"Our potential in technology is not known,'' said Luiz Fernando Furlan, who was chairman of Brazil's largest agri-business concern, Sao Paulo-based Sadia, before taking his government post three years ago. "The image of Brazil is soccer, coffee and samba, not sophisticated high technology products. But that's out of date.''

Airplanes and aircraft parts are Brazil's largest exports today.

Furlan described some of the other advances that Brazilian engineers have made in recent years that have gone unnoticed. Sophisticated fund-management software that makes split-second calculations grew out of the banking crisis in the early 1990s, when the Brazilian currency collapsed and inflation was running at close to 1,000 percent, Furlan said.

Brazil's home-grown automatic teller machine technology is marketed successfully in Europe and China, he said. In the automotive industry, domestic engineers have perfected technology that blends ethanol and regular gasoline in fuel-efficient and environmentally-friendly "flex-cars,'' which are hugely popular in Brazil.

Government planners project that Brazil will export $2 billion a year in information technology services by the year 2007, Furlan said. That would make it a player in the off shoring industry.

"We don't want to follow the Indian model, because we don't have the same concentrated software-center infrastructure,'' he said. "We see ourselves as a backup,'' he added, to "places like India that have risks of political instability.''

The advantage for Brazil -- the world's 12th largest economy -- is its robust democracy and free press, Furlan said. The trade minister conceded, however, that Brazil has a host of problems to overcome on the economic front.

The country's average 34 percent tax rate is a hurdle for foreign investors, as well as the combination of interest rates as high as 12 percent and inflation in the 6 percent range.

Nonetheless, Brazil is the world's second-biggest magnet for direct foreign investment, after China. Its telecommunications market is completely privatized and open to foreign capital, and the percentage of the population connected to the Internet is 14 percent and rising rapidly.