully
applied at present. Two examples from industrial conditions
in Sao Paulo will make this point clear.
Here is the first example. The law provides that, under

-

55 -

certain conditions, every industrial worker shall be allowed a
fortnight's holiday with pay. During his holiday the worker
naturally may not work for an undertaking other than that by
which he is normally employed. In Säo Paulo, however, the
custom tolerated both by the administration and by the trade
unions is that, in defiance of the law, many workers go to work
for another employer during their holiday, thus receiving double
payment to the detriment of any other workers who might be
engaged to do this extra work. The reason is that there are no
other workers available, and that unless those who are on paid
holiday came to the rescue the work would not get done at all.
Thus it is the shortage of labour which leads to this infringement
of labour legislation, with the assent of the authorities and the
interested parties.
Here is another and perhaps even more striking case. As
already mentioned, the law prohibits industrial employment
for children under 14 and only allows if for young persons
between 14 and 18 years of age if they can read, write, and do
arithmetic. At the present time, however, the shortage of
workers has led to such a demand for labour in the State of
Säo Paulo that this provision has had to be interpreted in the
broadest possible way, although it is true that detailed arrangements have been made to give satisfaction to the employers
and the workers' families without prejudicing the ducation of
the young people themselves.
When an employer engages a youth or girl between 14 and
18 years of age, he must submit to the Department of Labour
(1) the written assent of the parents; (2) a health certificate;
and (3) a certificate stating that the young person concerned
can read, write, and do arithmetic. If the third certificate
cannot be furnished, the young worker is given a temporary
permit, first for a month and then for six months, on condition
that he attends special evening classes organised for the purpose
of teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic during this period.
At the end of six months the worker sits for an examination at
the Department of Labour, a service, which I saw in operation,
being organised for the purpose. If the examination shows that
the boy or girl has made progress, the temporary permit is
renewed. If, on the contrary, no progress is found to have been
made or if the pupil is found to have missed a number of the
evening classes, the temporary permit is not renewed, and the
young person concerned is sent to day-school. Every six months

— 56 —
he is re-examined to ascertain whether he can again be employed
temporarily, subject to attendance at evening school. Finally,
when he has passed the examination, the young worker obtains
a permanent employment permit. This permit is, of course,
issued at the age of 18 years, even if the worker is still illiterate.
The system is strict and very well organised. But, at the
same time, an 8-hour working day (usually from 6 to 10 a.m.
and from 11 to 3 p.m.) followed by evening school from 7 to 8
is undoubtedly too tiring for children of 14 years of age who
cannot yet read or write. So great is the demand for labour,
however, especially in the city of Sao Paulo, that the authorities
have been obliged to adopt this system in agreement with the
workers. This is a further example of the unfortunate results
of the shortage of labour.
This shortage is undoubtedly due to the inadequate supply
of immigrants, either from within the Federation or from abroad,
in the States which are widely cultivated and more or less industrialised, a question which will be examined later. In spite
of its swift and steady development, Brazilian industry, and even
that of Säo Paulo, does not seem likely to be able to absorb a
large number of foreign immigrants. Although there are no
employment statistics in Brazil, the labour available to industrial
undertakings, except in the city of Säo Paulo, may be regarded
as practically adequate in quantity and even in quality. Moreover, from the latter point of view in particular, even supposing
that there is already an inadequate supply of labour in some
places and that a revival of world trade in the future were to
lead to a fresh expansion of industry and increased demand for
labour owing to its effects on Brazilian production for export,
the country's industrialisits, even those of foreign nationality,
would no doubt prefer to employ Brazilians, who are both able
and willing to learn and make excellent workers. But they could
only do this to the detriment of the peopling and settlement of
the land, where the population is already inadequate to meet the
needs of an expansion of production in the areas already under
cultivation, and an extension of the cultivated areas into the
interior. Thus, directly or indirectly, both the present scarcity
of labour, industrial and agricultural, in the economically
advanced States and the shortage which may be expected to
arise in the near future in those which are still on the threshold
of development again raise the question of settlement and
immigration.

CHAPTER II
LAND SETTLEMENT

V A R I O U S T Y P E S OF S E T T L E M E N T

Hitherto land settlement in Brazil has proceeded under three
forms, differing considerably from each other : settlement by the
public authorities; settlement by private agencies with commercial aims; and spontaneous or "advance-guard " settlement
by pioneers.
Settlement by the public authorities may be carried out by the
Federal or State Governments ; that is to say that one or other
of these authorities founds a settlement and grants holdings of
the land which it owns to members of the settlement under
certain conditions.
The Federal settlements are scattered over the territory of
14 States, although in very unequal proportions, 12 out of the
total of 31 settlements being in the State of Paraná. The
settlement activities of the Federal Government were very much
more vigorous before the war than they have been since. Between 1907 and 1913 25 settlements were founded, and after
1920 only 6 new ones were added. The total population of all
the settlements is about 50,000. As regards the origin of the
settlers, it would seem that before the war many of the members
of the Federal settlements came directly from abroad. In the
stettlements founded since the war, however, most of such
settlers as were not Brazilian nationals seem to have spent
some time in the country before finaly establishing themselves.
This applies to the settlers in the two Federal settlements in the
plain of Rio, Sao Bento and Santa Cruz, both of which I visited.
In the two comparatively recently founded settlements, Candido
de Abreu and Marquez de Abrantes, the high proportion of
Poles (especially in the first settlement, where they represent
over half the total population) points to the conclusion that
direct immigration played some part in this case. Data consulted
concerning 12 Federal settlement centres, with a population of

— 58 —
35,903 persons, gave the following figures for the distribution
of the population by nationalities:
Brazilians
Poles
Germans
Spaniards
Italians
Japanese
Austrians
Portuguese
Russians
Others

66.4 per cent.
14.3
10.2
2.4
1.8
1.5
1.3
0.6
0.4
1.1

Thus, practically two-thirds of the inhabitants of the Federal
settlements are Brazilians and one-third of other nationalities.
In view of the very moderate scale on which Federal settlement
is being carried out at present, it does not appear to offer much
scope for foreign immigration in the immediate future. But the
adoption of a more vigorous policy might revolutionise the
situation, provided that land were available for this form of
settlement. At present not more than 500 holdings are available
in the existing Federal settlements.
These holdings average 10 hectares in size. The system of
allotment and payment, as I saw it in operation in the settlement
of Santa Cruz, is as follows: the settler receives his holding of
10 hectares from the Administration^ with a house provided with
the necessary services (water supply, sanitary arrangements, etc.),
but unfurnished. The total charge is 18 contos (1 conto =
1,000 muréis), 10 for the land and 8 for the house. The first
instalment on the debt is not due until three years after the
settler enters into possession and the whole is payable in ten
equal annual instalments. The settler thus has at least 13 years
to pay off the 18 contos of his original debt and the time-limit
may be extended under special circumstances; for instance, at
Santa Cruz, following floods which destroyed part of the settlement in 1935, the repayment period was extended by three years
and tax exemptions were also allowed for the same period.
Seed is provided free of charge by the settlement.
The Santa Cruz settler therefore has a debt of 18 contos to
discharge within 16 years. Is this too much ? At Santa Cruz I
visited three settlers. One of them, a white Brazilian, has already
been offered 35 contos for his holding and had refused on good
grounds. The second, a particularly energetic and intelligent
Austrian, said that he would hold on to his land whatever

-

59 —

happened. The third, a coloured Brazilian with a family of
eight children, including a son of 25 years of age and a son-in-law,
is more concerned with the problem of how to acquire a new
holding than with that of selling the one he has. A settler may
obtain possession of a new holding when he has put the whole
of his original holding under cultivation. As a rule he cannot
to this unless he has a large family, like the coloured Brazilian
just mentioned, without having recourse to paid labour. The
settler usually engages his labourers by the year. Some of them
live on the holding itself in primitive huts made of clay and
bamboo, while others come from the neighbouring town or
village every day.
What has been said about the Federal settlements also
applies to the settlements founded by the different States. The
official settlement activities of the States have been very unequal.
The State of Rio Grande do Sul, for instance, no longer grants
land for settlement to individuals or settlement companies;
since 1926 it has reserved the residue of its lands for official
settlements. Even before this date the public authorities had
done much more than private agencies in the way of settlement
in this State. In 1926, the State's record was 2,700,000 hectares,
with a population of 600,000, and that of private agencies
1,286,000 hectares, with a population of 330,000. In the State
of Säo Paulo, on the contrary, settlement by the public authorities has never been carried on very energetically. No doubt the
Government, being committed to a costly policy of assisted
immigration intended to supply labour for the plantations,
regarded it as inconsistent to found large official settlements,
the first effect of which would be to deprive the plantations of
many of the workers, and probably the best.who had been
brought into the country for them at great expense.
This does not mean that the State of Säo Paulo has no settlement policy at all. Not only has it encouraged private settlement, for reasons to be explained below; it has also had a theory
of public land settlement. Thus, although a Decree of 1913,
most of the provisions of which are still applicable to settlement
by the State authorities, authoritises the direct establishment
of immigrants in State settlements, that of 5 July 1935, setting
up the Department of Immigration, Land and Settlement in the
State of Säo Paulo, reserves any holdings still available in the
settlements to immigrants who have already worked for at least
two years on a plantation.

