The rainwater harvesting cistern is everywhere in Brazil's semi-arid region, a social technology that reduced water scarcity for its inhabitants. Elizabete Sousa Soares wanted to leave Jatobá when her daughter Maria was born 11 years ago, but decided to stay in her small rural town thanks to the cistern and other social technologies that have improved her life. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
USERRA DAS ALMAS, Brazil, Dec 29 2025 (IPS)

“The work of collecting seeds saved me from depression,” caused by her daughter’s suicide at the age of 29, said Maria do Desterro Soares, 64, who lives in the poor rural community of Jatobá in northeastern Brazil.

She drew her younger sister, Maria de Jesus Soares, 45, who lost her husband in a car accident and also struggles to avoid falling into depression, into the activity. The two walk together for nearly two hours to reach the forests where seeds abound.“The reserve is a great water reservoir. A study we conducted on avoided runoff showed this 6,285-hectare area can retain an astonishing 4.78 billion liters per year” - Gilson Miranda.

They only earn some 1,000 reais (US$185) in a “good year,” but “it’s my work, my pleasure, it’s what I want and I like doing it,” claimed Maria do Desterro, who also makes ice cream and medicines for flu and other illnesses with locally sourced juices, teas, peels, and honey.

She is one of the 121 people trained by the Caatinga Association (AC) through 2023 for the collection and management of seeds from native plants of this biome exclusive to Brazil, as a way to generate income and restore forests.

The association, founded in 1998 to protect the caatinga, the biome of the semi-arid region in the Brazilian northeast, manages the Serra das Almas Natural Reserve (RNSA) and disseminates social technologies for coexistence with the semi-arid ecoregion in surrounding communities.

The caatinga occupies 10% of Brazil’s vast territory and is home to 27 million people. Its vegetation is generally low, with twisted branches and trunks, appearing dead in the dry season and turning green just days after rain. It also features large trees that reach heights of tens of meters.

Maria de Jesus Soares and her older sister, Maria do Desterro Soares, extract seeds from the buriti coconut, a palm tree also known as moriche, found in several parts of Brazil, including its exclusive caatinga biome. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Coexistence, instead of fighting against nature

To coexist, rather than fighting droughts, is a guiding principle of the actions that are improving life in Brazil’s poorest region, the Northeast, offering a climate lesson for the country and the world.

This slogan, set in motion by civil society organizations, spurred several social technologies as solutions for water scarcity. Best known is the rainwater harvesting cistern for domestic use, with over 1.2 million units built since 2003.

Cisterns, bio-water (a system that cleans household water for reuse in planting), green septic tanks (a concrete tank with soil, filters, and a banana plant base), solar ovens, and eco-efficient stoves are the five tecghnologies being disseminated.

The AC website reports that 1,481 of these “technologies” have been implemented.

The AC has the RNSA for environmental education and as a source of income through eco-tourism. It works in 40 communities nearby where some 4,000 families live, implementing social technologies and supporting the conservation of the reserve and the entire caatinga.

Headquartered in Fortaleza, the capital of the northeastern state of Ceará, and in Crateús, in the west of that same state near the RNSA, the association stands out from other non-governmental organizations by having this conservation unit of 6,285 hectares of dense forests and four streams.

The green septic tank, also called a biosepitic bed, treats wastewater from toilets with microorganisms that process the waste, leaving the water ready to irrigate crops in the semi-arid region of Northeast Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

The caatinga mitigates climate change

“The reserve is an open-air laboratory, where research on fauna, flora, carbon, and water takes place, so we can understand the importance of this area, and of the entire caatinga,” explained Gilson Miranda, a biologist and manager of the RNSA for the Caatinga Association.

In 2015 – 2022, the caatinga was responsible for nearly 40% of the carbon removed from the atmosphere in Brazil, he said, based on a study by São Paulo State University on greenhouse gas capture.

This is because the rapid regreening of the vegetation, an indicator of intense photosynthetic activity when it rains, makes the caatinga a major greenhouse gas sink, different from the Amazon, which is an immense carbon reservoir.

“That is why preserving and conserving the caatinga is strategic in a climate adaptation scenario,” said Miranda in an interview with IPS.

This biome, exclusive to Brazil, covers an area of 844,453 square kilometers.

Water is another wealth of Serra das Almas, which was designated a Private Natural Heritage Reserve (RPPN) in the year 2000.

“The reserve is a great water reservoir. A study we conducted on avoided runoff showed this 6,285-hectare area can retain an astonishing 4.78 billion liters per year,” said Miranda.

