Industrialization Spells End of Ex-Boom Town : Brazil: Peasants migrate to city slums as government gives priority to production of export crops over basic foods.

Everything that made this remote mountain outpost a coffee boom town is gone, or going.

Gone are the coffee farms, the wagons and boxcars that hauled the beans to port. Gone are the pickers--for jobs in the city--and the Atlantic forest felled for charcoal and firewood.

The bald hills erode more after each rain. School enrollment has fallen 10% in a year. The church is crumbling. Even the jail is boarded up.

Some say the only hope is a bus ticket out, to Nova Friburgo or Rio de Janeiro.

“Our town’s like a wounded bird, dying a little every day,” said Fatima Rosa, 36, who tries to keep the last gift shop open and her two daughters fed.

Nothing important is close to Sao Sebastiao do Alto, one of countless towns bypassed by a nation eager to industrialize.

Millions of peasants have migrated to city slums because the government gives priority to production of export crops over basic foods, and powerful landowners resist efforts to break up their estates.

Sociologists say rural flight began 30 years ago. Today, 70% of Brazil’s 150 million people live in cities.

The numbers of urban poor continue to grow, said Iraci Pietrani, a town official in Sao Sebastiao do Alto, because “the government has turned its back on us. With no investment or financial help for small farmers, how can people survive here?”

There was a time when men sought their dreams in the mountains that embrace Sao Sebastiao.

Gold-seekers came in 1770. Then nobles with land titles cleared the forest for coffee and sugar cane, exporting the precious hardwoods to Europe.

By 1900, “king coffee” had brought electricity and telephones to the southeast. A theater and movie house opened in Sao Sebastiao and a new railroad carried its products to Rio, 150 miles away.

Prosperity was fleeting, however. Drought and fires ruined harvests. Repeated planting of the same crops depleted the land, which yielded less and less. In the 1930s, the prices of coffee and sugar crashed, and Sao Sebastiao’s rich fled to Rio.

The close-knit community that remained survived for a while on crops of corn, rice and beans, but in the 1950s, the government increased agricultural taxes to pay for state industrial projects. Peasants flocked to city factories.

Sao Sebastiao’s last hope came in 1975, when the military regime then in power started an alcohol-fuel program and subsidized production of sugar cane.

Unfortunately for local sharecroppers, artificially low cane prices and high interest rates drove them into bankruptcy. Wealthy families bought up the land, purchased cattle as a hedge against inflation and turned farms into pastureland.

It was death to a way of life.

“The breeze used to smell of corn, cane, manioc and garlic,” said Pedro Solano, 94, nodding toward the barren slopes. “I put 43 years into these fields, and now look at them--empty.”

Solano walked along a rising, empty dirt road past a big stone house, dark and abandoned behind a gate sign that said, “Keep out. Private.” Crows circled overhead.

Beyond the house, a few thin cows munched on scrub in the valley.

A mule cart baked in the town square of Sao Sebastiao, which has lost half the 14,000 residents it had in 1950.

It is a silent, dust-covered town. Railroad cars rot on rusted tracks hidden by weeds. The theater and movie house closed years ago.

The Banco do Brasil, a government-controlled bank that provides most of the farm credit, gave up and closed its branch in April.

Men who used to measure time in planting seasons gather in roadside bars over glasses of cane alcohol called cachaca.

Luis Peixoto, his skin burned and wrinkled by 78 years in the sun, is too old to start over.

“Now, I just kill my days,” said Peixoto, whose 10 children have moved to Nova Friburgo, 50 miles down the highway.

The few young who remain cluster in front of television sets for nightly serials that tell of romance and grandeur in Rio.

“That’s all my little Helena does, talk about the shows and Rio,” Rosa, the young mother, said. “It will be difficult to keep her.”