Herein lies the principle and guiding spirit of official settlement policy in Säo Paulo. Its object is not to undertake largescale settlement schemes at State expense, but to create, as it
were, a sort of official model settlements to serve as an example
to private settlement agencies and even to plantation owners,
and to this end it selects the cream of the workers from private
plantations. This appears indeed to be the purpose which presided
over the organisation of some of the public settlements in Säo
Paulo, such as that of Barao de Antonina, on which I collected
some particulars. The settlers in this colony, which covers
14,000 hectares, belong to 16 nationalities, about half being
Brazilians. Medical aid, technical agricultural assistance, the
teaching of hygiene, the rationalisation of agricultural work,
the standardisation of products, the industrial working-up
of suitable products, experimental farms, free distribution of
plants and seeds, elementary schools, clubs for young people —
all the features of a model settlement seem to be present here.
It must be concluded that settlement by the public authorities, whether Federal or State, is a factor which cannot be
ignored in the general scheme of land settlement, both past and
present, in Brazil. But the importance of this factor lies
mainly in its quality. The quantitative factor lies, as it has done
in the past and will do in the future, elsewhere — in settlement
by private agencies, under certain conditions which remain to
be described later.
Private land settlement has always played a leading part in
Brazil. At present the private settlement companies are comparatively few in number. Those which are referred to most
often are the big Japanese Company, which will be described in
detail later in connection with Japanese immigration, and the
Norte-Panama Company which is admitted by all who have
visited the sites of its schemes to have obtained remarkable
results both in the economic and in the social fields. Under
present economic conditions in Brazil these private land settlement activities appear to be essential. The competent authorities of the State of Säo Paulo are fully aware, for instance, that
if it is desired to attract a further large supply of immigrants
from Europe, this can be done only by offering the best of them
better living conditions and prospects of success than they are
likely to have on the plantations. It is also realised that side
by side with the large-scale and more or less uniform production

— 61 —
of the plantations, even the most progressive ones, settlements,
being a collection of smallholdings, are the best means of
promoting that variety of crops which is so necessary to the
economic development of Brazil, and in particular of extending
the cultivation of vegetables, dairy produce, and the food
industries connected with it, which would be so useful to the
big Brazilian cities.
So far as I could ascertain, the Government of Säo Paulo
is prepared to do everything possible to encourage private
settlement. What in fact are the main difficulties ? Whether
the settlers come from the northern parts of Brazil or from
abroad, and especially in the latter case (it will be seen later
where the preference of the Säo Paulo authorities lies), the main
difficulty is the cost of transport and of installing single immigrants or families without means. Even where the would-be
settlers are workers who have already spent two or three years
on the plantations, as is usually the case in Säo Paulo, so that
the cost of transport does not have to be taken into account,
there is still the cost of establishment and of the land to be
granted, which represents a large outlay for the company
responsible for the scheme. A sound settlement scheme implies
that the responsible settlement agency shall not try to obtain
the major part of its profits by exploiting the settler — that is
to say, by demanding payments which are too high and spread
over too short a period, by failing to equip him well enough to
ensure his success, and by subsequently turning him out after
a time and beginning all over again with another. It also implies
State assistance to the settlement agency, carrying with it as a
natural condition the right of State supervision.
The State of Säo Paulo still possesses vacant and undeveloped lands in regions which are sparsely populated and
suitable for mixed plantation and stock-raising. This also applies
to some of the large private estates which contain, besides wellcultivated areas, large stretches of undeveloped land. But even
within the cultivated part of the country some of these big
estates seem to be ripe for breaking up into holdings which
could probably be obtained at a moderate cost, either because
the soil is exhausted by long years of coffee-growing and needs
a change and rotation of crops, such as can be introduced on
smallholdings, to recover its strength, or because paid agricultural labour is scarce in regions where independent settlers
would be quite willing to establish themselves, or for any other

— 62 —
reason obliging the landowners to sell up. And lastly, there is
still a certain amount of idle land in the immediate vicinity of
the big towns, suitable for growing vegetables or fruit and for
dairy farming, although these lands are admittedly becoming
scarce. Of all these different kinds of land, the most numerous
and attractive are the lands of the big estates which have already
been developed. They naturally cost less than the vacant land
near the towns, and the fact that they have been developed
in the past implies the proximity of means of communication and
facilities for marketing the products, an essential condition
for the success of any well-organised settlement scheme. It is
in this field that the best prospects of successful settlement in
the immediate future would seem to lie in an advanced State
like Sâo Paulo. The Säo Paulo Railway Company has recently
founded a settlement agency in collaboration with the State
Government with the object of buying up old plantations and
organising settlements on them. What has been done on Säo
Paulo should or could be done equally well in the other States
which are at the same stage of agricultural development, from
Minas Geraes and Rio de Janeiro to Rio Grande do Sul.
The question of the price of the land doubtless needs careful
consideration in view of the low purchasing power of the settler,
who will ultimately have to bear the cost of acquiring, and
preparing the holding and installing himself on it, plus a certain
percentage representing the company's profit. The. price of
land varies considerably from one region to another. Data
furnished by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture show that
although in the Matto Grosso, that is in the interior, the price
of land per hectare varies from 2 to 120 millreis in the country
districts, and from 150 to 300 near the capital in Goyaz, still
in the interior, from 2 to 350 and 400 to 600 ; in Paraná from 40
to 600, and in Santa Catharina, from 50 to 600, the prices rise
to 100 and 1,000 milreis (one conto) in Rio Grande do Sul. In
Minas Geraes, although in the rural districts land can still be
bought for between 20 and 80 milreis per hectare, the prices
range from 1 to 500 milreis near the towns ; while in Säo Paulo
prices, even in the rural districts, vary from 50 milreis to one
conto, rising to as much as 2 to 10 contos near the towns. Except
perhaps in the vicinity of the cities in the two last-mentioned
States, these prices are not prohibitive even without financial
aid from the State, and well-organised companies should be
able to meet them. If, however, the other costs involved are

— 63 —
also taken into account (travelling expenses of the settlers,
equipment of the settlement, etc.), it is clear that in the majority
of cases private settlement schemes will require assistance out
of public funds, especially where it is proposed to organise
smallholdings for vegetable-growing or dairy-farming near the
towns.
Finally, there is also in Brazil a movement towards spontaneous settlement. These settlers are the advance-guard of
civilisation. There are larger areas of undeveloped but cultivable
lands belonging to the State (terras devolutas) in Brazil than in
any of the other Latin American States. Lands of this type
still exist in the more advanced States such as Säo Paulo, Rio
de Janeiro, Minas Geraes, Bahia, Pernambuco; there are many
more in Paraná, Matto Grosso, Goyaz, Espirito Santo, and in the
northern States in the interior, such as Piauhy, Maranhâo, Para,
and Alazomas. The local Governments often concede a large
stretch of these lands to applicants in return for the cost of
measuring and surveying it ; in other cases they farm them out
or sell them for small annual instalments. More often, however,
on these distant territories with no roads other than natural
or semi-natural communications such as rivers or paths through
the bush or forests, the land is occupied either by the native
adventurers known as caboclos — semi-nomads with no local
attachments who are found principally in the north — or by the
more daring type of settlers known as pioneers. This kind of
settlement is neither extensive nor organised, but it very often
prepares the way for ordered development on a larger scale.
It is to the interest of the State not to prohibit it, and even to
legalise it subsequently if the settlers are successful. This is now
the usual practice sanctioned by the law where the occupier is
of Brazilian nationality. Section 125 of the new Brazilian
Constitution lays down that any Brazilian not already owning
rural or urban property who occupies, inhabits, and cultivates a
stretch of land without opposition for 10 consecutive years
shall acquire possession thereof, provided that it does not exceed
10 hectares in extent, by means of a mere legal declaration duly
registered.
Spontaneous settlement by pioneers has led in certain cases
to remarkable results. By way of example I may mention the
district of Manila in the State of Sâo Paulo. In 1920 this territory consisted of virgin forest. To-day it has over 71,000 inhabitants, nearly 58,000 of whom live on the land.

— 64 —
PRESENT PROBLEMS OF LAND SETTLEMENT

Agricultural settlement has rendered and will continue to
render the greatest possible services to the economic development
of Brazil, which is indeed inconceivable without it. But in
order that it may proceed in the right proportions and along the
desired lines, certain.problems will first have to be solved. A
survey of the chief of these problems is given below.
The first is the problem of finance. To-day this can no longer
be left to chance, as it so often was in the past during the heroic
age of settlement, without running the risk of wasting funds
which are not unlimited. Everything I heard during my journey
about settlement schemes which had definitely failed or were
doing badly because they were set on foot without sufficient
preparation points to the conclusion that, even in a country
as rich as Brazil, where nature responds with a colossal return
to every human effort, preparation, and especially financial
preparation, is essential.
It is true that the price of land itself is low almost everywhere
except in the vicinity of the towns. The figures given in an
earlier part of this volume show that land is much cheaper in
Brazil than in some of the other Latin American States, especially Argentina, and that in the pioneering belt land may be
obtained for nothing or next to nothing. But the cost of the land
is not the only item; the expenses also include the organisation
of the scheme, the cost of installing the settlers, of housing,
equipment, and road-building, to mention only the chief items
in a budget which is bound to include a great many, and very
large ones. The settler's success depends on the advances he is
granted under all these heads, and on the length of the period
for which they are granted, since the average settler must be
presumed to be a man of small means.
The question therefore arises whether private settlement
companies can normally be expected to commit themselves to
all this expenditure and undertake the responsibility for such
vast long-term credit operations without any outside help. In
the case of some especially wealthy companies this is perhaps
possible, and also in that of charitable organisations whose
funds are derived from voluntary contributions and which are
not seeking a profit. But I doubt if it is possible for most of the
companies which spring up and set their schemes on foot haphazard, except in two cases.

— 65 —
The first exception is only mentioned to be rejected, and
fortunately for the honour of land settlement agencies it is
extremely rare. I refer to those speculative companies which
have appeared from time to time, which lay out large sums and
require the settler to repay them within a fairly short term, so
that after a few years he is obliged to give up his land and leave
the instalments he has already paid in the hands of the company;
the latter then begins again with a fresh outlay and a new
settler. In this way a batch of holdings may be made to yield
profits for the company as high as they are immoral, but the
system cannot be regarded as anything but a swindle. Fortunately, as already stated, such cases are rare.
The other exception is more frequent and less dishonourable,
but it is useless for the settlement of persons of small means.
It is that of companies which do not grudge the necessary outlay
on installing the settlements, and add to it the sometimes high
expenses of a noisy advertisement campaign designed to attract
settlers from comparatively wealthy countries who can afford
to give high prices for their holdings and to pay for them within
a fairly short time, two conditions which exclude poor immigrants
from the poorer countries.
On all these grounds I believe that the best method of
carrying out a sound settlement policy, both in those parts of
the Brazilian States that have already been opened up and even
in the empty spaces, designed to attract agricultural workers
from the poorer regions (whether from other parts of the Federation or from abroad; this is a question which will be dealt
with later in connection with immigration) is to have recourse
to official or semi-official bodies which, without seeking to make
large profits, would increase the price of the holdings only by an
amount sufficient to recover the initial expenses over a long
term, to secure a fair profit for the private capital invested, and
to constitute a small reserve fund. Bodies of this kind, inspired
by social aims and organised on a sound technical and financial
basis, would undoubtedly receive from the State in which they
carried out their settlement schemes support in various forms,
such as the grant of land free or at very low cost, contributions
to the cost of building means of communication, temporary
exemption from taxes, assistance in organising social services,
etc.
The second problem is that of the settlers' standard of living.
Here I must revert again in another form to a point already