Around the springs, there are very tall, green trees that differ from the usual biome. The gameleira (Ficus gomelleira), can reach up to 40 or 50 meters, according to Jair Martins, the tourist guide on hikes along the six trails of Serra das Almas.

This water, retained in the soil by the forests, actually drains slowly. The four springs preserved in the reserve do not dry up, but are unable to sustain year-round the streams that feed the Poti River, whose course passes to the east and north of Serra das Almas.

Nor is this moisture enough to keep the caatinga vegetation green, which is very dry in December, with the green of some shrubs or trees more resistant to water stress.

Maria Clemente da Silva was only able to cultivate her garden when she gained access to bio-water, because the public water supply is limited to three hours a day in Jatobá, a poor community in the Brazilian caatinga. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Mitigated drought

In the surroundings of the RNSA, the drought is harsher.

Maria Clemente da Silva, 59, relies on bio-water to supplement the water she uses to irrigate her small garden. The public water supply only operates for two to three hours per day, which is not enough for cultivating vegetables, such as lettuce and onions, or fruit trees like papaya, banana, acerola, orange, and cashew.

About 100 meters behind her house, a forest of tall, very green trees reveals that, with water, the caatinga vegetation gains exuberance. It is the moisture that remained in a low-lying area of a river that practically dried up due to deforestation and fires set to “clear” the land, explained Elisabete de Souza Soares.

Water is the most keenly felt shortage, according to Souza and other women who spoke to IPS and a group of journalism students visiting the Jatobá community, in the municipality of Buriti dos Montes, in the state of Piauí, where the AC’s socio-environmental actions benefit the population and the protection of the RNSA.

All of them received cisterns, the small three-burner ecological stove, and other “technologies” that reduced difficulties in their lives. “Before the cistern, we would fetch water from a public fountain about a kilometer away, carrying cans on our heads,” recalled Souza.

When she was pregnant with her daughter Maria, 11 years ago, she thought about moving away from the community where she had always lived in search of water. “Now I won’t leave here, where I was born,” she said.

The dry vegetation in December, the peak of the annual dry season, displays some resistant shrubs and trees that maintain green patches in the caatinga forests of Brazil’s Northeast region. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

The Caatinga Association adopted a comprehensive conservation model with broad participation from the local population, including in the economic benefits of work within the RNSA, such as guiding ecotourists and providing other services.

The AC’s approach is always socio-environmental, a main component in protecting the reserve and the caatinga in general, stated Miranda.

Inside the reserve, there is a modest hotel that can accommodate up to 36 people. Local tourism tends to expand due to promotion by the governments of the states of Ceará and Piauí, which share the Serra das Almas Natural Reserve.

The nearby Poti River flows through a 140-kilometer-long canyon and has become a major tourist attraction.

The reserve is a legacy of the US Johnson family, owners of the SC Johnson company, which, because it uses vegetable wax for its furniture cleaning and conservation products, imported carnauba wax, a palm abundant in Ceará, Piauí, and Rio Grande do Norte, another Northeastern state.

In 1998, the leader of the family’s fourth generation, Samuel Johnson, repeated an expedition to Ceará that his father had made in 1935 and decided to establish a Caatinga Conservation Fund, using part of his fortune. This led to the RNSA and the Caatinga Association, composed of environmental specialists in the biome.

By Mario Osava
NITERÓI, Brazil, Dec 29 2025 (IPS)

“We moved from a context of socio-environmental exclusion to one of environmental justice,” said Dionê Castro, coordinator of the Sustainable Oceanic Region Program which led Brazil’s largest nature-based solutions project.

Having won national and global awards, the Orla Piratininga Park (POP) built 35,000 square meters of filtering gardens and improved the water quality of the Piratininga lagoon, in the oceanic south of Niterói, a municipality in metropolitan Rio de Janeiro, across the Guanabara Bay.

The project, named after the late Brazilian environmentalist Alfredo Sirkis, began in 2020, and aims to environmentally restore an area of 680,000 square meters on the lagoon’s shores whose waters cover an area of 2.87 square kilometers.

At the heart of the project are the treatment systems for the waters of the Cafubá, Arrozal, and Jacaré rivers, which flow into the lagoon. Sedimentation and pollution were deteriorating the water resource and the quality of life in the surrounding area.

A weir, which receives the river flow, a sedimentation pond, which removes solid waste, and the filtering gardens make up the chain that partially cleans the water before releasing it into the lagoon, reducing environmental impacts, in a process called phytoremediation.

