The USA Recognizes Cachaça (and Brazil recognizes Bourbon)

This week, Brazil's President, Dilma Rousseff, is making an official visit to the USA, stopping in Washington, DC, and in the Boston area. This is her first visit to the United States since she took office just a bit more than a year ago. There are a number of issues that she will be discussing with President Obama, and a number of agreements, diplomatic and commercial, that the two countries will sign during her visit.

During a lunch today at the White House, President Obama announced that in response to the tremendous increase in the number of Brazilians visiting the USA the United States planned to open two new consulates in Brazil - in the cities of Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre. This news was greeted with joy in Brazil, as visa regulations for Brazilians wishing to visit the USA require a personal interview at a US Consulate. In a country as large as Brazil attending an interview can require a large commitment in time and money, with no guarantee of receiving a visa.

Additionally (and of more importance to Flavors of Brazil) the two countries sign a commercial according to boost trade in Brazilian cachaça and in American bourbon (plus Tennessee whisky). In the USA cachaça will be recognized as a distinctly Brazilian product, and the name may not be used on spirits imported from any other country or manufactured in the USA. Equally, the names bourbon and Tennessee whisky in Brazil will from now on be restricted to whisky distilled in Kentucky and Tennessee respectively.

Up to the signing of this accord, the USA had required Brazilian cachaça to be labeled as "Brazilian rum." Although both rum and cachaça ultimately come from sugar cane, the two spirits are entirely different, cachaça being made from sugar cane juice and rum from molasses, and having to call their national spirit rum is something that has long irritated Brazilian cachaça exporters. Rum it is not - it's cachaça.

As soon as the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau amends their regulations and requirements, Brazil will do the same for the two types of American whisky.

Although by far the largest percentage of the world's USD$1.1bn in annual cachaça sales occur domestically in Brazil, the cachaça export market is growing rapidly. Up to today, the largest market outside Brazil is Germany, but Brazilian cachaça distillers hope that these new regulations will help them capture a part of the American imported-spirits market. The caipirinha cocktail, made with cachaça, is already trendy and becoming more common in the USA. Now Brazilians hope that cachaça itself will catch on with American consumers.

Brazil as a Rice-Producing Nation - Part 2

If Discovery Channel can have a Shark Week (about one out of every five weeks, it seems) then Flavors of Brazil can certainly have a Rice Week, which is what this week appears to be turning out to be here on the blog. Rice is such an essential and central part of Brazilian food culture that it deserves detailed coverage - and lots of recipes to showcase how many different ways rice is eaten in Brazil.

In the first part of this "rice saga", published yesterday, we detailed where Brazil fits in as part of worldwide rice cultivation and consumption patterns. There are places on Earth where the population consumes more rice than Brazilians do, and there are many more where the population consumes much less. On a per capita basis, Brazilians are right in the middle in terms of rice consumption. What makes the Brazilian rice market so large, however, is the sheer size of Brazil's population. Brazil is the fifth most-populous nation in the world, with the current estimated population of just over 194 million. It is outranked only by China, India, the United States and Indonesia in terms of population. So if you take the estimated per capita consumption of 45 kgs (100 lbs) and multiply that by 200 million you've got a lot of rice.

Irrigated rice field - Rio Grande do Sul

Where is most of this rice grown? Although rice requires warm weather and adequate water to grow, large portions of Brazil are not suitable for rice cultivation. Rice cannot be cultivated in the Amazonian rain forest which covers more than half of Brazilian territory. Because of agricultural suitability, historical patterns of habitation and present-day economics rice cultivation is concentrated today in two Brazilian regions. The most important region is Brazil's far south - the two southern-most states in the country, Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, where about 54% of Brazil's rice comes from. The second region is in the state of Mato Grosso, in the the Center-West Region, where about 15% of the nation's rice is grown. The balance of the crop comes from a number of regions in the South-east and North-east of the country.

Non-irrigated rice field - Mato Grosso

The two main regions for cultivating rice use very different cultivating techniques to grow rice. In the South, rice is grown on older, well-established and irrigated lands. In the Center-West, by contrast, rice is grown on non-irrigated, newly-cleared land where rice is used to prepare the land for soy and cotton production. Rice production, therefore, is much more stable in the traditional rice-growing regions in the South, where rice has a long history of cultivation and farmers have a greater investment in growing rice specifically, because of the infrastructure required for irrigation.

