Of course, East Africa could only treat the symptoms, not the root cause, by using this method to ease its relations with Brazil. After all, East Africa itself was a major global coffee producer, and East African coffee was fairly renowned worldwide. Coffee from Kenya in particular had gained broad recognition after more than a decade of marketing and had become a hot-selling product in Europe.
Thus, even if East Africa yielded some profit to Brazil, it was extremely limited. Conversely, East Africa gained more from Brazil, which had in effect become one of East Africa's important overseas suppliers of raw materials.
This was the gap between industrial and agricultural nations. Although East Africa could only be considered a semi-industrialized country, Brazil, by comparison, had an even lower level of industrial development.
Brazil's geographical position was also poor. South America lay simply too far from other markets. The countries closest to Brazil were the United States and East Africa, and both currently possessed higher industrial levels than Brazil.
Take the coffee trade, for example. The coffee Brazil grew could only be sold to other countries, since its domestic processing capacity was weak and it lacked independent sales channels.
Argentina was actually much the same, except that it possessed vast plains that were easier to develop, had a relatively smaller population than Brazil, and differed in other respects as well. As a result, the two countries' economic development was completely different at this stage.
Leicamon said, "In short, the purpose of this 'friendly' exchange is to display East Africa's formidable military strength, so that Brazil and other South American countries will entertain fewer stray thoughts when trading with us."
To put it bluntly, East Africa wanted to use "gunboat diplomacy" to deter the South American nations and safeguard East Africa's interests