The gardens are small reservoirs where aquatic plants called macrophytes are planted, which feed on the nutrients from the pollution, explained Heloisa Osanai, the biologist specialized in environmental management of the Sustainable Oceanic Region Program (PRO Sustainable).

Three polluted water treatment stations are in the neighborhoods crossed by the rivers, based on natural resources, “without the use of electrical energy, chemicals, or concrete,” explained Castro, the coordinator of PRO Sustainable.

Furthermore, some macrophytes produce abundant flowers. Only native Brazilian species are planted, with priority given to biodiversity, added Osanai.

Along with these water treatment systems, 10.8 kilometers of bike paths, 17 recreation centers, a 2,800-square-meter Eco-Cultural Center, and other environmental works with social goals were built.

The bike path, generally along a pedestrian sidewalk, caters to physical and leisure activities but is also a factor in protecting the lagoon shoreline by blocking urban occupation and real estate invasions, explain the officials.

The area where the water system was built at the mouth of the Cafubá river was highly degraded by an open-air dump and flooding. A reformed “belt channel,” in some sections also reinforced by macrophyte islands, corrected the waterlogging.

On the other side of the lagoon, 3.2 kilometers of bioswales improve the drainage of rainwater. They are trenches with pipes, stones, and other materials, plus vegetation, that accelerate drainage and prevent pollutants from reaching the lagoon.

The main result, according to Castro, reconciled the local population with the lagoon. The old houses that “turned their backs on the lagoon” are joined by new buildings facing the water, some with balconies overlooking the new landscape, said Mariah Bessa, the engineer in charge of hydraulic aspects of the project.

The local population was highly involved in the design and construction of the new environmental and social facilities that transformed the lagoon shoreline. This led to new attitudes, such as not littering on the ground or in the water and preventing others from doing so, according to Castro.

The Ecocultural Center promotes permanent environmental education, with films, children’s games, audiovisual resources, and a large space for visits and classes.

“We moved from a context of socio-environmental exclusion to one of environmental justice,” said the coordinator of PRO Sustainable.

Brazil has become a major producer of ethanol, a biofuel that competes with gasoline. Monocultures of sugar cane form a monotonous landscape in the southern state of São Paulo and in the country's central-west region, but they help decarbonize transport in the country. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 22 2025 (IPS)

Quadrupling the production and use of sustainable fuels by 2035 is the goal of a new international initiative to drive energy transition and mitigate the climate crisis, which will be launched during Brazil’s climate summit in November.

The Belem Commitment on Sustainable Fuels, led by Brazil with the support of India, Italy, and Japan, awaits the support of other countries after its official launch during the so-called Climate Summit on November 6 and 7 in Belem, northern Brazil.

The meeting of heads of state and government will this time precede the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) on climate change, which will be hosted by Belem from November 10 to 21. The unusual separation between the COP and the summit aims to mitigate the accommodation problems of the Amazonian city.

The commitment, nicknamed “Belem 4x,” is based on a report by the International Energy Agency that points to the possibility of quadrupling the volume, adding new alternatives such as green hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), and shipping and synthetic fuels to ethanol and biodiesel.

At COP28, held in 2023 in Dubai, it was agreed to initiate “a transition away from fossil fuels” as an indispensable measure to contain global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In Belem, the goal is to implement that consensual decision.

“Brazil was careful not to limit the initiative to biofuels in order to include various sustainable fuels, an important distinction because there are countries, especially in Europe, that oppose biofuels,” warned Claudio Angelo, international policy coordinator for Climate Observatory, a Brazilian coalition of 133 social organizations.

Objections to biofuels include potential environmental damage, land conflicts, and competition with food production, he said by phone to IPS from Brasilia.

Extensive cattle ranching has degraded 100 million hectares in Brazil. One third of this area can be recovered for the cultivation of sugar cane, corn, and oilseeds to double biofuel production, according to a study by the Institute for Energy and Environment. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Biofuels market

It is an old Brazilian dream to create a large international biofuels market, due to its large ethanol production and its potential to expand it.

Brazil tried, unsuccessfully, to promote this market in the 1990s and early 21^st century, based on the existence of many sugar cane producing countries, the crop with the highest productivity for this biofuel.

Cuba, once the world’s largest sugar exporter, rejected the proposal with the argument of prioritizing food, despite the decline of its sugar industry and its lack of energy, due to its dependence on imported oil, which became scarce after the fall of the Soviet Union, its major supplier, in 1991.

