THE depth and range of the corruption that has already been proven or is still alleged to have taken place at very highest levels in Brazilian politics and business is shocking. Politicians trusted by voters choose to use their power to enrich themselves and their cronies. In large part they did this when business leaders paid them for favors or contracts. It remains unclear for now whether it was by and large Brazilian business, which first offered the inducements to politicians, or the politicians, who first began to demand the payola.
Either way, this essentially financial corruption has had a far wider impact. Leave aside the corrosive effect on the confidence of voters in the political establishment they elected, the waves of this scandal have crashed ashore around the world. A Brazilian business world that is prepared to cheat and bribe politicians finds it but a small step to deceive and short-change its customers.
Thus, for instance, it has emerged that within the country’s corned beef manufacturing sector, where Brazil is the absolute world market leader, a series of corrupt and dangerous practices have been adopted by some producers. The product had been found to contain high and illegal levels of the veterinary drug albendazole. Worse than this, it has emerged from documents leaked by a whistle blower that some manufacturers have for very many years been using rotten meat in their production.
The response from one company executive has been that even if this is true, given the tens of millions of cans of corned beef that are sold and consumed around the world every year, no one appears to have suffered any harm. He also suggested that the standards by which meat was condemned as unfit for human consumption veered excessively on the side of caution. An extension of the corned beef scandal has been that one some of the huge ranches where the cattle are raised, bosses have been using slave labor. This has for instance been the primary reason why the Jamaican government decided to ban the import of the product.
The issue here of course is one of trust. Manufacturers have a duty to both consumers and their shareholders to sell products that are safe and are exactly what they are claimed to be. Adulterated foodstuffs — chickens bulked up by the injection of water, the insanitary factory-farming egg production with its high risk of salmonella are only the part of it. The scandals over Volkswagen’s production of vehicles, not only with falsified emissions data but with a deliberate defeat device that conceal this cheat from any testing — a scandal which seems to have been duplicated in one way or another by other manufacturers — have shaken consumer confidence.
Market trust is held to be everything. A company that has a good reputation should be prepared to go to considerable lengths to protect it. Thus where manufacturing errors occur, companies are quick to recall their products, apologize effusively and refund or replace faulty items. But this of course is where something goes wrong. It is entirely a different matter when a company or indeed a political establishment deliberately sets out to deceive, cheat and shortchange their customers and electorate. There is no recall for such deliberate falseness. And the only consequences ought to be bankruptcy and jail sentences.
