Thank you, Japan

A few days ago, the government released its agricultural harvest forecast. The best ever, with an estimated harvest of 154 million tons of grains. Brazil has been at the forefront of the great turnaround in global agribusiness over the last 50 years thanks to the "Green Revolution" in the Cerrado. Behind this success lies the invisible hand of Japan. Brazil began to master tropical agricultural technology in the early 70s, when the Japanese government financed Prodecer, the Cerrado Development Program, a region that today accounts for the largest share of Brazil's trade surplus.

Long before that, the then Vale do Rio Doce, now simply Vale, began to develop when its former president, Eliezer Batista, signed cooperation agreements with major Japanese steel companies, such as Nippon Steel. And the mining company Vale, as everyone knows, is today the country's main exporting company. More recently, the governor of São Paulo, Geraldo Alckmin, in his previous term, began the works to deepen the channel and dredge the Tietê River, thanks to a nearly non-refundable grant from the Japanese government – ​​the dredging was later abandoned by the PSDB party, bringing back the floods, but that's another story.

These three cases are just a small sample of the many things Japan has already done for Brazil, without considering the invaluable contribution of the Japanese community over the last 100 years. Despite all this, what does Brazil, which proudly proclaims itself the seventh largest economy in the world, offer Japan? Absolutely nothing. In fact, the Brazilian Foreign Ministry has decided not to help even the Brazilians living there, while governments and airlines from various countries are already mobilizing to evacuate their citizens from the areas most exposed to the carcinogenic radiation from Fukushima.

Ah, some might say that the Japanese are rich and don't need any international help. They can manage on their own to recover from a catastrophe that will cost more than US$200 billion. After all, their GDP is twice that of ours. But that's not how things work. Governments of other countries have already sent ships and humanitarian missions. Here, what we heard was the pathetic statement from the Minister of Labor, Carlos Lupi, saying that Brazil "will gain more than it loses" from the Japanese earthquake.

Lupi doesn't speak Japanese. But there's a word that everyone in the world knows. Arigatô. Thank you very much. It was time to show gratitude for all the good that Japan has done for Brazil. At least, that's what is expected of someone who intends to be a global protagonist. Did Dilma Rousseff hear that? Did Geraldo Alckmin hear that? Did Roger Agnelli hear that?