— 66 —

referred to in connection with the living conditions of agricultural
wage earners. The new settlers cannot expect to enjoy at the
outset a standard of living equivalent to that which they would
have had in their country of origin, at least if they come from
Western Europe or from some of the countries of Central
Europe, Denmark, Germany or Switzerland. A settler who
establishes himself right in the country, and still more one who
settles in the pioneering regions, lives in a closed economic
system; he must be self-sufficient for the fairly long period
which must elapse until the development of the settlement's
production and the organisation of communications and the
machinery of exchange enable it to take its place in the commercial network of the country. But here, as in many other
countries, discrepancies between different standards of living
are to some extent compensated by the different mode of life
dictated by natural conditions. In Brazil, the problem of
heating does not arise and that of clothing is solved in the
simplest of ways, while the abundance of timber helps to settle
the question of housing at small expense. The food problem may
be solved by supplying the settler with a small poultry yard,
a few head of cattle, and a small field in which he can grow a
little manioc, maize, vegetables, fruit and sugar cane. The
staple items in this diet are obviously better suited to native
Brazilians and settlers of Mediterranean or Japanese origin than
to those from Central or Northern Europe, but the latter's
needs can equally well be satisfied by varying the crops grown.
But it is true nevertheless that a sound settlement policy
should also aim at improving every aspect of the settlers'
standard of living, including that of intellectual and social
facilities. All the authorities I consulted on this point were
unanimous in their opinion that land settlement cannot be
successful unless the settler's family takes root in the soil and
merges into its environment. The old saying: Ubi bene, ibi
patria, is still true; the pleasanter his life there, the sooner will
the settler become a true citizen of his new country. Here the
demographic and the economic interests of Brazil march together. It is vital to the country that it should be able some
day to rely, not merely on its export trade for its prosperity,
but on a wider home market; and improving the settler's
standard of living means increasing his purchasing power. All
the manufacturers with whom I discussed the matter in Säo
Paulo were unanimous on this point; the settlers must be able

— 67 —
to buy some at least of the goods that are manufactured with
the aid of the surplus raw materials they have helped to produce.
The principal items in the settler's standard of life which
this policy should aim at improving are health conditions,
housing, and diet. In none of these three fields will it be necessary to start from rock bottom. As an example of sanitary
organisation, I visited with interest the hospitals established
in the Federal settlements of Sao Bento and Santa Cruz, where
they are engaged in exterminating malaria in the marshlands
of the plain of Rio de Janeiro. The housing conditions of the
settlers also seem satisfactory on the whole as regards space,
water supply, and essential sanitary arrangements. But it is
obvious that however adequate this organisation may be for
settlements at the outset of their career, it must improve if it
is to keep pace with their economic development. I was told
that it is the settlers' diet which probably offers the greatest
scope for improvement. The committees on workers' nutrition
which have been working for over a year in connection with the
League of Nations and the International Labour Organisation
could doubtless play a most useful and effective part in this
field, and the same applies to the Conference on Health and Rural
Housing for the Latin American countries which is on the programme of the Health Committee of the League of Nations.
A third problem which is of regional interest only, affecting
the settlements in the vicinity of towns, is that of preventing
the rural exodus. This difficulty does not arise for the first
generation so much as for the second. A settler transplanted
from the north to the central or southern States, and still more
one who has come from Europe or Asia to Brazil, values the land
which he has had such difficulty in acquiring and his life's one
ambition is to make a success of it, especially as he would be
lost, penniless, and out of his element among the population of
the town. But for his children, who are practically assimilated
or at least acclimatised, the attraction of city life is a very real
danger. The best method of averting it is to raise the standard
of living in the suburban settlements in order that the settlers'
family may not only make a profit but enjoy some at least of
the social and intellectual amenities expected of city life.
Another regional problem is that of settlement in the equatorial
north. In some parts of Amazonia a need is beginning to be felt
for imported labour. Big undertakings such as that set on foot
by Henry Ford and others of German origin already employ a

— 68 —
large number of indigenous workers whose standard of living
has admittedly been considerably improved. But if these
undertakings prosper and multiply, and if cotton-growing,
originally introduced in the State of Bahia, is encouraged to
extend by the development of the textile industry in the central
States, recourse will have to be had to settlers from elsewhere.
In the north, however, both the natural conditions, especially
the climate and conditions of employment, and the low rate of
wages in particular, practically exclude the possibility of settling
Brazilians from the central or southern States, still more Europeans. This difficulty may be met in two different ways,
which are not mutually exclusive but complementary. The
first is to begin by opening up the cultivable parts of northern
Brazil with the help of the local population, a suggestion which
raises the question whether it would not be better to retain this
population in the north and to discourage, instead of encouraging,
the migration movement to the centre and the south which is
already in progress. This is a problem of internal migration
which will be considered later. The second solution lies in
bringing into this region the only kind of immigrants who appear
to be possible in this case. Europeans are out of the question
because of the climate, and Africans because of the sparseness
of the black population of Africa, so that the only remaining
alternative are the Asiatic peoples, and in particular the Japanese. Here, however, another problem arises — that of the
nationality of immigrants.
This problem too will be dealt with later. But the following
table, showing the distribution of agricultural property in Säo
Paulo between the various nationalities, according to returns
made five years ago, may perhaps appropriately be inserted
here in order to give some idea of the contribution each of the
races admitted to Brazil has made to land settlement.
This table is instructive. There is nothing surprising in the
fact that most agricultural holdings (over seven-tenths of the
developed land) belong to Brazilians and that Italians hold the
second place, in view of the large numbers of Italians who
entered Brazil during the first fifteen years of this century. It
is also natural that the other Mediterranean peoples — the
Portuguese, who first opened up the country, and the Spaniards
— should come next in order. What is more surprising is that
the Japanese are already ahead of the Germans, British, Syrians,
French, Austrians and Poles as regards the area of cultivated

— 69 —
DISTRIBUTION OF AGRICULTURAL P R O P E R T Y IN THE STATE OF
SÄO PAULO BY NATIONALITIES

(NUMBER, AREA AND VALUE),

1931-1932 !
Number of
holdings
Percentage

Brazilians. .
Italians . .
Portuguese .
Spaniards. .
Japanese . .
Germans . .
British . . .
Syrians. . .
French . .
Austrians. .
Miscellaneous
Negligible
fractions .

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

133,275
32,709
11,228
10,517
10,235
2,589
145
1,206
123
402
1,766

.

—

Area
Total
(Hectares)

Value
Percentage

Total
(milreis)

65.26 11,558,125 70.37 3,506,370,390
16.01 2,264,682 13.78 958,717,831
5.49
643,546
3.91 275,332,185
5.15
514,678
3.12 243,137,546
5.01
326.637
1.98 129.162.169
1.26
302,558
1.84
52,900,568
0.07
223,269
1.35
95,594,126
0.59
190,812
0.20
67,029,651
0.06
33,306
1.16
8,867,250
0.19
25,550
0.15
8,531,650
0.86
341,653 2.08
56,734,317
0.05

—

0.06

—

Percentage

64.90
17.74
5.09
4.50
2.39
0.97
1.76
1.24
0.16
0.15
1.05
0.05

Total . . 204,195 100.00 16,424,816 100.00 5,402,377,683 100.00
1

The order in which the nationalities are given is that of the area of their holdings.

land; although they still own slightly under 21 per cent, of the
cultivated land and their holdings represent only slightly over
2 per cent, of its value, they already account for 5 per cent, of
all holdings, which means that they have gone in for smallholding much more than any of the other nationalities have
done. And it is with smallholding that the future lies.
An estimate of the average size of the holdings of landowners of each nationality gives the following figures :
Nationality

British
French
Syrians
Germans
Brazilians
Italians
Austrians
Portuguese
Spaniards
Japanese

Average size of holdings
(hectares)

1,540.0
270.8
158.2
116.8
86.7
69.2
63.5
57.3
48.9
31.9

This shows that smallholding is most common among
Brazilians and, as far as aliens are concerned, among the Medi-

— 70 —
terranean settlers, the Austrians, and still more the Japanese.
Now smallholding implies that the settlers are grouped together
in settlements, and this again usually implies a concentration of
separate nationalities. This question of settlement by groups
of the same nationality is one of the most serious and widely
debated problems in Brazil to-day. It forms, in fact, one of
the most thorny aspects of the present problem of immigration,
as the following chapter will show.

CHAPTER III
IMMIGRATION

IMPORTANCE O F IMMIGRATION I N B R A Z I L

It is not my present purpose to describe here the very
important part played by immigration in the economic
development of Brazil since the beginning of the nineteenth
century. But without minimising the qualities of the native
population, the first white settlers, and the coloured labour
imported under the slave system and subsequently emancipated,
it may safely be said that if there had been no immigration the
country's resources would have been less extensively, less
thoroughly, and less rapidly developed. Figures are available
to substantiate this statement. Between 1820 and 1930 nearly
4 % million immigrants entered Brazil, that is, probably more
than were admitted by any other Latin American country
except Argentina. Of this number 2,624,000, representing 58.3
per cent, or nearly three-fifths of the whole, settled in the State
of Säo Paulo, which is precisely the most economically advanced
of all the Brazilian States.
The immigrants came from a large number of European
countries, and more recently from Asia also. The 4*4 million
immigrants who landed in Brazil within the above period of
110 years were distributed by nationalities as follows:
Per cent.

Italians
Portuguese
Spaniards
Germans
Miscellaneous

*.

34.5
30.0
12.2
3.5
19.8

In the State of Säo Paulo, which never received a very large
influx of Germans, who preferred the cooler States of the south,
but which has recently attracted nearly all the Japanese immigrants to Brazil, the percentages are slightly different:
Per cent.

