BRAZIL: Brazil's next president faces stiff challenges to preserve the environment, especially the Amazon rainforest
- 00:00:10
- ITN Source
BRAZIL: Brazil's next president faces stiff challenges to preserve the environment, especially the Amazon rainforest
With his leftist credentials and background as a worker in a Sao Paulo car factory, environmentalists had high hopes of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva when he took office in 2003. The results have been mixed and conflicts could flare if he wins another four years in office in next Sunday's presidential election, as is expected. Disputes over how to develop the Amazon are sure to mount. Environmentalists are unanimous in saying Lula needs to take better care of the world's largest rainforest. Huge tracts of Brazil's Amazon rainforest were cleared legally and illegally in the past year. Officials estimate 6,450 square miles (16,700 square km) of forest -- an area about the size of Hawaii could have been lost legally or illegally in the 2006 season, which ran from August 2005 until July 2006. Brazil's chaotic legal system and its large informal economy have not helped the fight against deforestation. Illegal loggers often use fake permits and land titles to harvest trees and then sell the cleared land to farmers or ranchers. Many Brazilians are clamouring for more growth after the economy expanded only 2.3 percent last year. Business interests are railing at the slow pace of environmental licensing and infrastructure projects are needed to spur economic expansion. Deforestation slowed by a third in the past year and is expected to slow further in 2006. But environmentalists worry that waning demand for soy, beef and timber may be the real reason for the decline, not government action. Congressman Fernando Gabeira of the Green Party said Lula's government made a series of mistakes as it adopted a developmental model similar to that of Eastern European countries, where development comes first, despite environmental losses. "He (President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva) committed a series of mistakes in this field. In reality, Lula's government has a more developmental perspective like the one Eastern European countries had. To develop not taking into account the environmental issue," he said. Land-clearing in the Amazon surged during Lula's first year in office as a global boom in demand for soy and beef tempted farmers and ranchers deeper into the forest. Deforestation surged during Lula's first year in office as local demand for timber and global demand for soy and beef tempted people deeper into the rainforest. Gabeira also said the area where soy plantations are growing the most is precisely the area of Brazil's greatest biological and cultural riches. "Soy is growing precisely in the areas where there is more biological riches and more cultural riches, which is also the land of the Indians," he said. Illegal loggers used fake permits to transport timber and bogus land titles to sell cleared land. In just one year, a swathe of rainforest the size of Massachusetts was cleared. Corruption inside Brazil's environmental agency IBAMA has been part of the problem. Some 100 IBAMA employees have been arrested since mid-2003 in raids that have uncovered more than a dozen illegal logging rings. Gabeira said the present structure of Brazil's IBAMA does not function properly, since it needs more organization, more equipment, and especially a more rigid control over its employees that are largely involved with corruption. "Ibama (Brazil's environmental agency) needs to be better structured, better equipped, and it is necessary as well to raise information about the action of the Ibama people (staff). Here in Rio, for example, we had forty percent of the employees arrested for corruption," he said. Environmentalists worry that the new energy projects and roads will serve large agriculture and industry projects at the expense of the kind of small-scale sustainable development projects environmentalists recommend. Lula won praise for his plans to nearly double the acreage of state-protected conservation areas to about 10 percent of Brazil's Amazon territory -- although Sergio Leitao of Greenpeace questioned whether government could police the land. And most everyone is pleased with environment minister Marina Silva, the daughter of Amazon rubber-tappers, and would like to see her continue her efforts if Lula wins.
ITN Source | September 27, 2006
