IX 



PLANTATIONS 



X HE principal wealth of Brazil consists of its great plantations, and 

 the planters, the fazendeiros, are gentry who live in great style and 

 have a decisive influence over the political life of their country. 

 Fazendas is the name by which the great plantations in the south 

 and the interior are known ; the estates on the north-eastern coast, 

 which cultivate sugar-cane chiefly, are called engenhos, while the 

 smaller fruit-farms are known as chacaras. 



There are, of course, only certain staple crops which can be 

 cultivated on the grand scale. Cereals do not play a leading part in 

 Brazilian agriculture. Although wheat thrives in the southern 

 States, the Brazilian consumer depends principally on the wheat of 

 the Argentine, one of the great wheat-exporting countries of the 

 world. Rice, too, though it is cultivated in several States, does not 

 mould the landscape as it does in India ; for Brazil has no systematic 

 system of irrigation, such as has existed in India for thousands of 

 years, and rice, of course, is an aquatic plant, which has to be 

 planted under water. The wonderfully luminous bright green of the 

 terraced ricefields in Ceylon adds greatly to the beauty of the 

 landscape; there the ricefields represent the lawns of the lovely 

 park-land, full of coconut-palms, mangoes and other fruit-trees, 

 which adorns the whole western coast of the island. 



Maize, on the other hand, is widely cultivated in Brazil. This 

 essentially American plant, which was cultivated in Mexico and 

 Peru long before the discovery of America, is still grown in the 

 primitive fashion by the Indians — for example, in the interior of 

 Matto Grosso. They burn a patch of forest, until even the tree- 

 stumps are consumed, make holes in the ground with a pointed stick, 

 drop in the seeds, cover them with earth, and wait for the harvest. 

 The first settlers, who obtained the cereal from the Indians, culti- 

 vated maize in this fashion. Even to-day there are large areas of 

 Brazil which have not yet adopted the plough; the mattock, the 

 enxada, is still the most important agricultural implement, and many 

 a settler who hoped to find European methods of agriculture in 

 Brazil has found himself, to his disappointment, compelled to work 

 under the most primitive conditions, which make the greatest 

 demands on physical strength. 



K 145 