Italians
Portuguese
Spaniards
Japanese
Miscellaneous

36.0
16.0
15.0
4.5
28.5

— 72 —
Generally speaking, this immigration was not spontaneous
as it was in the United States during the heroic age of land
settlement in the interior. In many cases the immigrants were
recruited and assisted. In the State of Säo Paulo, for instance,
42 per cent, of the immigrants were settled with State aid, the
Government having spent 182,306 contos in establishment
expenses, or an average of over 3 % million milreis a year,
between 1881 and 1930. From this it may be inferred that
Brazilians fully and, until recently at least, unanimously
realised the advantages their country would derive from a steady
influx of new blood.
One consequence of this large inflow of foreign immigrants
must be noted. While it is true that a very large number of them,
by far the majority, have become Brazilian subjects, this
immigration has nevertheless led in the past, and is still leading,
to the presence of an exceptionally large number of aliens in the
country. As the last official census taken in Brazil dates from
1920, it is impossible to illustrate this point by figures as recent
as are available for other countries, but it is improbable that the
proportion of aliens has diminished since that date, as a result,
for instance, of the pursuance of a more liberal naturalisation
policy by Brazil or of a keener desire for naturalisation on the
part of foreign immigrants, in view of the very nationalistic
complexion of the present Government of Brazil and the equally
nationalistic spirit dominating some of the countries from which
the immigrants are drawn. In 1920, when the population of
Brazil formed only 1.7 per cent, of the total population of the
world, 6.7 per cent, of all aliens returned as resident outside
their own countries were in Brazil. Whereas aliens returned
outside their own country represented an average of about
1.4 per cent, of the world population, those resident in Brazil
(about 1,566,000 persons) formed 5.1 per cent, of the country's
population. This exceptionally high proportion of aliens does
not seem to have disturbed public opinion much in the past.
But I am obliged to record that it was put forward as one
argument against mass immigration by some of those who
are opposed to the continuance of such immigration in
future.
It may be useful give here the number of members of the
principal nationalities represented among the foreign population of Brazil in 1920, together with the proportion they formed
of all aliens.

— 73 —
Number
of aliens

Percentage
of all aliens

52,870
26,354
219,142
558,405
32,299
433,577
28,941

3.4
1.7
14.0
35.7
2.0
27.7
1.8

50,251
39,926

3.2
2.6

T o t a l . . . . 1,441,765
America:
South Americans
84,077
Other Americans
6,074

92.1

Nationality

Europe:
Germans
Austrians
Spaniards .
Italians
Poles
Portuguese
Russians
Turks (including Asiatic
Turks)
Miscellaneous

Total.

. .

5.4
0.3

90,151

5.7

27,976

1.8

6,069

0.4

1,565,961

100.0

Asia :
Japanese
Oceania
Grand total . . . .
PRESENT

NEEDS

In most of the Brazilian States there is still a great demand,
not only for settlers to develop land still lying idle or to introduce
smallholding methods on the big estates formerly engaged in
large-scale plantation, but also for agricultural labourers.
This need is greatest in the States in the central and southern
part of the Atlantic belt where development is in full swing,
from Rio Grande do Sul to Espirito Santo, and so far as I was
able to ascertain, especially in Minas Geraes and Sào Paulo.
This is not surprising in the case of Minas Geraes, since for a
long time no immigrants entered this State except adventurers
prospecting in precious metals or precious stones, and to-day
agricultural development is in full swing, especially fruit and
vegetable growing near the towns and cotton-growing on the
land, which could give employment to thousands of workers
who are not available. It is more unexpected in the case of
Säo Paulo, considering the enormous proportion of immigrants
to Brazil who have drifted into that State, but its continuous
need for labour can be explained on two grounds.
The first is that Säo Paulo is developing not only agriculturally but industrially. It is true that, rapidly though its
industry is expanding, it has no need to call on the services of

— 74 —
workers from outside its own boundaries. Even if, as may be
expected, industrial development continues, and at a rapid
rate, the necessary labour can be found within the State itself
among the rural population, which, here as elsewhere, gravitates
towards the towns, while in exceptional cases it can be obtained
from the other States. Technicians are the only kind of workers
who may have to be obtained from abroad. But this drain on
the rural population by the towns has had and will continue
to have the result of reducing still further a supply of agricultural
workers, whether settlers or wage earners, which is already
inadequate. On this point the complaints I heard in Sao Paulo
were unanimous. I was informed that a great many plantation
owners do not plant the whole of their land for fear of being
unable to obtain sufficient labour for the harvest. During the
season of 1935-1936, although 51,000 workers were brought into
the State under Government auspices and 30,000 more came
of their own accord from the neighbouring States, wheatgrowing and coffee-planting declined to the advantage of cotton,
which is indeed a more profitable crop at the moment but which
could have been expanded without any restriction of the other
crops if sufficient labour had been available.
The second cause of this comparative shortage of labour
is no doubt the large number of departures, which partly
cancels out the effect of immigration. So far as the Brazilians
who come to Säo Paulo from other States are concerned, the
high rate of re-emigration is due to an instability rooted in the
customs of the population. This will be discussed later; suffice
it to say at present that between 1908 and 1935, of the 100,000
Brazilians who entered Sao Paulo from the other Brazilian
States, less than one-fifth (19.3 per cent.) remained, the rest
having left the State subsequently. As regards foreign immigrants, the rate of re-emigration is lower, but is also due mainly
to the habits recently acquired by the immigrants of certain
nationalities (another point which is dealt with in greater detail
below), for although the earnings and living conditions of agricultural workers are low and considerably inferior to these
obtaining in Western Europe, they are not appreciably worse
than those of the eastern or central European countries from
which most of the immigrants are drawn. Hence a certain
proportion of re-emigration must always be reckoned with.
If too many vacancies remain, the remedy, as I was told,
is to admit more immigrants to the country. According to

— 75 —

the highest authorities in Sao Paulo, the State could at
present absorb 300,000 immigrants annually.
PRINCIPLES OF PRESENT POLICY

The Quota System. — The immigration policy of the Federal
Government is definitely restrictive, in accordance with the
provisions of the Constitution itself. Article 121 of the Constitution in fact lays down that not more than 2 per cent, of the
number of immigrants of each nationality who settled in Brazil
during the past 50 years may be admitted every year. This
highly restrictive provision is inspired by the similar legislation
introduced earlier in the United States. If it is applied without
modification, its effects will clearly be more serious than in the
northern Federation. On the one hand the quotas will be
assessed on immigration figures which were much lower in Brazil
than in the United States during the past half century, while
on the other the few immigrants whom they still allow through
will enter a country much less densely populated, Brazil having
42 million inhabitants as compared with 127 million in the
United States and 5 inhabitants per square kilometre as compared with 16.
The Federal Ministry of Labour seems to have grasped this
difficulty. It has in fact fixed the immigration quotas for each
nationality, not according to the strict letter of the Constitution,
on the basis of the number of immigrants of that nationality,
who settled in the country during the past 50 years, but on the
basis of those who entered the country, without regard to departures, which in certain cases were very numerous. Had the
Constitution been strictly applied, only about 46,000 immigrants
would have been allowed to enter each year; liberally interpreted, it allows the entry of some 84,000, or nearly twice as
many 1. But this figure is a maximum which is never reached,
since, as will be seen below, some countries, including those with
1
The following are the annual quotas provisionally fixed for the
nationalities to whom the system applies by the Decree of 16 April
1936: Argentinans, 369; Austrians, 1,679; Belgians, 117; British, 417;
Czechoslovaks, 174; Estonians, 123; French, 606; Germans, 3,118;
Hungarians, 236; Italians, 27,475; Japanese, 3,480; Lebanese, 266;
Lithuanians, 1,573; Netherlanders, 151; North Americans, 221; Poles,
2,035; Portuguese, 22,991; Rumanians, 773; Russians, 2,146; Spaniards,
11,962; Swiss, 148; Syrians, 405; Turks, 1,584; Uruguayans, 161;
Yugoslavs, 997; total, 82,807. Those nationalities which supplied
practically no immigrants in the past are allowed a maximum annual
quota of 100.

— 76 —

the largest quotas, are very far from using the whole of the quota
allowed to them, a practice which incidentally diminishes this
quota from year to year, it being reassessed annually on the
basis of the past 50 years, which naturally include the year
just elapsed when the number of immigrants actually admitted
did not come up to the full quota.
This is perhaps to take rather too gloomy a view of future
prospects, but it is at least certain that although 84,000 immigrants may enter the country each year, a much smaller number
actually do so. Moreover, many of those people with whom
I discussed this question in Brazil, belonging to the most varied
circles, consider that even if the quota of 84,000 were entirely
filled, it would be wholly inadequate to the country's real need;
as already stated, the State of Säo Paulo alone could absorb
300,000 persons annually.
The False Analogy of the United States. — Some of the
advocates of a liberal immigration policy contest the very
principle of restriction on the ground that the alleged analogy
with the United States on which it is based is a false one.
They argue that the principal ground on which the United
States restricted immigration was the opposition of the trade
unions, who were afraid that the competition ot immigrant
labour, not only that of Asiatic immigrants, but also of immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, would drag down the
wage level and lower the standard of living of American workers.
This argument cannot however apply to Brazil, since the
standard of living of agricultural workers there is nearly as low
as in Eastern Europe or in the Far East.
A second reason for the introduction of the quota system
in the United States was the fear of a further increase in unemployment, which at one time affected 13 million workers and
probably still affects 10 million. To this the Brazilians reply
that there is no unemployment in agriculture in Brazil, but on
the contrary a shortage of labour.
Thirdly, the United States Government was alarmed by the
low birth rate of its own population. Whereas in the United
States the annual excess of birth over deaths was 89 per thousand
among the Italians, 78 among the Jews from Eastern Europe,
between 33 and 24 among the Germans, Irish, English and
Scottish, among the old North American stock there was a slight
annual excess of deaths over births of 0.8 per thousand. In

— 77 —
Brazil, however, the rate of increase among the old-established
population is as high as among the newcomers.
Finally, in the United States there is also the question of
race prejudice, the desire to keep a sufficient place for the
representatives of the old American culture. The Brazilian
answer to this argument is that there is no race prejudice in
Brazil, a statement which was strictly true until an anti-Japanese
movement began to spring up, which is, however, still weak and
sporadic; it will be discussed more fully later. In Brazil there
is a uniform culture stretching from the native population and
the negro through a series of cross-breeds to the white settler,
and Brazilian civilisation has proved itself capable of absorbing
the most diverse and allegedly refractory elements. In support
of this view I was told that there are families of Japanese settlers
(although it is true these are isolated cases) in which the children
speak nothing but Portuguese, and I myself saw similar cases
among Italians.
Proposed Mitigation of Restrictive Policy. — Vigorous protests
against the quota system, even when liberally interpreted as it
has been by the Federal Ministry of Labour, have been made in
several States, such as Minas Geraes, Espirito Santo, and, still
more, Säo Paulo. I was able to consult a recent memorandum
of the Immigration Department of the latter State, enumerating
all the points on which a reform of the present system is necessary
to prevent its damaging the interests of the State. As regards
those aspects of the matter with which we are here concerned,
the memorandum recommends that the quota system should
apply only to "free " immigration, and not to those immigrants
whom any individual Brazilian State should see fit to introduce
into its territory to meet its economic needs, by its own efforts
and at its own expense.
Another point is that at present a maximum annual quota
of 100 immigrants is allowed to those countries which supplied
a negligible number in the past and whose quota would therefore
be practically nil. The memorandum recommends that this maximum should be raised. Here again the United States legislation,
which sought in this way to raise a colour bar against the Asiatics,
seems to have been taken as the model. In Brazil, however, this
bar does not operate against the Japanese, whose statutory
quota is nearly 3,500, whereas it may operate to the disadvantage
of other nationalities against which there is no prejudice.

