Country profile: Brazil.

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Country profile: Brazil

Brazil is South America's biggest and most influential country and takes up almost half the continent. It is one of the world's economic giants and is revered for its football prowess, coffee production and lively music such as samba and bossa nova.

It includes much of the world's biggest rain forest around the Amazon, whose exploitation has become a major environmental worry.

On the economic front, Brazil has a history of boom and bust, with its attempts at development hampered in the past by high inflation and one of the biggest foreign debts. It has had to be bailed out in times of crisis, but economic reforms in the 1990s brought some stability to the country's finances. Reforms included privatisation and the opening up of its markets.

The government is facing increasing pressure to redress what some say is one of the world's most unfair distributions of wealth. Much of the country's arable land is controlled by a handful of wealthy families, a situation which the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) seeks to redress by demanding land redistribution. It uses direct protest action and land occupation in its quest.

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Social conditions are harsh in the big cities Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, where a third of the population lives in favelas, or slums.

A drive to move settlers to the Amazon region during military rule in the 1970s caused considerable damage to vast areas of the rainforest. The high rate of destruction of the Amazon by loggers and cattle ranchers remains controversial, but government-sponsored migration programmes have been halted.

Brazil's Aids programme has become a model for other developing countries, having succeeded in stabilising the rate of HIV infection and cutting the number of Aids-related deaths. ...

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