Brazil's infrastructure challenges have long hindered the country's economic potential. The Grand Escarpment comes right down to the ocean throughout the Brazilian southern coast. Brazil's cities, therefore, are forced to develop on small enclaves of relatively flat land in the few areas where the escarpment has not pushed all the way to the sea. The lack of a coastal plain means no small cities can form between the major cities. Any infrastructure built by one city never serves another city, and linking the cities requires climbing up the escarpment onto the shield itself, traversing the shield and then going back down the escarpment to the other cities, a difficult and costly endeavor in terms of both time and engineering. Because Brazil does not have direct access to the navigable rivers of the Rio de la Plata region, it has to scrounge for capital to apply to this capital-intensive project. To this day, Brazil has very few major highways and railways because even where the topography does allow for the possibility, the costs are still much higher than in flatter lands farther south. The country lacks a major coastal road system, as the escarpment is simply too steep and too close to the coast. Following the Brazilian coastline makes clear how Brazil's coastal roads are almost exclusively two-lane, and the coastal cities — while dramatic — are tiny and crammed into whatever pockets of land they can find. And most of the country is still without a rail network; much of that soy, corn and rice that the country has become famous for exporting reaches the country's ports by truck, the most expensive way to transport bulk goods.