— 78 —

Other Principles. — Among the other principles governing
immigration in Brazil, mention must first be made of the
principle of equality of treatment for national and foreign
workers, both under ordinary law and in respect of conditions
of employment. The observance of this principle is highly
necessary; not only does it reassure the Brazilian worker as to the
maintenance of his standard of living, which is already low
enough, but it also tends to prevent the kind of inferiority
complex to which the immigrant is only too often prone.
Another principle which is excellent in intention but seems
to have caused some disappointment in application, at least
according to the memorandum cited above, is the provision
that no immigrant may enter the country unless he is in possession of a contract of employment. Agricultural workers from
the poorer countries of Eastern Europe, for instance, who as
free emigrants find it difficult enough to pay the cost of their
passage, are unable to bear the extra expense of obtaining a
contract. It is said that in these cases there is a danger that a
practice already met with occasionnally may become general
where free emigration is concerned. I refer to the illegal traffic
in fictitious agricultural contracts of employment, which are
sold by middlemen at exorbitant prices to so-called agricultural
workers who are in reality urban workers and who, on arriving
in Brazil, are a nuisance to the cities, where they are a drag on
the market, and are no use to the agricultural districts, where
on the contrary labour is urgently required. In order to prevent
this topsy-turvy form of selection, which is an unforeseen result
of the compulsory requirement of a contract, the memorandum
recommends that this requirement should be abolished, in favour
of the establishment of an efficient service for the selection of
applicants in the emigration countries, so that only genuine
agricultural workers would be allowed to emigrate, even on
their own account, to countries which are known to have only
agricultural employment to offer.
Finally, there is one more principle, also laid down in
Article 121 of the Constitution, the application of which may
have far-reaching consequences on the settlement of immigrants
in Brazil. Paragraph 7 of this Article prohibits the concentration
of immigrants at any given point in the territory of Brazil, and
provides that the localisation, selection and assimilation of aliens
shall be regulated by law. This provision is inspired by the
desire, no doubt legitimate and in any case unanimous, to

— 79 —
promote the rapid assimiliation of immigrants. For the time
being no statutory measures have been enacted to give effect
to the constitutional principle. A preliminary draft proposes,
however, that the teaching of Portuguese by Brazilian-born
teachers should be compulsory in all settlements — a measure
which is hardly open to reasonable objection — and would also
prohibit the founding of any settlement in future, whether official
or private, with immigrants of a single nationality, but would
require a certain proportion of Brazilian nationals to be
included in every case.
There is nothing new in these last provisions so far as the
official settlements are concerned; it has always been the practice
to mix the nationalities and to include a large Brazilian element,
as examples already given have shown. As regards settlement by
private agencies operating commercially, these provisions do
not seem likely to create any difficulties, since there is nothing
to prevent the companies concerned from recruiting their settlers
from among all nationalities. There remain the settlement
agencies with social aims, formed to promote the settlement of
special classes of persons (i.e. persons of a certain nationality,
race, or even religion). Can such agencies be required, without
endangering their success, to devote part of their funds, which
are often donated under specified conditions, to the establishment of Brazilian settlers ? This does not seem to be impossible,
but it doubtless implies the condition that the State Government concerned should offer some return in the form of a grant
of land on specially favourable terms, tax exemptions, or other
facilities.
INTERNAL MIGRATION

Interstate migration, especially from the northern States to
the rapidly developing central ones, has always been very
active in Brazil, and especially so since the Federal Constitution
prescribed the quota system for foreign immigration. At present
most of these Brazilian immigrants go to Säo Paulo. As already
stated, this State is capable of absorbing 300,000 immigrants
a year, whereas its official quota for foreign immigrants is only
32,000. Hence it is obliged to have recourse to workers from the
other parts of Brazil. It receives immigrants from Bahia and
Ceara (especially in years of drought), and even from Minas
Geraes and the southern States, although these are in the full
tide of development and have for many years themselves ad-

— 80 —
mitted foreign immigrants. During the first half of 1936, for
instance, 400 emigrants came to Säo Paulo from Rio Grande do
Sul. A few Italians also came from Argentina, which may be
regarded in a sense as a source of internal migration. Generally
speaking, however, the nothern States are the principal sources
of supply. The subsidies to foreign immigration were suspended
from 1927 to 1935, when they were resumed, but at the same
time the recruiting of workers from the other Brazilian States
had to be intensified. Four private companies supported by the
State undertook the recruiting, transportation, and feeding of
the immigrants during the journey, and their accomodation in
camps pending their departure for the plantations. In 1935
these companies brought 50,000 workers into the State at
Government expense. The cost naturally varies with the distance
covered; it is 100 milreis for a worker from Minas Geraes, 170
from Bahia, and 260 from Ceara.
In the eyes of many people in Säo Paulo this immigration
from the north is admittedly a makeshift, and they look forward
to a system which will enable them to replace it by increased
immigration from abroad. They argue that although the workers
from the north have the twofold advantage of being already in
the country, and thus immediately available, and of being
Brazilians, that is to say, needing no assimiliation, at least
theoretically, this is only half true in practice. For although, in
the case of northern Brazilians, there is none of the danger of the
formation of national groups which is feared in the case of some
European or Asiatic immigrants, it is none the less true that the
northern Brazilians will never become assimilated to the population of Säo Paulo to the extent of adopting the latter's industrious ways. According to the standards of Säo Paulo the
output of the northern Brazilian is poor; he has few needs, and
he prefers to work little and earn little rather than to increase
his earnings by working harder. Moreover, this type of labour
is unstable. As already stated, these workers refuse to enter into
any contract, even for the moderate term of a year; they wish
to remain free to return home at the earliest favourable opportunity (for instance, in the case of migrants from Ceara, when
the drought is over in their own State) or as soon as they feel so
inclined. Moreover, they take full advantage of this freedom;
it is estimated that practically four-fifths of the workers who
have entered Säo Paulo from other States have returned home
again within a comparatively short space of time. The most

— 81 —
important standard for judging the qualities of a group of
migrants in Säo Paulo is the rate of permanent settlement
among them, and it is precisely among the migrants from other
States that the rate of permanent settlement is lowest.
Lastly, a twofold final argument is drawn from the demographic position, not in Säo Paulo itself but in the home States
of the migrants. These States are sparsely populated and are
beginning to call on foreign immigration to assist their own
development. Is this the proper time to take from them some of
their already inadequate supply of labour ? Rightly or wrongly,
there seems to be some apprehension in certain Government
and political circles in Brazil concerning the mass immigration
of Japanese settlers. As the Japanese settle for preference in
the hot northern regions, it is hardly good policy to drain these
regions of their native labour and thus to render the admittance
of these immigrants, whose arrival seems to be so much dreaded,
desirable even to the authorities of the States concerned.
Thus even the question of interstate migration raises the
wider problem of foreign immigration in general and Japanese
immigration in particular.
FOREIGN IMMIGRATION

Under this head I propose to describe foreign immigration
under the present quota system and the problems which it
raises for Brazilians.
Recruiting. — In most of the central and southern States
foreign immigration is encouraged, assisted, and even subsidised
within the limits permitted by the Constitution. The procedure
in Säo Paulo, for instance, is as follows.
The 1936 budget provided a credit of 10,000 contos (10 million milreis) for the introduction of European immigrants; of
this sum, 3,000 contos were spent during the first half of the
year (I visited Säo Paulo in July). The recruiting of immigrants
in European countries and their transportation to the port of
Santos, where they are taken ever by the Brazilian authorities,
has been entrusted to two companies, one of which organises
recruiting in the countries served by the North Sea and Baltic
shipping lines, and the other in those served by the Atlantic
and Mediterranean lines. Their operations are supervised by
two State inspectors, responsible for the northern and southern
6

— 82 —
zones respectively. As a rule the agents of the shipping companies responsible for transporting the immigrants submit a
full and detailed list to the competent inspector, as furnished by
the immigration company; the inspector examines the list and
grants or refuses his approval. In many cases he inspects the
applicants, convened for the purpose on a specified date, and
superintends their embarkation.
I was able to examine the charter of one of these immigration
companies, which specifies that all the immigrants must be
agricultural workers. Unless they enter the country in response
to an invitation from relatives already established in Brazil,
they must come in family groups including at least three persons
fit for agricultural work and between the ages of 12 (14 for girls)
and 50 years. This reflects the Brazilian Government's desire
to attract those immigrants who will be most likely to settle
in the country.
The State Government refunds the cost of the immigrants'
fares to the immigration companies, which have already paid
the shipping companies. In 1935 the fares averaged £17 for
each adult, half of this sum for children between 7 and 12 years,
and a quarter for children between 3 and 7, children under
3 years travelling free. The company is responsible for the
transport of the immigrants' luggage, which must travel on the
same ship ; it is liable for compensation for any piece of luggage
lost at the rate of 100 milreis, or of the actual value if declared.
The authorities of Säo Paulo expressed their regret that
collaboration between their representatives (inspectors and
companies) and the authorities of the emigration countries has
not yet been organised everywhere as closely as they would have
wished. They are doing everything in their power to remedy
this. Thus the charters of the companies provide that they
shall comply strictly with the laws and regulations of the
countries in which they operate, that they shall not begin
recruiting without formal permission from the Government of
the country, and that they shall not issue misleading propaganda;
for instance, the only leaflets or information which may be
distributed are those previously approved by the Secretary for
Agriculture of Säo Paulo describing living and working conditions in that State.
Such are the safeguards adopted by the immigration country
to protect the immigrant. Let us now consider the measures it
has taken for its own protection, in accordance with the Decrees