Brazil became the largest sugar exporter in the mid-1990s, two decades after launching its National Alcohol Program to replace part of its gasoline with ethanol.

It sought to mitigate the economic crisis caused by the rising oil prices, which tripled in 1973 and doubled again in 1979. At that time, the country imported about 80% of the crude oil it consumed; today it exports oil and ethanol.

Many countries use ethanol, blended into gasoline, as a way to reduce pollution. In Brazil, the blend already reaches 30%, and pure ethanol is also used as automotive fuel.

But most passenger cars in the country today are “flex,” consuming gasoline or ethanol and blends in any proportion.

In 2023, the Global Biofuels Alliance was born in New Delhi during the annual summit of the Group of 20 (G20) most relevant industrial and emerging economies, in a new attempt to promote its production.

The City Park, under construction in January, in the Amazonian city of Belem, which will host the debates and negotiations among government delegations and the United Nations at COP30, from November 10 to 21. Credit: Rafa Neddermeyer / COP30

Ambitious goal

Now, at COP30, the aim is to expand the attempt to replace fossil fuels with an ambitious goal: to quadruple the current production of alternative fuels within 10 years.

This follows the path charted at COP28, held in Dubai in 2023, where it was agreed to initiate “a transition away from fossil fuels” as an indispensable measure to contain global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In Belem, the goal is to implement that consensual decision.

Currently, this production, basically of biofuels, reaches 175 billion liters, about two-thirds ethanol and one-third biodiesel. The United States surpasses Brazil as the largest producer.

Brazil produced 36.8 billion liters of ethanol and 9.07 billion liters of biodiesel in 2024. In recent years, production of corn-based ethanol has grown, utilizing the surplus of this grain in the country’s central-west region. Its share is already close to 20% of the total.

A study by the Institute for Energy and Environment (Iema), released on October 9, states that Brazil will be able to double this production by 2050 without deforesting new areas. The utilization of degraded pastureland would be sufficient to achieve the goal.

The country has about 100 million hectares of such pastureland, almost entirely abandoned. This is equivalent to twice the territory of Spain and is set to increase, as Brazil has 238 million cattle, far exceeding its 213 million human inhabitants.

From this total, the cultivation aimed at doubling biofuels could occupy 25 to 30 million hectares. Plenty of land would remain for the expansion of food agriculture, emphasized Felipe Barcellos e Silva, a researcher at Iema and author of the study.

According to his calculations, a portion of the pastureland would be allocated to reforestation for biome restoration and environmental protection areas, another part to the recovery of the pasturelands themselves for more productive cattle ranching.

Between 55 and 60 million hectares would remain for energy and food agriculture, with about half for each.

The area for biofuels would vary depending on the choice for more biodiesel, which requires the cultivation of oilseeds, or more ethanol, in which case expanding the area of sugar cane or corn.

The alternatives comprise six scenarios that combine priorities for different raw materials and the option to produce other fuels, such as SAF and green diesel, which is different from biodiesel.

Soy is another monoculture that occupies vast expanses of land in central-western and southern Brazil. Its oil fuels the biodiesel industry by offering surpluses at a low price, since soybean bran is the most in-demand byproduct for livestock feed. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Persistent alternatives

“Biodiesel has a problem because it is a degradable organic compound,” unstable, while green diesel is a product of the same vegetable oil but subjected to hydrotreatment and has “physicochemical properties similar to mineral diesel,” explained Roberto Kishinami, a physicist and strategic specialist at the non-governmental Institute for Climate and Society.

Green diesel, he assured, fully replaces fossil diesel without damaging vehicles and has the advantage of emitting fewer urban pollutants than biodiesel, such as fine particulate matter, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxide.

“The dozens of biodiesel plants (installed in Brazil) will disappear at some point. They were a temporary solution, favored by the soybean oil surplus, when soybean bran had growing demand,” as livestock feed, Kishinami told IPS by phone from São Paulo.

In his assessment, the energy transition and the decarbonization of transport and industry need sustainable fuels, since electrification is not economically viable for all activities. A combination of the two solutions will have to prevail.

The creation of an international market for these fuels, especially biofuels, depends on standardizing norms and patterns worldwide, a difficult task especially given the rigid European demands.

Furthermore, it faces geopolitical issues, such as “the US-China trade war that will dominate the coming decades,” concluded Kishinami.

Biofuel production in Brazil is growing not only through the expansion of crops but also through technological advances and the utilization of waste.

