English.news.cn 2014-02-28 10:27:44
RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb. 27 (Xinhua) — President Dilma Rousseff said Thursday Brazil will earmark a large part of its oil revenue to improve education.
The government will earmark for education 75 percent of the revenue from oil sales and 50 percent of the revenue from the extraction of crude from its deep-water pre-salt reserves, Rousseff said at a graduation ceremony in the National Program for Technical Training and Employment in Sao Paulo.
Brazil’s two biggest resources are its people and its oil reserves, Rousseff said, adding “this limited wealth has to be transformed into Brazil’s endless richness, which is education.”
“For Brazil, to grow and develop and to leave behind its tragic history of inequality, we need to pave the way to education, especially technical education, which is very important for any country,” the president said.
Education improvement requires cooperation of different sectors, Rousseff said, highlighting the importance of student unions, family support and opportunities created by government programs.
“Such collaboration allows the country to move forward,” she said.
Over the past few years, Brazil has discovered billions of barrels of high-quality oil in offshore reserves. Most of these fields lie beneath several kilometers of ocean, bedrock and hot salt beds, making extraction extremely technically difficult.