— 83 —

of 9 and 16 May 1934, issued shortly before the Constitution was
adopted. If the immigrant has no capital which he intends to
invest in the country, he must fulfil one of the two following
conditions : he must either hold a letter of invitation (carta de
chamada) issued either by relatives already settled in the State
or by the State Government in the interests "of the demand
for agricultural labour ", and in this case he need not hold a
contract of employment; or he may be applied for by an agricultural undertaking or an individual plantation owner, and in
this case he must be in possession of a contract of employment
concluded for a term of three years if the employer is an undertaking, and one year if he is a plantation owner. In both cases
the contract must cover a group containing not less than two
persons between 12 and 60 years of age.
As regards non-agricultural immigrants, provision is made for
the admittance of two classes ; technicians, and persons with no
special qualifications. Technicians may be admitted provided
they hold a contract with an industrial employer for the term
specified in the contract, which may be prolonged. Other
persons must be in possession of a minimum sum of 6 contos or,
in the case of a family group, 3 contos for every person over
12 years of age and 2 contos for every child below that age.
Further, a reliable permanent resident in Brazil must guarantee
their maintenance and their repatriation, if necessary, for a
period of five years.
Distribution and Placing. — Once the immigrant disembarks
at Santos or at any other Brazilian port, he passes out of the
charge of the immigration company into that of the State
immigration authorities.
After passing the inspection of the port services the immigrants are taken to the State immigrants' hostel. I visited
two of these hostels: that at Rio de Janeiro in the wonderful
setting of the gardens of the Isla de Flores, and that at Säo
Paulo, which, although in a less romantic setting, is equally
comfortable. Both these institutions deserve unstinted admiration and they do the greatest credit to the spirit of social
progress which animates the immigration authorities of Brazil.
The dining rooms, dormitories, sanitary arrangements, and
medical services are faultless. Each of the hostels also has a
full set of data concerning immigration and settlement, including
maps, statistics, agricultural leaflets containing practical advice,
6a

— 84 —
posters and propaganda, health hints, etc. At the Säo Paulo
hostel I was shown models of the settlers' houses, shops, schools
and church in the famous settlement of Baräo de Antonina,
which I was unfortunately unable to visit. These then are the
hostels in which immigrants and their families are temporarily
accommodated. Let us now follow the fate of one of these
immigrants' families in the hostel of Säo Paulo.
The fact that this immigrant is in the hostel at all means
that he had no fixed destination and did not come in response
to an application from a relative or from a company or plantation owner with whom he is under contract. Ho is one of the
immigrants recruited by application from the Government either
to enter an official settlement or to take employment on a
plantation which is short of labour. As already stated, the
present tendency is to require the immigrant to work on a plantation for several years so that he may become acclimatised and
prove his mettle. On entering the hostel he is given a medical
examination and any medical attention he may need; he is
inoculated against typhus and dysentery, vaccination against
smallpox having already been performed in his own country
before departure. The authorities then look for a suitable
opening for him. The Department of Immigration has a card
index, kept constantly up to date, of all applications for immigrants addressed to it from the interior of the country, and
giving any particulars of the applicant furnished by himself
or obtained from the State Department of Labour concerning
the number of workers employed, the age required, occupations
specified, and conditions of employment offered.
As there are always more applications than immigrants,
the first to be met are those from employers who offer the best
living and working conditions. This leads to a certain spirit of
competition among the plantation owners who are short of
labour, and the scarcity of labour thus has at least the advantage
of improving conditions of employment. The "Rural Association
of Brazil ", which comprises most of the plantation owners, has
realised this and is conducting a campaign among its members
with a view to improving sanitary conditions on the land and
safeguarding the workers' health. The Department of Immigration at Säo Paulo is also drafting a Bill, which proposes to give
the administrative authorities power to withhold certain State
facilities of a financial, economic or sanitary nature from
unsatisfactory undertakings.

— 85 —
The immigrant and his family are then sent on to the selected
plantation, provided with the caderna containing their contract
of employment, or in exceptional cases to an official settlement.
In the first case, if there is any doubt as to the living and working
conditions of the plantation, an official of the Immigration
Department accompanies the immigrant in order to inspect
these conditions on the spot. On arrival at their destination
the immigrant and his family become workers or settlers as the
case may be, and enter on the life which has already been
described above 1.
Arguments for and against Foreign Immigration. — Such is
the system at present in operation. It must be admitted,
however, that it does not yet operate on a large scale; from
1 January to 30 June 1936 the records of the competent services
of Sao Paulo showed that 500 aliens had been placed in employment in the agricultural undertakings of the State.as compared
with 10,000 Brazilians. This shortage of immigrants is very
generally, if not unanimously, deplored in Säo Paulo, and there
is a general demand, if not that the Constitution should be
amended, at least that the quotas should be increased. But there
is also a body of opinion, especially in the north, in favour of
still severer restrictions. In short, the question of whether
foreign immigration should be increased, kept within narrow
limits, or further restricted is a public issue in Brazil to-day. It
would be both impertinent and presumptuous on my part to
attempt to settle this question either one way or the other, but
I can at least try to summarise the arguments I heard put
forward by the supporters and the opponents of foreign immigration without overstepping the bounds of my competence and
knowledge.
Arguments in Favour of Foreign Immigration. — It is stated
in favour of foreign immigration that it would aid the rapid
growth of a population whose sparseness is retarding the development of the enormous resources of Brazil. This would also result
in increasing the purchasing power of the home market, the
restricted scope of which was one of the main causes of the
particular severity of the depression in Brazil during the recent
world slump, and also prevents the introduction of that greater
1

See Second Part, Chapters I and II.

— 86 —
variety in agricultural production which is both possible and
desirable in Brazil.
If it were only a question of providing more workers for the
coffee, sugar and cotton plantation in the States now in course of
development, interstate migration might be sufficient, at least
so far as its quality is concerned, although it would fall far short
of the necessary quantity. But Brazil also needs technicians,
market gardeners, and peasants who are used to dairy farming
and its ancillary industries, and these cannot be found in the
northern States.
Further, Brazil has benefited greatly in the past from the
mixture of races which have settled in its territory, each contributing its special characteristics and merging with the rest to
found a new and original culture. Why be afraid of the introduction of new elements ? It is obvious that a larger influx of
European immigrants would be the best check to mass immigration by the Japanese, which is apparently viewed with apprehension in certain quarters.
It is quite right that every possible precaution should be
taken to select the immigrants before departure and to attach
them to the soil once they have entered the country, so that their
families may become Brazilians within one or two generations
with no desire to return to their country of origin. But these
measures do not exclude the possibility of large-scale immigration.
Arguments against Foreign Immigration. — It is argued
against foreign immigration that before admitting aliens to the
country the livelihood of all Brazilians should be secured. This
is not the case in the north-eastern parts of Brazil at present
and the inhabitants of this region must therefore be given the
first opportunity of going to seek a living in the centre and the
south.
Another argument is that the workers' standard of living is
already very low in Brazil. To open wide the doors to immigration would mean increasing the supply of labour to such an
extent that its remuneration would fall to a lower level.
Moreover, subsidised immigration is expensive when the
immigrants are brought long distances and public funds are none
too plentiful.
And, leastly, whatever may be said to the contrary, too large
an influx of aliens will endanger the national culture, especially

— 87 —
if settlements of immigrants of the same nationality are formed,
in which the few Brazilians would be submerged, a course which
would have to be followed willy-nilly in the event of extensive
immigration. This danger would be all the greater in that the
immigrants of some nationalities are much more liable to settle
permanently than the interstate migrants, who, as already
stated, are extremely unstable. To attach foreign immigrants
to the land always involves the risk that one day they will come
to predominate over the true Brazilians and become masters of
the land on which they have settled. It is better to adopt the
policy of a slower but truly national development of the resources
of Brazil.
Nationality of Immigrants and Rate of Permanent Settlement.
— The foregoing arguments for and against foreign immigration
raise certain points which must be considered in greater detail.
Some of these relate to the nationality of the immigrants, others
to their occupation, and especially to the proportion engaged in
agriculture, which is the branch where labour is most needed in
Brazil, and finally, others to the coefficient of permanent settlement of each nationality.
1. As regards the first point, the following observations may
be made. Generally speaking, the stream of immigration from the
Latin countries, which was the most important before the war,
has shrunk considerably since, whereas that from Eastern
Europe has increased in volume, and a new stream, which is
steadily growing, has also appeared from Japan.
As regards the Latin peoples, Italian immigrants, who
numbered over 187,000 persons between 1906 and 1915, fell to
slightly over 88,000 between 1916 and 1925 and to 51,000
between 1926 and 1935. The corresponding figures for Spanish
immigrants are 214,000, 87,000 and 37,000. Only among the
Portuguese has immigration remained at the former level,
the figures being 203,000 between 1916 and 1925, and 207,000
between 1926 and 1935.
As regards immigrants from Eastern Europe, between the
periods 1916-1925 and 1926-1935 the number of Poles increased
from about 7,000 to about 34,000 ; that of immigrants from the
Baltic States (Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians) from 4,000
to 29,000; that of Rumanians from 16,000 to 22,000. Yugoslav
immigration fell from 15,000 to 7,500, but it must be remembered

— 88 —
that there was practically no immigration from this source to
Brazil before the war.
The same might almost be said of the Japanese before the
war. Between 1916 and 1925, however, over 25,000 Japanese
entered Brazil, and between 1926 and 1935 nearly 133,000, this
being the largest immigration figure for any nationality except
the Portuguese, who migrate naturally and spontaneously to
Brazil as to a sister country.
2. Which of these various nationalities furnish the most
agricultural workers to Brazil ? No figures are available for the
whole of Brazil, but the statistics for the State of Säo Paulo
show the proportion of agriculturists belonging to each nationality among all the immigrants landed at Santos between 1908
and 1933. The figures are given in the following table, the
nationalities being classified in order of the proportion of
agriculturists.
PROPORTION OF AGRICULTURISTS AMONG IMMIGRANTS
LANDED AT SANTOS BETWEEN 1908 AND 1933
Nationality

Japanese
Yugoslavs
. .
Lithuanians. .
Rumanians. .
Spaniards
. .
Austrians
Hungarians. .
Italians
Russians . . .
Portuguese . .
Poles
Germans
Syrians
Turks
Miscellaneous .

.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.

. .
. .

. .

Total
1

Per cent.
of all
immigrants

Total number
of immigrants

Number of
agriculturists

139,199
21,088
20,214
23,001
207,326
14,652
5,092
199,201
10,359
265,751
12,261
39,524
16,732
26,242
28,493

137,584
19,768
17,848
20,143
164,306
9,069
3,116
100,553
5,200
129,027
5,410
13,145
4,923
2,937
14,205

98.84 !
93.74 *
88.29 !
87.57 1
79.25 !
61.83
61.80
50.48
50.20
48.5
44.1
33.3
25.6
11.2
49.8

1,029,135

647,234

62.9

Above the average.

