Brazilian Carnival reveler Eliane Aparecida dos Santos wears a headdress adorned with a huge fake sapphire and gold braid topped by seven white ostrich feathers that sway as she practices her samba steps.
"I work hard all year, but Carnival is beautiful," said dos Santos, 27, a manicurist and member of Vai-Vai, a Sao Paulo samba school, as a bunch of ostrich plumes that sprouts from the back of her 220-real (US$90) costume rustles softly. "Vai-Vai is like my family."
PHOTO: REUTERS
The feathers and boas worn by dos Santos and other performers at Carnival, which started Friday night and ends early today, mean big business for South African ostrich farmers. For them, the plumes are a valuable product, along with the leather and meat of the flightless bird.
PHOTO: AFP
The Klein Karoo Cooperative in Oudtshoorn, a town in Western Cape province, is the world's biggest ostrich feather exporter, shipping as much as 240 tonnes a year, most for Brazil's Carnival parades, said Stefan Terblanche, director of the company's feathers unit.
Depending on quality, the plumes can fetch as much as US$120 a kilo, he said. Klein Karoo, which produces 80 percent of South African ostrich plumes, exports more than 90 percent of its output, earning revenue of almost US$30 million a year.
Although precise figures are hard to come by, South Africa probably accounts for about 60 percent of the world's ostrich industry, breeding 250,000 slaughter birds a year, said Francis Hanekom, manager of the Ostrich Business Center in Oudtshoorn.
"Brazil is probably our biggest final market, even though we send more feathers to other countries like Japan and the US," said Sebastiaan Meyer, who works with Terblanche at Klein Karoo, a cooperative that groups 500 ostrich farmers.
The days ahead of Brazil's four-day Carnival were hectic for Elias Ayoub, the owner of The Palace of Plumes, a store in Sao Paulo that generates 20 million reais (US$8.1 million) a year in sales of materials for Carnivals throughout Brazil.
Rio de Janeiro's Carnival has 14 first-league schools and about 90 smaller groups, and Sao Paulo's event is not much smaller, said Ayoub, as he fields calls from costume designers in a last-minute search for batches of feathers, lace or braid.
A single "wing," or sub-group, of a samba school, can use as much as 30 kilos of feathers, said Ayoub, whose wife, Pinah, known as the "Black Cinderella," is a director of Rio de Janeiro's Beija-Flor samba school. She is known in Brazil for enticing the UK's Prince Charles out to dance samba during a royal visit to Rio in 1978.
Each samba school has about 25 wings with as many as 150 members in each. Along with the feathers used to embellish drummers and floats, a single school could easily use as much as a tonne of feathers, said Ayoub, whose 10-year-old daughter, Claudia, already is a veteran of four Carnivals with Beija-Flor.
Ayoub's "Carnival supermarket" sells "99.9 percent" of the plumes used for Sao Paulo's Carnival and about half those used in Rio de Janeiro, he said.
"Some people like artificial feathers, but the texture just isn't the same," said Ayoub, who fell in love with shaven-headed Pinah when she walked into his office to negotiate an order for Beija-Flor. They married in 1982.
Nevertheless, the 18 percent decline in the value of the real since last year's Carnival means he's now selling cheaper, shorter or imperfect feathers that go for US$30 to US$120 a kilo. "Carnival is for ordinary people, so we have to keep prices down," said Ayoub.
Plumes are just one profitable by-product of the ostrich, a member of the ratite family of flightless birds and a cousin of the emu and rhea. The birds live as long as 80 years in the wild and females can lay as many as 65 eggs a year.
Each bird can yield as much as 2 kilos of feathers as well as up to 30 kilos of lean, red meat worth about US$660 as well as leather, which can fetch as much as US$300 for a piece measuring 1.1m2, said Mauricio Lupifieri Junior, owner of Aravestruz, an ostrich farming company in Sao Paulo state.
Ostrich is the second-most valuable leather after crocodile skin, he said. Ostrich feathers also can be made to make dusters to clean electronic equipment like computers or the shells of cars before they're spray-painted.
At present, Brazilian ostrich farming, with 700 breeders rearing 15,000 birds, is in its infancy, said Lupifieri. "Brazil is Carnival, so the market is right here for our feathers," said Lupifieri. "It's an industry of the future." As revelers -- among them Mark Mobius, who manages US$6 billion in emerging market funds at Franklin Templeton Investments -- enjoy the world famous Rio Carnival, Ayoub's wife Pinah recalls how her Carnival dress, a skimpy confection of white lace and ostrich feathers, bewitched Prince Charles 24 years ago.
"He seemed shy, a little aloof perhaps, but he took my hand," said Pinah. "So I taught the future king of England to dance samba."
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