Brazil On The Brink: What Decades In Reverse Mean For Them And The World

[hatrack]

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To understand what happened in Brazil over the last decade, it’s necessary to look back a little farther. In 2003, new Brazilian President Luiz Inácio da Silva, from the Workers’ Party (PT), appointed Marina Silva as environment minister. Silva, renowned as a committed environmentalist, was born into a family of Amazonian rubber tappers. Although the rate of deforestation took off during the first two years of Lula’s government, it fell during Silva’s tenure, until by 2012, well after she left office, it was down to 4,511 square kilometers (2,803 square miles) annually — just a sixth of the 2004 level. Much of Silva’s success was due to her strategy of penning in development pressure by creating protected areas around big infrastructure projects and agribusiness expansion. Environmentalists drew up plans for vast new conservation units, but at first congress obstructed. The bancada ruralista agribusiness lobby — dominant in government today — was already powerful, forming a large bloc in the legislature, creating problems for Lula.

Then came the assassination of the American nun, Dorothy Stang in January 2005. Sister Dorothy, as she was universally called, had campaigned fearlessly against illegal loggers, land grabbers and ranchers destroying the forest and threatening the livelihoods of poor rural populations in the Amazon basin. Her brutal assassination was a political embarrassment for the government. Responding to international outrage, Lula blew the dust off Silva’s plan to protect vast swathes of Amazon forest.

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Ominously, what is happening in Brazil won’t likely stay there. Experts warn that the current deforestation will make it virtually impossible for Brazil, the world’s seventh largest emitter of greenhouse gases, to achieve the commitments it made under the 2015 Paris Agreement, and may possibly jeopardize the whole global accord. Moreover, deforestation, combined with escalating climate change, is pushing the Amazon toward a rainforest-to-savanna “tipping point” which would result in massive tree death and a gush of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere at a time when the world can least afford it. Ironically, the mega-drought that could soon devastate Amazon forests would also empty Brazil’s aquifers and be catastrophic for agribusiness — and thus for the whole Brazilian economy.

Some of the world’s largest companies are getting worried and responding to Bolsonaro’s polices. In September 2019, some 230 global investors with $6.2 trillion in assets urged companies to eliminate Amazon deforestation from their supply chains. Then in December, 87 large UK companies, including Tesco and Sainsbury, signed a letter to Bolsonaro asking his government to stop Amazon deforestation for soy production. International pressure seems likely to grow as the president turns increasingly belligerent and aggressive, but it will take more than urging to save the Amazon basin. Some activists think the only current hope for the rainforest may lie with an international boycott. Combined with the growing mobilization of social movements underway inside Brazil, such a boycott might cause the Bolsonaro government to rethink its policies in the years ahead.

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https://news.mongabay.com/2019/12/brazil-on-the-precipice-from-environmental-leader-to-despoiler-2010-2020/

[Iliyah]

1. Destroying the Amazon, killing it's

indigenous people, killing animals and insects, destroying about 20% of the oxygen and nitrogen in the world, all for profit.

Right wingers love destroying mother earth for money.