Booming Brazil – a well-kept secret

I’ve been in Brazil for three days now, but only just woken up to the reality that the humungous city of Sao Paolo is only the beginning of it.

This morning I broke out, and we drove more than 400 kilometres west – a distance, well, heading from London to well past Newcastle.

Let me tell you, when you look at a map of Brazil we had hardly moved a centimetre.

We came out here to look at the miracle of sugar cane, an organism which is capable of being spun into plastic, distilled into alcohol fuel for cars, and the waste used for cattle feed and for fuelling power stations.

But more of that on Channel 4 News next week. What struck me once we escaped the dense urban sprawl into the Brazilian countryside was the high quality highway (private toll road), the apple-pie clean verges, and the verdant green.

And everywhere abundant farmland – of course, also in private ownership. No squatters here.

This is where you begin to see Brazil as the bread basket of the Americas, if not the world.

Brazil is the best-kept secret, and though aficionados brag about the samba, this is also an economy on the boom. And we haven’t even set foot in Rio yet.

Tomorrow to the Amazon! All this ahead of Channel 4 News, beamed live from Brazil all next week.