Ecologists and environmentalists point out that the Southern rice crop is more sustainable than the crop from the Center-West. In the Center-West rice farmers need newly-cleared land for their crop, which means that deforestation is required. In the South, rice fields have long been established and there is no present-day deforestation occurring. Unfortunately, with the way rice is marketed in Brazil, it's virtually impossible to tell where the rice one buys in the supermarket comes from. Perhaps as consumers become more demanding in terms of food security and environmental impact some smart marketer might be able to sell sustainably grown rice, even at a premium. But the Brazilian market isn't yet at that point.

Of the total rice crop in Brazil 99% is long-grain rice and only 1% short-grain. Although whole-grain (brown) rice is available in most supermarkets, it's little seen in restaurants or in home cupboards and is consumed only by a very small percentage of the population. For nearly all Brazilians their daily rice is white and long-grain. Because the daily consumption of rice is such an integral part of Brazilian eating patterns, it will probably be some time before brown rice has wide acceptance.

Starting tomorrow,  Flavors of Brazil will continue its Rice Week with some typical Brazilian recipes for this grain.

Brazil as a Rice-Producing Nation - Part 1

Flavors of Brazil is full of recipes that include rice - not surprising at all, since most Brazilians eat the grain daily and have done so since Portuguese colonial times. Rice has a role in every regional cuisine in Brazil and is eaten across all the economic and social strata of Brazilian society - the maid in an industrial magnate's villa eats her own rice after serving it to her employer and his family, the middle-class working mother eats rice during her lunch break at work while her children eat it in a school lunch program and the urban poor who inhabit the slums of Brazil's big cities often eat it and nothing else besides beans for days at a time.

All added up, that's a lot of rice. Millions of tons of it every year. Recent statistics from UNCTAD (the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development ) tell an interesting story about the cultivation and consumption of rice in Brazil and around the world. Brazil is the ninth-largest rice producing nation in the world, and the largest producer outside the traditional West and East Asian "rice bowl", where 90% of the world's crop is planted. Brazil's total production in 2009-2010 was 10,198,900 metric tonnes which means it produced just under 2% of the world's rice crop. By way of comparison, China's crop, the world's largest, was 166,417,000 metric tonnes, accounting for 32.7% of the world's crop. Brazil is the only non-Asian country to feature in the top-ten list of rice producing countries. The amount of rice grown in the USA places it just outside the top-ten list.

These statistics show that Brazil is a significant producer of rice, but you have to look elsewhere, at statistics of per capita consumption, to get an idea of the importance of rice to the Brazilian diet. The data provided by UNCTAD divides the world into three rice consumption models, each with vastly differing numbers for per capita consumption. The first model is called  the Asian model, and in this group of countries typical annual consumption of rice, per capita, is over 80 kgs (or 175 lbs). In this group you find China with per capita consumption of 90 kgs (218 lbs), Indonesia with 150 kgs (330 lbs) and world-leader Myanmar with a staggering 200 kgs (440 lbs) annual per capita consumption. Brazil's per capita consumption is far lower, and the Brazilian model is called the Sub-tropical model by UNCTAD. Nations in this group are mostly Latin-American and African and annual consumption in the group is between 30 and 60 kilos. According to UNCTAD Brazilian consumption is 45 kgs (just about 100 lbs) annually per person, putting it in the mid-range of this group. Other examples of the Sub-tropical model are Colombia with annual consumption of 40 kgs (88 lbs) and the Ivory Coast with 60 kgs (132 lbs). The third UNCTAD model is called the Western model, and in this group annual per capita consumption is under 10 kgs (22 lbs) per year. In this group you find nations such as the USA, where people annually eat 9 kgs (20 lbs) and France, where only 4 kgs (9 lbs) of rice is consumed. The range between the models and between food cultures is colossal - residents of Myanmar, on average, eat 50 times as much rice as the French.

If you mathematically compare the size of the Brazil's annual rice crop with its annual consumption, it quickly becomes clear that Brazil doesn't produce enough rice to meet its domestic needs. About 10% of the rice consumed in Brazil every year is imported, mostly from other Latin American countries and from the USA. Today Uruguay and Argentina together supply about 85% of Brazil's imported rice. Brazil imports virtually no Asian rice, with the exception of specialty rices such as sushi rice from Japan. Although as recently as the 1980s Brazil as a rice-exporting nation, it is now firmly in the the rice-importing group of countries and accounts for 5% of total world imports.

In the next post onFlavors of Brazil, we'll look at Brazilian rice production - where it is produced, what types of cultivation models exist and what kind of rice in grown. Then we'll get back to the more culinary side of Brazilian rice, with a bunch of Brazilian recipes featuring the country's most important grain.