Thus, the Japanese, the immigrants from Eastern Europe
(except the Poles), and the Spaniards furnish the highest
proportion of agriculturists — it might in fact be said that the
highest proportion is found among the newcomers (except for
the Spaniards) save for the curious exception of the Poles. It

— 89 —
is admittedly hard to give a satisfactory explanation of this
anomaly, but it may be the result of an exceptionally heavy
demand for labour in the industry of Säo Paulo which was being
founded and developed during the twenty-five years covered.
To-day, however, it seems true to say that the vast majority
of Poles immigrate with a view to agricultural work or land
settlement. In the case of the Japanese this has been true from
the outset.
3. Those who are in favour of foreign immigration advocate
the immigration of family groups who will settle permanently
in the country, this factor of permanency being an essential
condition for their assimilation and for the advantages they will
bring to the Brazilian economy. The two following tables give
the rate of permanent settlement among immigrants of each
nationality for all immigrants and for immigrants intending
to enter agriculture ; the figures relate to all immigrants landed
at Santos during the same years as are covered by the previous
table.
COEFFICIENT OF PERMANENT SETTLEMENT AMONG
ALL

IMMIGRANTS

EMBARKED

OR

DISEMBARKED

AT SANTOS B E T W E E N 1 9 0 8 AND 1 9 3 3

Nationality

Lithuanians.
Japanese. .
Yugoslavs .
Rumanians.
Hungarians.
Syrians. . .
Turks . . .
Austrians. .
Poles
. . .
Spaniards .
Portuguese .
Germans . .
Italians . .
Russians. .
Miscellaneous

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

Total

Coefficient
ot
permanent
settlement
(per cent.)

Entries

Departures

Balance
ot immigration

20,214
139,199
21,088
23,001
5,092
16,732
26,242
14,652
12,261
207,326
265,751
39,524
199,201
10,359
28,493

1,072
9,445
4,828
5,863
1,853
7,198
12,227
6,869
5,805
100,128
154,156
31,666
173,663
9,183
23,342

19,142
129,754
16,260
17,138
3,239
9,534
14,015
7,783
6,456
107,198
111,595
7,858
25,538
1,176
5,151

94.7
93.2
77.1
74.5
63.6
57.0
53.2
53.1
52.6
51.1
42.0
19.9
12.8
11.4
18.0

1,029,135

547,298

481,837

46.8

— 90 —
C O E F F I C I E N T OF PERMANENT SETTLEMENT AMONG
AGRICULTURAL IMMIGRANTS EMBARKED OR DISEMBARKED
AT SANTOS B E T W E E N 1 9 0 8 AND 1 9 3 3

Nationality

Lithuanians.
Syrians
Hungarians
Yugoslavs .
Rumanians.
Japanese
Poles
Portuguese.
Austrians
Spaniards .
Germans
Turks
Russians. .
Italians
Miscellaneous

. . .

Entries

Balance
Departures of immigration

Coefficient
of
permanent
settlement
(per cent.)

. . -

17,848
4,923
3,116
19,768
20,143
137,584
5,410
129,027
9,069
164,306
13,145
2,937
5,200
100,553
14,205

183
93
66
422
491
5,141
373
9,639
783
27,407
2,350
1,201
2,726
59,038
1,611

17,665
4,830
3,090
19,346
19,652
132,443
5,037
119,388
8,286
136,899
10,795
1,736
2,474
41,515
12,594

99.0
98.1
97.9
97.8
97.1
96.3
93.1
92.5
91.3
83.3 2
82.1
59.1 2
47.6 2
41.3 22
88.6

Total. .

647,234

111,524

535,710

82.8

. . .
. . .
. . .
. . ,
. . ,
. . .

1

Above the average.
- Below the average.

The chief conclusions to be drawn from these two tables are
as follows. The immigrants with the highest rate of permanent
settlement are those from Spain and Portugal, Eastern Europe
and Western Asia, and lastly Japan. It will be noted, however,
that apart from the Portuguese and Spaniards, whose high rate
of settlement cannot cause the slightest alarm to the most
scrupulous defenders of the national spirit and culture of
Brazil, the Japanese are the people who have settled in Brazil
in far larger numbers than the immigrants from Eastern Europe
and Western Asia during the past twenty-five years; they alone
represent a contingent 46 per cent, higher than that of the
Hungarians, Yugoslavs, Rumanians, Poles, Lithuanians, Syrians,
and Turks together. It is therefore only natural that Japanese
immigration should be a matter of special concern to everyone
in Brazil, whether they are in favour of or opposed to foreign
immigration.
JAPANESE IMMIGRATION

Japanese immigration in Brazil is of quite recent date. Its
primary causes must doubtless be sought in the over-population

— 91 —
of Japan and the very severe restrictions placed on Asiatic
immigration by the United States Government from the beginning of the present century. It was in 1908, as a result of the
favourable enquiry made by the authorities of Säo Paulo in the
Hawaiian Islands and in Peru, where Japanese immigrants
were admitted, that a first contingent of Japanese was allowed
to enter Brazil. This beginning was made on a very small
scale, since in 1908 78 Japanese were admitted to Säo Paulo,
their immigration having been organised by a private Japanese
emigration company; and Japanese immigration continued at
about the same annual rate until September 1923, when the
great earthquake took place in Japan. In order to mitigate the
distress caused by this catastrophe, the Japanese Government
decided to undertake a systematic organisation of emigration
to selected countries which were willing to admit Japanese, and
where the latter would find suitable climatic, working, and living
conditions. Brazil was one of the foremost of these selected
countries, as the following figures show. In 1927, 9,625, or
60.1 per cent., of the 16,041 emigrants who left Japan went to
Brazil, and in 1933, 23,299, or 85.3 per cent., out of a total of
27,317. In 1934 the Japanese statistics showed that 872,814
Japanese were settled in foreign countries, Brazil holding second
place, after Manchuria and before the Hawaiian Islands and the
United States, with 173,500 persons, or 19.8 per cent, (nearly
one-fifth) of all the Japanese living out of the country.
As regards the provenance of these Japanese settlers in
Brazil, the Japanese Consul at Säo Paulo has investigated the
origin of 89,205 of the Japanese settled in the territory of that
State. He found that 50,355, or over five-ninths, came from the
south of Japan; 20,240, or two-ninths, from the centre; and the
rest from the north and from some of the less important islands.
This is no doubt due to the combined facts that the density of
the population is greatest in the centre and south, that the
climate of Säo Paulo is best suited to the southern Japanese,
that the latter show the most enterprising spirit, and lastly, that
the south of Japan is less highly industrialised than the centre.
Organisation of Japanese Immigration to Brazil. — Whatever
may be the opinion of a number of Biazilians as to the utility
of Japanese immigration to Brazil (a question to which I will
revert later), it must be admitted that its organisation might
serve as a model for other similar movements which have been

— 92 —
or may be set on foot in Europe. The agency responsible for
Japanese emigration and settlement is the Kaigai Kogyo Kaisha
or "International Development Company ", but it operates with
the support and under the control of the Japanese Government.
Since 1923, the Japanese Government has in fact included
in its budget a substantial item for "the protection and promotion of emigration and settlement ", and there is a special body
of officials to help in the recruiting of suitable emigrants by
means of enquiries, lectures, propaganda films and broadcast
talks, while the Ministry for Oversea Affairs includes an advisory
service for emigrants. Emigrants are entitled to reduced fares on
Japanese railways and ships. Emigration agents are not allowed
to ask for any fees from intending emigrants to Brazil, the
Government granting them an indemnity. In 1928 the Government set up an Emigrant Training Institute at Kobe, where the
emigrants stay for ten days prior to their departure and are
given a rudimentary knowledge of the language, customs, and
agricultural crops of Brazil. Emigrant ships are under the
supervision of Government inspectors, and in Brazil itself the
Japanese Government subsidies the establishment or upkeep
of schools, hospitals, and pharmacies wherever Japanese
nationals are to be found.
The chief of the private companies which operate under
these Government auspices is the Kaigai Kogyo Kaisha, which
from its foundation in 1917 to the end of 1933 had introduced
over 113,000 Japanese into Brazil. It also does eveiything in
its power to ensure that the emigrants are properly recruited and
trained; its activities include the organisation of travelling
cinemas in the rural districts of Japan, press communiqués and
lectures, interviewing of applicants for emigration by agents
of the Company, etc. It is the Company which receives the
applications of plantation owners for Japanese immigrants.
In spite of the alarm shown in certain Brazilian circles, the
supply of Japanese immigrants is far from sufficient to meet
these demands in full; in 1933, for instance, applications were
received for 8,200 families to work on the plantations and only
3,800 families actually came from Japan.
The emigration Company has now extended its activities
to land settlement. A brief description of the most important
of its settlements will be given later.
The official and semi-official activities of Japan do not stop
here however; the Japanese immigrant continues to receive

— 93 —
assistance once he has been brought into the country and
settled there. To give an instance, the Kaigai Kogyo Kaisha
set up in 1931 in the State of Sâo Paulo a laboratory for agricultural experiments with an experimental farm of 250,000
hectares ; here fifty young Japanese receive a technical training
reaching a fairly high standard, either immediately on their
arrival from Japan or when they are already established on the
plantations or in settlements. There is a similar laboratory with
an experimental farm of 1,500 hectares in Amazonas, mainly
for the study of the most suitable crops and plantations for
cultivation in the Amazon forests.
The Japanese in Brazil. — In the past, Japanese immigrants
to Brazil have gone by preference to the State of Säo Paulo.
In 1935, 150,000 of the total of 173,500 Japanese in Brazil, or
over six-sevenths, were to be found in this State.
The Japanese in Säo Paulo form four groups, each fulfilling
a different function which may be said to mark one of the stages
in the process of Japanese settlement in Brazil.
The first group is to be found in the old coffee-growing belt
of Paulista and Mogyana, from Araraquara to Ribeiräo Preto
and Rio Grande. In this region they are nearly all paid labourers
in the employment of the plantation owners, brought to the
plantations in response to their demand for Asiatic workers one
or two years previously by the chief Japanese company. Most
of them are merely serving their apprenticeship to the Brazilian
climate, customs, and methods of work. They also begin to
earn a little money, pay their debts, and put something by.
Then, when they have acquired some experience and a measure
of economic independence, the majority go elsewhere to become
smallholders or settlers.
The second group, which to-day is the largest, is that in the
region of the city of Säo Paulo. There are no less than 3,400
Japanese in the immediate vicinity of this city. Nearly all of
them are market gardeners growing vegetables and potatoes
principally for the Säo Paulo market; most of them began their
careers as wage earners in the manner described above.
The third group is found further in the interior of the country,
in the more recently developed region of Alta Paulista, Alta
Sorocabana and Novo Este. They own small plantations on
which they grow coffee, maize, cotton, and tea.
The fourth and last group consists of the Japanese living on

