FT mete o pau em Chaves e elogia o Brasil

O financial Times ganha cada vez mais leitores no Brasil graças principalmente aos elogios que faz ao governo Lula e à economia brasileira, ao contrário da grande mídia tupiniquim.

As Venezuelan troops this month seized the assets of oil service contractors, the fable of the goose that laid the golden eggs again made the rounds of conversations among oil executives.
Venezuela’s oil industry may not be dead, as was the fate of the goose in the fable, but the latest round of nationalisations could prove a near-fatal blow, oil executives warn.
Analysts believe the move could reduce the country’s production to lows not seen for 20 years and prompt a significant shift in power that will redefine the relative importance of Latin America’s oil producers.
In fact, the oil service contractors were not the first to suffer under the drive of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s populist president, to use the country’s oil wealth for social programmes and to increase his influence among neighbouring countries.
During his decade in power, Mr Chavez has decimated PDVSA, Venezuela’s national oil company, which in the 1990s ranked as one of the world’s best-run. And as oil prices rose from about $20 to $147 a barrel in the past decade, he wrested control of Venezuela’s oil fields back from international oil companies before turning his sights to the oil service sector.
All this has had a profound effect on the country’s ability to produce oil. Output has dropped from 3.4m just before Mr Chavez came to power in 1999 to barely more than 2m barrels a day today.
Until the second half of last year, the drop in production had been masked by the extra income from rising oil prices. But prices have collapsed since hitting their peak last July, falling to as low as $32 before recovering to trade at about $60 today.
This has meant PDVSA, burdened by financing Mr Chavez’s social programmes, has had to slash costs and Venezuela has run up billions of dollars in debt to oil service contractors it can no longer afford to pay. Nationalising them has only dug Caracas into a deeper hole, analysts warn.
“It is clear that, even though in 2009 PDVSA will probably see an important decline in oil income and expenditures will keep increasing, it will still have the capacity to pay its [debt] obligations,” analysts at Barclays wrote in a note to institutional investors.
Observers say this means Mr Chavez’s reign is far from over and his actions, though disastrous for Venezuela’s oil industry and the country’s long-term prosperity, have not yet caused enough trouble to destabilise his government.
But Venezuela is not alone in having mismanaged its most precious resource. For more than 50 years Mexico has rivalled Venezuela as Latin America’s most important oil producer. But it too has relied too heavily on its national oil company as a piggy bank.
For decades Mexico’s congress has dipped into the coffers of Pemex, the national oil company, plunging it deep into debt and forcing it to borrow money to keep investing in producing and developing the country’s oil fields.
Meanwhile, Mexican politicians have denied Pemex the opportunity to use foreign oil companies to fill the resulting gap in investment by maintaining strict laws that make investing in the country unattractive.
All this has had severe consequences. Pemex has been unable to halt the steep natural decline of Cantarell, the giant, ageing field that at its peak produced more than 2m barrels of oil a day, but now no longer manages even half that.
Nor has Pemex succeeded in compensating for Cantarell’s losses by finding and developing new fields.
Despite recent political reforms, Mexico now faces the daunting prospect of becoming a net oil importer within a decade.
The fates of Mexico and Venezuela stand in stark contrast to that of Brazil, the country that represents the future of Latin American oil.
In the past two years, Petrobras, Brazil’s sophisticated, partially traded national oil company, has discovered such promising reserves in the deep waters off the south-west coast, that executives are comparing this new frontier with the North Sea, which saved the world from the energy crises created in the Middle East in the 1970s.
So far, Brazil has managed its industry well, allowing Petrobras to grow into one of the world’s most advanced oil companies, using foreign investment and expertise to its advantage.
It is an enviable position, but Petrobras has huge technical and financial hurdles to overcome. It took a dozen big oil and gas companies more than a decade to tap the North Sea.
Far fewer are active in Brazil and the country’s politicians have yet to thrash out a new energy law that will govern the development of the potentially huge reserves that are still to be discovered.
As discussions in Brasilia continue, the story of Venezuela and Mexico should serve as a cautionary tale similar to the one about the goose and the golden eggs.