Politicians and bureaucrats in the immediate postwar abandoned the nationwide orientation of the diversification movement to appeal to narrow regional interests. Like many Brazilian producers, merchants, politicians, and foreign investors, political elites in the Northeast and South assumed that Europe's devastated conditions would sustain elevated prices for favored commodities. Their efforts to support continued profitability of two products that had received new attention during the war—cotton and beef—were to founder despite ample government support. Elites in the Northeast and South would prove unable to counter falling cotton and beef prices, a weakened national currency and renewed interest in coffee.