Businessman linking to Brazil

Friday, December 4, 2009

By EDUARDO A. DE OLIVEIRA

For the Journal

BEDFORD – The two hottest business trends that Dawn Wivell, a director at New Hampshire’s International Trade Resource Center, always hears about when she travels overseas are sustainability and green technology.

Both should benefit next week when, thanks to Craig Cassarino, a local environmental businessman, New Hampshire will sign a Sister State agreement with Tocantins, Brazil’s youngest and fastest-growing state. The partnership includes the exchange of recycling and green technologies, and a mutual cooperation in renewable forms of energy, such as engines for power generators that run on vegetable oil.

For Cassarino, it all started in 1991, during a – let’s say – good mid-life crisis.

Single and having just sold his Milford company, the Recycling Development Corp. of America, Cassarino went to Rio de Janeiro to relax on the beach.

“Brazil felt like going home to me, it was a whole new adventure,” Cassarino said in his Bedford office at Leonardo Technologies Inc.

He was having a great experience in Rio, but soon learned that the money was in Sao Paulo, the country’s commercial capital. He headed there and started what he recalls “an investigative work,” as he did not speak Portuguese and knew nobody in Sao Paulo.

Cassarino then worked introducing American companies to Brazilian counterparts interested in doing business in the U.S. About 18 years later, he was traveling all over Brazil as one of New Hampshire’s 15 commercial consuls, a type of business ambassador.

“If you’re starting in a new sector, such as sustainability, isn’t it wonderful that we can also immediately have a relationship with one of the fasted growing countries in the world?” Wivell asked.

According to Wivell, Brazil is New Hampshire’s 16th strongest trade partner. With 2,200 clients from 215 countries, the International Trade Resource Center’s goal is to help American companies to export their products abroad.

On Dec. 9, Gov. John Lynch will host a meeting with Carlos Henrique Amorim, governor of Tocantins, a 20-year-old state with a vast range of natural resources and a relatively relaxed set of business regulations.

To refresh the minds of TV aficionados, Tocantins was the shooting locale for the 18th edition of CBS’s “Survivor.”

For Cassarino, the ceremony with Gov. Lynch just represents a kick-off of what may come.

“When I was in graduate school a professor said to me: ‘Economics and ecology have the same root, ‘eco,’ which is a Greek word that means to manage one’s household. The study of ecology is the study of relationships, and from a business standpoint I’m always looking at how everything is related to everything else,” he said.