ENVIRONMENT-BRAZIL: Sidelined by the Economy

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 23 2004 (IPS) - Brazil’s Environment Ministry has well-designed policies and projects and is headed by a highly respected environmentalist, but it frequently clashes with other ministries when its requirements run up against economic policies and interests, environmentalists complain.

The Environment Ministry "got off to a good start, with good programmes", when President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former trade unionist, took office in January 2003, parliamentary Deputy Fernando Gabeira told IPS.

Gabeira left President Lula’s leftist Workers Party (PT) in October, disenchanted by government decisions that he said have been made at the expense of the environment and human rights.

A government decree that authorised the cultivation and sale of transgenic soy with seeds brought in as contraband over the border from Argentina was Gabeira’s main gripe.

The measure basically legalised a fait accompli – the illegal cultivation of genetically modified soy in southern Brazil, which has become increasingly widespread in that area since 1997.

The government also authorised imports of used tires from Paraguay and Uruguay under the pretext of respecting free trade within the Mercosur (Southern Common Market) trade bloc (of which Argentina is the fourth member), he complained.

During last year’s economic recession, the Environment Ministry became a target of accusations that it was an obstacle to growth because it delayed the granting of environmental permits for mega-projects like hydropower dams, said the lawmaker, a prominent environmentalist since the early 1980s.

In Gabeira’s view, the Lula administration’s biggest shortcoming is the lack of a policy to guarantee basic sanitation for the entire population, to fight the spread of water-borne diseases, which lead to many deaths and create a huge burden for the health system due to the lack of piped water and sewage services in many areas.

Nine million children in this country of 178 million live in areas lacking sewage services, and the administration – including the environment authorities – has failed to come up with a national policy on sanitation, he complained.

Nor has significant progress been made in combating deforestation in the Amazon jungle, which is partly caused by slash-and-burn agriculture – a technique that uses intentionally-set fires to clear land for farming or grazing – said Gabeira, although he recognised that efforts were being made.

The lawmaker conceded, however, that there have been "positive initiatives." He pointed, for instance, to the way the authorities are handling the paving of the controversial BR-163 highway through the eastern part of the Amazon jungle, which for the first time is being carried out with broad participation by society and ecologists, in order to minimise the project’s environmental impact.

A plan for granting publicly-owned forest land in concession for sustainable exploitation by communities and private companies is also a "good idea", Gabeira added.

That controversial project was proposed by the Environment Ministry to curb the appropriation of public land by private interests, a problem that lies at the root of the unchecked deforestation.

The government’s failures on the environmental front are a result of the economic policies that have been followed, which put top priority on growth and fiscal adjustments "at any cost," said Adriana Ramos, coordinator of the policy and rights section at the non-governmental Socioenvironmental Institute (ISA).

The "willingness to engage in dialogue" and the constant search for negotiated solutions that characterise Environment Minister Marina Silva, who has a long career as an environmentalist, put her at a disadvantage in internal disputes within the government, Ramos said in an interview with IPS.

In the debate on transgenic soy, Minister Silva accepted the authorisation of sales of soybeans that had already been planted. But she negotiated a definitive solution: a biosafety law, which is making its way through the Senate, said Ramos.

The main dispute within the government is between the Environment Ministry and the Ministry of Mines and Energy, whose head, Dilma Roussef, is pressing hard for environmental permits for dozens of new hydropower dams, arguing that if they are not built, Brazil could suffer a major energy shortage as of 2007.

The fears of a repeat of the blackouts of 2002 and the subsequent electricity rationing measures, which remained in place for eight months that year, conspire against the Environment Ministry’s requirements and demands.

But Ramos argued that it is not a question of blocking plans for hydroelectric dams, but of preventing environmental and social damages that can be caused by poorly-designed projects that have a major impact, and which can even stand in the way of making better use of the country’s rivers.

Many of the projects were designed without an evaluation of the actual energy potential of the rivers in question, or an assessment of the best place to build the dams, from the point of view of both the environment and energy needs, she said.

A number of the projected dams are projects inherited from previous administrations, which do not live up to environmental standards, and generate conflicts.

The government’s energy policies require studies of river basins and environmental impact to be carried out before the presentation of any new initiative, which must first win the approval of the Environment Ministry.

But that policy has not resolved all of the weaknesses of the plans designed under previous administrations, said Ramos.

The policies over which the Environment Ministry has occasionally found itself at loggerheads with the ministries of agriculture, energy and labour, for example, "tend to continue sacrificing the environment, by imposing economic interests" ahead of other concerns, said the environmentalist.

That, however, does not mean Silva has failed to design adequate policies on the environment, or to take "the right stance," but is the result of a government based on a coalition of many parties, with different interests and concerns, which makes it difficult to enforce environmental standards in all sectors, she argued.