Second-generation ethanol is already being produced from cane straw, and biomethane, which is equivalent to natural gas, is produced through the biodigestion of vinasse generated in ethanol production, noted Silva.

There is also the beginning of cultivation of the macauba palm (Acrocomia aculeata), which has different names in Latin America and has high oil productivity.

Electrification will take time. It is relatively fast for light vehicles but slow for heavy vehicles, whose useful life reaches about 20 years. This is where decarbonization is achieved through biofuels, argued Silva.

“The transition in transport will continue until at least 2050,” after which biofuels will be able to meet other demands, including power generation, he concluded in a telephone interview with IPS from São Paulo.

The commitment to quadruple sustainable fuels is positive, but it cannot in “any way” dominate the energy debate at COP30, warned Angelo.

“The success of COP30 depends on promoting the implementation of a just, orderly, and equitable transition to eliminate fossil fuels, which are the main cause of global warming,” he concluded.

The complexity of the Brazilian electricity system has evolved from a model based on hydroelectricity supplemented by thermoelectricity to a combination of diverse sources, without planning and with little control, whose excess intermittent generation threatens to cause blackouts. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 25 2025 (IPS)

Wind and solar power sources, essential for the energy transition to mitigate the climate crisis, have become a risk of power outages in Brazil.

It is a remedy that, in excess, becomes poison. The rapid and unplanned growth of these alternatives has created operational difficulties for the Brazilian electricity system, which is nationally interconnected.“Brazil has one of the most complex electricity systems in the world. No other country has such a diversity of sources”–Luiz Barata.

A blackout on August 15, 2023, which affected 27% of the supply throughout most of the country, was a major wake-up call about insecurity. It began with the transmission of wind and solar power plants in the state of Ceará, in northeastern Brazil.

It almost happened again in April and August of this year due to excess generation, according to the  National System Operator (ONS), a private organization that represents consumers and all sectors involved, which coordinates and controls supply nationwide.

A functional electrical system requires surpluses; energy must be available at all outlets for eventual consumption. But “too much excess causes problems,” said Luiz Barata, former director general of the ONS and current president of the non-governmental National Front of Energy Consumers.

The proliferation of solar and wind power plants in Brazil has created imbalances between supply and consumption that caused operational difficulties in effective distribution, such as power outages in 25 of Brazil’s 26 states on August 15, 2023. Credit: Fotos Públicas

Renewables in question

The intermittent nature of wind and solar power, which have grown the most in the last decade, exacerbates the risks due to their uncontrollable origin. This type of energy depends on nature, on when there is wind and sun.

The plot thickens with distributed generation, also known as decentralized generation, which turns consumers into producers of their own electricity in 3.8 million residential micro-plants or groups of individuals or small businesses.

This dispersed generation already exceeds 43 gigawatts of power, according to data from the National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel), the sector’s regulatory body.

This amounts to 18% of the country’s total generating capacity, with solar photovoltaic power dominating the segment with a 95% share.

“In addition to being uncontrollable, because it depends on the sun, distributed generation cannot be interrupted, as it is beyond the control of the ONS,” warned Barata, an electrical engineer.

What the ONS does is curtail the contribution of some generating sources when excess supply threatens the system. In general, the interruption affects wind and solar generation, which are further away from the area of highest consumption.

The Northeast, favored by strong and regular winds and solar radiation, concentrates most of these sources, while the highest electricity consumption occurs in the Southeast, Brazil’s most populous and industrialized region.

Wind farms occupy hills and mountains throughout the Northeast region of Brazil, which has become a supplier of electricity for the entire country. The intermittency of this source, with generation concentrated at night, contributed to the risk of blackouts in the country. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Uncertain future

The trend is for operational problems in the electricity system to worsen because distributed generation continues to expand, due to the legal incentives it enjoys, and without planning, as it is the result of individual decisions.

From January to August 2025, the ONS discarded 17.2% of the country’s potential wind and solar generation, which corresponds to 7% of the country’s monthly consumption. This tripled the cuts compared to the same period in 2024, according to an analysis by Volt Robotics, an energy consulting firm.

In August, the rejection reached 57% of new renewable generation due to excess supply.

“Brazil has one of the most complex electricity systems in the world. No other country has the diversity of sources that we have,” Barata told IPS by telephone from Brasilia.

Of a total of 236 gigawatts of installed capacity at the end of 2024, hydroelectricity continues to account for a majority, with 46.5% of the total, according to the state-owned Energy Research Company. But it is no longer as dominant as it was in 2000, when it accounted for 89%.

