Brazil backslides on protecting the Amazon
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By Paulo Prada
ITAITUBA, Brazil | Fri Aug 3, 2012 3:49pm BST
(Reuters) - Ivo Lubrinna has been wildcatting for gold in the jungle here for more than 30 years. It's a notoriously messy business, as crews strip away topsoil in the forest and along riverbanks and use mercury and other pollutants to draw precious metal from mud.
For the past two years, Lubrinna has held a second job: environment secretary for this riverside city of 100,000 people, gateway to the oldest national park and half a dozen nature reserves in Brazil's vast Amazon wilderness. As such, it's his job to protect the area from the depredations of loggers, poachers, squatters - and gold miners
...Meanwhile...
The president is clear in her reasoning: Unleashing further development in the Amazon rainforest, an area seven times the size of France, is essential to maintaining the sort of economic growth that over the past decade lifted 30 million Brazilians out of poverty and made Brazil the world's sixth-largest economy.
The government intends to build 21 dams in the Amazon through 2021 at a cost of 96 billion reais (30.77 billion pounds), as planned under Rousseff when she was still working for her mentor and predecessor, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. The dams are necessary, she says, to meet the energy demands of Brazil's growing consumer class.
And Brazil still has 60 million people living in poverty. "I have to explain to people how they are going to eat, how they'll have access to water, how they'll have access to energy," she said in a speech in April.
That message resonates with many Brazilians. Rousseff enjoys an enviable approval rating of 77 percent, according to a June poll....
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/08/03/uk-brazil-environment-backslide-idUKBRE8720GQ20120803
