Brazil as the next space power

Good article from i09:

While lacking a manned shuttle initiative, Brazil is poised as a hotbed for space exploration along with private and joint government launches in the coming decades. Additionally, Brazil's Science without Borders programs aims to spend two billion dollars to educate 75,000 students pursuing advanced degrees in engineering and physical sciences at home and abroad, with hope that some of those students will return to work in Brazil. Yes, Brazil, thanks to its location and initiative, could very well become the planet's spaceport of choice in the late 21st Century.

It's infrastructure plus education plus location (being the the equator helps).

Thinking long on China's economic impact

Useful stats on the regional economic projections over the next 20-40 years.

Mexico will join the Big 7 by 2030 and Indonesia by 2050. By then, the United States will be the only advanced country to rank among the world’s seven largest economies. At the same time, China will become the center of world trade, representing by far the largest trading partner for most countries. Its share of world trade will reach 24 percent by 2050, up from about 10 percent today.

The rise of emerging economies other than China will create major opportunities for Latin American countries. Today, about 40 percent of Latin America’s exports go to other developing countries, including China; this figure will surge as developing countries’ share of world exports will more than double from 30 percent in 2006 to 69 percent in 2050. 

Beyond the China angle, a few other things stand out. First, Mexico and Brazil will be increasingly important markets for the hemisphere and the US will remain one of the top trading partners, even looking 40 or 50 years into the future.

Second, watch out for Indonesia. Most regional analysts are watching China. Some are watching India and expect that to be one of the next big things in the coming decade. If Indonesia is going to be one of the world's top seven economies in forty years, then they are going to be one of the top economies for trade with Latin America and the Caribbean. I don't think many Latin American countries are thinking through their Indonesia relations, but perhaps they should start.

City-state secession

In one of this blog's first posts, I said one possible long-term (100 year) future for the region would be for some countries to split apart with city-states taking a role.

To build on that: What is the first city to secede from its national government in Latin America or the Caribbean?

Here are a few criteria that I think would make it more likely. It would need to be a city that is not the capital or center of national politics. It would probably need to be a city with access to a coastline or at least a border, because being landlocked and surrounded would not be helpful. It would probably also need to be a city that has a different political, economic or social makeup from the capital or the national demographics.

In the context of modern Latin America, there is one city that fits all of those criteria: Guayaquil, Ecuador.  I could easily imagine a narrative that leads to it calling for separation from the national government in Quito in the coming decades.

There are a few other possibilities if you look 50 years out. There are some towns on the Caribbean coast of Central America, particularly in Honduras and Nicaragua, that could hypothetically call for full separation from the national government as they've been generally ignored throughout their history anyway. Rio or Sao Paulo or some cities in Northern Brazil (Recife?) could hypothetically make the attempt, though it's hard to imagine a political future today in which they do. I could also imagine an outlier scenario in which the Yucatan or Baja California areas of Mexico could make that attempt.

None of these scenarios are likely. I don't intend to predict that any of this will occur. However, whatever happens in the next 50 years to the borders of the region, it will be something that is considered an "unlikely" scenario today. Only by looking at the current map and imagining various possible futures can we really think about how Latin America can change 50 or 100 years out.

Shrinking islands

50 years from now rising sea levels will likely start to eat away at a number of coastlines. This will be a problem throughout the hemisphere, but will be a particularly big hit to the islands in the Caribbean. Most are rather small and don't have much space to lose.

Do they accept the lost land? Do they build walls to try to keep out the rising ocean? Do the build platforms over the sea? Do they build floating portions to the island? Do they build skyscrapers upwards, regaining lost ground vertically that they lose horizontally? Do they build underneath the water?

Every country will likely approach the problem differently. For those islands that choose to use structures to maintain their lost land, I would be interested to know some of the international law questions that could be raised by them building on top of or under the waves. This could go to how we define maritime boundaries.