— 94 —
the coastal plain from Santos westward to the frontier of
Paraná. In this region the Japanese is a settler; it is the site of
the Kaigai Kogyo Kaisha's large settlement.
This settlement was founded by the Kaigai Kogyo Kaisha
around Iguape and Registro in 1912 under a contract between
the Government of Säo Paulo and a financial group in Japan,
which ceded its rights to the Company in 1917. The latter has
invested 2 million yen in this colony, which to-day covers
75,000 hectares of land. At the end of 1935 it contained 767
families, or 4,873 Japanese, in addition to 3,590 Brazilians.
Every family admitted must include at least three persons of
working age and ability and must deposit a sum of 950 yen, or
over 6 contos (6,000 milreis), as security for the advances made
by the Company to ensure the family's maintenance during the
first year and the purchase of a holding. The holdings contain
about 25 hectares of land and cost 1,000 yen (over 6,300 milreis)
repayable in seven annual instalments. The Company has
organised various facilities to assist the settlers and help them
to market their products; these include a laboratory for agricultural experiments, a stock-breeding farm, premises for
husking rice and sorting coffee. Lastly, it also acts as the
settlers' agent in marketing the products. The average annual
value of the settlement's production is about 500,000 yen, or
nearly 3,200 contos.
As already stated, most of the Japanese immigrants enter the
country as agriculturists and remain in agriculture. The statistics show that the Japanese population of Brazil, which
numbers 173,000 persons, includes 36,838 occupied persons,
distributed by occupation as follows :
Agriculture
Commerce
Industry
Public services and liberal professions. . .
Communications and transport
Domestic service
Miscellaneous
Total

33,285
1,279
884
422
355
245
368
3M38

Of the 33,285 members of the occupied population who are
engaged in agriculture, 19,499, or 58.5 per cent., are already
owners of land. It has already been seen that according to the
statistics for the State of Säo Paulo, the Japanese are the immigrants among whom the smallholding system is the most
common.

— 95 —
The introduction of smallholdings, coupled with the methodical and enterprising character of the Japanese, has enabled
them to play an important part in developing mixed farming in
Brazil and in introducing a number of new crops. During the
season of 1931-32, when there were fewer Japanese in the State
of Sào Paulo than there are to-day, Japanese holdings accounted
for the following proportion of the production of some of the
products of this State :
Percentage

Tea
Vegetables
Silkworm cocoons
Cotton
Potatoes
Bananas
Rice
Coffee
Beans
Maize

75
70
57
46.4
14
11.3
8
5
4.6
4

Japan has now fresh plans for settlement in the North of
Brazil, where the climate suits the southern Japanese who, as
already seen, form the majority of the immigrants. A Japanese
settlement company, the Nambei Takushoke Kaisha, has two
settlements in the State of Para, one at Acara and the other at
Monte Alegre. At present these two settlements do not contain
more than 1,500 persons. In the State of Amazonas, negotiations and plans begun in 1929 and 1930 ultimately led to the
conclusion of a contract between the State Government and the
Japanese for the concession of one million hectares of land. But
it was not until 30 September 1935 that the Legislative Assembly
of Amazonas authorised the Government to ask the Federal
Senate to approve the contract, as required by Article 130 of
the Brazilian Constitution. This approval was refused after
a long debate in October 1936, so that the contract has been
cancelled.
This is one among many other signs of the hostility with
which Japanese immigration is regarded in some Brazilian
circles. The arguments put forward against it are the same as
those summarised earlier in this study in connection with
foreign immigration in general, but in this case they are more
imperious and the emphasis is laid on the threat to the physical
and moral integrity of the nation, and even, as is alleged in
certain quarters, to its independence, which this immigration
implies. Accuracy compels me to add that I heard these objec-

— 96 —
tions to Japanese immigration put forward by persons who would
never have entertained them in the case of European immigrants.
These persons were all the more anxious to encourage the latter
as the best means of reducing the extent and relative importance
of Japanese immigration. On the other hand, many persons in
Säo Paulo assured me that in their opinion the Japanese peril
was non-existent in Säo Paulo, the population of which is so
large and energetic that it is bound to assimilate the Japanese
immigrants, if not in the first generation, at least in the second,
and that even though they represented a real danger in the North,
where the population is so much sparser, this would only be an
additional reason against draining that part of the country of
its native population by allowing internal migration to continue
on the large and uncontrolled scale on which it occurs at present.
The gist of the discussion is in fact substantially the same as
regards both foreign immigration in general and Japanese
immigration in particular, the arguments merely being slightly
changed or more vigorously expressed. It must be admitted,
however, that, of the two, Japanese immigration has fewer
friends and rather more enemies. It is not the present writer's
business to take sides on this question, but I can at least safely
say that so far as the methods and procedure of migration and
settlement are concerned, European migration movements
might well take the Japanese example as a model in many
respects if they were to revive one day on a large scale.

CONCLUSIONS
From this rapid survey of some of the social aspects of
economic development in Brazil, certain facts stand out clearly
and definitely, while others raise problems which are beyond
the scope of this study and can be solved only by the Brazilian
people themselves.
Upon one of the most obvious facts all those who have
visited Brazil, even if only on an aeroplane trip, are unanimously
agreed — namely, the abundance and variety of the animal,
vegetable, and mineral resources of the country. This abundance,
though perhaps not the variety, stops short at the final resource
necessary to develop all the others, man-power. Here it is not
quality which is lacking, but the quantity, which is inadequate
for rapid and thorough development.
Those resources which are most widely and thoroughly
exploited at present are the vegetable and animal wealth of the
country. Brazil has remained predominantly a country of
plantation products and crops and, to a lesser extent, of stockbreeding. Agriculture, the chief source of Brazil's wealth, was long
confined to a few staple crops, and even to a single crop —
coffee—so far as the export trade was concerned. To-day there is a
deliberate trend towards mixed farming and the development of
sugar cane, cotton, and oleaginous plants, vegetables, fruit, dairyfarming, and dairy-farming industries. This development again
raises the problem of population, since all these newly extended
or new forms of production require a great deal of labour. Some
of them also involve the smallholding system, which cannot be
widely introduced unless more applicants for holdings are available. And a higher purchasing power than at present obtains is
required on the home market to dispose of the resultant products.
Finally, Brazil has now become an industrial country. The
mining and transforming industries of Minas Geraes, the meat
and leather industries of the south, and above all the varied,
concentrated, and organised industries of Säo Paulo, have given
a new complexion to the classic notion of Brazil as a country
of adventurers. Here again the question of population arises.
It is not that the industry of Brazil, and even that of Säo Paulo,
cannot draw the necessary supply of labour, and even of skilled
labour, from the rural areas, except for some technicians and
a few skilled trades. But this can only be done by draining a

— 98 —
rural population of agricultural workers and settlers which is
already inadequate and thus aggravating the shortage due to the
expanding needs of agriculture itself.
If, therefore, Brazil wishes to develop its resources rapidly
and fully, a new influx of population is necessary. The question
is whether it really wishes to do so, or whether it prefers to
proceed more slowly, depending mainly on the normal natural
increase of its own population. This is a problem which only the
Brazilians themselves can decide.
Supposing, as seems possible, that the first alternative is
adopted, i.e. that a more liberal immigration quota policy than
the present one is introduced in the near future, what further
problems will this raise for Brazil ?
Some of these, too, will be for Brazil itself to solve; for
instance, those relating to the number of immigrants to be
admitted, the countries from which they are to be drawn, and
the conditions as to occupational, economic, political or cultural
qualifications required for their admission. The days are past
when countries were willing to admit anybody coming from
anywhere at all to their vacant territories without any conditions. Economic planning is now the order of the day; there is
talk of a planned nutrition policy for the workers, and immigration and land settlement will also be planned to the benefit both
of the immigration and of the emigration countries, but also
of the migrants.
The right which Brazil, like every other immigration country,
possesses of taking its own decisions as to the number of aliens
it can admit and absorb creates a parallel obligation. The days
are also past when the immigrants admitted to a country could
settle down haphazard without the country of immigration
doing anything to help them. Workers would no longer be
willing to emigrate under such conditions in these days of improving standards of living, assistance to the unemployed, and
labour legislation. We have seen that the Federal Government
of Brazil as well as the State Governments have realised this,
and that Sao Paulo, for instance, protects and assists the
immigrant and future settler from the moment he leaves his
own country until he settles in Brazil, and even beyond that
stage, by its employment and inspection services. Some of
the other Brazilian States have perhaps not yet attained this
advanced stage of organisation, but there is little doubt that they
will one day achieve it, especially if Brazil decides on a large-

— 99 scale immigration policy, as is hoped both in Sao Paulo and
elsewhere, since otherwise the immigrants would neglect them
in favour of the better organised States.
But there is another problem which already arises in Brazil,
as a country of immigration and land settlement, and which
will continue in the future: the problem of finance. It is true
that in most parts of Brazil the price of land is not exorbitant,
and a .credit institution which advanced the cost of land to be
resold to a settlement company could expect to obtain a fair
return on its money, leaving an honest profit for the company
without forcing the settler to pay too heavy a price and within
too short a time. But there is still the problem of finding the
funds ; these are not available in Brazil alone, or even in most of
the emigration countries, so that third parties must be brought
into the arrangement. Hence the question of immigration and
land settlement, though national in its origins and objects,
becomes international in virtue of its financial aspects.
But it is not only the financial aspects of the immigration
problem which make it a matter of international concern.
Collaboration between the country of immigration and the
country of emigration is in fact essential to ensure that the
immigrants actually fulfil the occupational, economic, and legal
conditions fixed by the immigration country, and that the
country of origin accepts the political and other conditions
imposed. Thus, in order to solve the problems raised by any
large-scale immigration policy which Brazil may adopt in the
future, a bipartite or tripartite, or even a wider organisation will
be necessary, but in any case one of an international character.
During my visit to Brazil I put forward this view, which was
always favourably received. In the present age of nationalism
and autarky Brazil is one of the least nationalistic and autarkic
of the big Powers. So far its population has been freely formed
by an amalgamation of the most diverse elements, all of which
have been welcomed on equal terms, and, as already stated, in
this country, which has representatives of races of four colours
on its territory, there is no race problem. Economically speaking,
Brazil has based its livelihood and prosperity (perhaps too
exclusively during a certain period) on its export trade — that
is, on its international relations. It is not likely to be discouraged,
disconcerted or antagonised by the international aspects of the
social and economic problems confronting it to-day.