A Warning
I don’t write about politics on my cachaça blog usually. And by politics, I mean electoral politics, the politics of elected officials. For the most part, they are outside the scope of what I want to focus on and can further alienate some readers.
But I think it’s important right now to understand how the current political situation in Brazil, even excluding the disastrous COVID response, will impact cachaça and ultimately limit its reach for years to come.
The Washington Post, one of the major newspapers in the US, put out a warning about Brazilian democracy. For some time, papers across the US have written stories about the awful coronavirus response and the failure of President Bolsonaro. And before the pandemic, newspapers often compared Bolsonaro to Trump: anti-democratic, authoritarian tendencies,etc.
With Trump out of the picture, but the echoes of his movement still reverberating, it’s a bit easier to focus on Bolsonaro. This piece the other day in the Washington Post directly called out Bolsonaro for anti-democratic acts. It warned readers about replacing professionals with loyalists, a practice Trump engaged in, particularly in the final days of his presidency as he tried to hold on to power. This is but one of numerous negative articles across a variety of publications in the US.
This is awful news for a product like cachaça. For now, we can’t fully judge what Bolsonaro is doing or what his plans are. I don’t know, you dear reader don’t know, and neither does the Washington Post. The appearances are bad, however.
Besides a domestic disaster, both humanitarian concerns and economic, the international community would likely not look too kindly on such a move. Brazil’s the largest producer of sugarcane and coffee in the world. Those products are pretty important, and they certainly might take a hit if something terrible were to happen. Maybe there would be tariffs, perhaps organized boycotts. And sure, that would make a difference.
But cachaça? Cachaça barely registers. It’s smaller than a blip on the radar; it’s a speck of dust. Whether it’s the third most consumed distilled spirit on the planet or not, it has no presence outside of Brazil. All of the work, all of the push, all of the effort to create a market outside of this country will disappear instantly.
No one will care. And further, most people will go out of their way not to consume it, assuming it wouldn’t be subjected to high tariffs.
A current cachaça producer sent the current President his cachaça and managed to get a photo taken, which he subsequently put on his Instagram. It’s difficult to overstate the negative reactions. Very rarely do Instagram posts elicit such negativity. Sure, some people liked it. But many, many did not, and promised never to buy this individual’s products again.
The point is, this is a bad situation. No country goes it alone. Not a single one. Just as Brazil is opening a little, it could easily shut down entirely once again as it has previously. There’s no reason things can’t get worse. They absolutely can. Coronavirus disaster? Anti-democratic government?
Producers need to be mindful.