Solar energy, with 20.5%, wind energy with 12.5% and thermal energy, which consumes fossil fuels and biomass, with 18.6%, already exceeded hydroelectricity in 2024, with a trend towards further growth.

Necessary reform

There has been a change in the electricity matrix, which has shifted from hydrothermal, basically hydroelectric and supplemented by thermal power plants, to a growing incorporation of new renewable sources, given the lower cost of their implementation and distributed generation, Barata pointed out.

However, legislation and regulations have not kept pace with this transformation, said the expert, who believes the sector needs a comprehensive structural reform in order to reduce risks and restore better operating and planning conditions.

“It is a complex system that cannot be solved with simple measures,” he said.

Joilson Costa, coordinator of the non-governmental Front for a New Energy Policy for Brazil and also an electrical engineer, considers it “incorrect” to attribute systemic risks solely to excess wind and solar generation.

“Excess supply is only part of the problem, not the only one. Another cause is the deficiency of the transmission system, which makes it impossible to transport the energy generated in the Northeast to other regions at certain times. This then necessitates a cut in generation,” he argued.

Nor can it be said that distributed generation is outside the scope of planning. The Energy Research Company, part of the Ministry of Mines and Energy, does consider this modality in its plans because “its studies and simulations allow it to make estimates,” even though it cannot control the expansion of microplants, Costa noted.

Electricity distribution companies also monitor the evolution of distributed generation in their networks and can update their data monthly, he told IPS by telephone from São Luis, capital of the northeastern state of Maranhão.

Distributed generation, which is small-scale and generally consists of photovoltaic panels on residential or commercial roofs, already accounts for 43 gigawatts of installed capacity in Brazil. There are 3.8 million plants benefiting seven million consumer units, without the necessary control over the operation of the national electricity system. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Daily asynchrony

The major risk factor, however, is the lack of synchrony between the generation and consumption of new sources of electricity in their daily cycles.

Solar generation occurs during the day, peaking around noon, when consumption is low. It declines just as consumption increases at the end of the day and beginning of the night, when lights and household appliances are turned on, especially electric showers, which are widely used in Brazil.

Wind farms, concentrated in the Northeast, generate electricity mainly late at night, when consumption drops again.

Pericles Pinheiro, director of New Business at CHP, a gas generation equipment and solutions company in Rio de Janeiro, identifies a trend toward crisis in the Brazilian electricity system in his ongoing analysis of the sector. “Every summer, new emotions,” he jokes.

In previous years, he identified a risk in the proliferation of diesel generators that many companies used to avoid the higher cost of electricity during peak consumption hours in the early evening.

But they abandoned this resource because they migrated to the free market, which has expanded in Brazil in recent years, lowering energy costs for large consumers by allowing them to choose their supplier.

Diesel generators, which helped reduce the upward curve of consumption during peak hours, disappeared or declined, exacerbating daily fluctuations in demand, in cycles opposite to those of wind and solar sources, Pinheiro told IPS.

Distributed generation reduces demand on the grid and the share of electricity managed by the system operator, in a trend that exacerbates insecurity, he added.

The ONS estimates that by 2029 it will control less than half of the country’s installed generation capacity, increasing the operational uncertainty of the national interconnected system.

The proliferation of digital data centers in Brazil, which the government is trying to promote, is seen as a way to balance electricity consumption and supply in the country.

But these huge energy sinks would consume the excess during the day but increase demand at night, as they operate 24 hours a day, warned Pinheiro, who identifies another risk in electric vehicles whose batteries consume the electricity of several homes when recharging.

The turbines in a wind farm, like this one in the Northeast region of Brazil, contain magnets made from rare earths in their generators. This makes rare earths, which Brazil has in abundance, indispensable for both decarbonized electricity generation and the development of electric motors in the automotive sector and others. Credit: Fotos Públicas

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 27 2025 (IPS)

Brazil, which stands out for exporting basic products such as iron ore, oil, coffee, and soybeans, rather than industrialized goods with higher added value, now intends to make a shift regarding rare earths, a key component in new technologies that it has in abundance.

Brazil is the second country in reserves of this natural resource, estimated at 21 million tons, surpassed only by China, with 44 million tons, explained Julio Nery, director of Mining Affairs at the  Brazilian Mining Institute (Ibram). Together, the two countries account for about two-thirds of the total."The critical phase of processing which adds the most value is the separation of the rare earth elements, with high costs due to numerous and successive treatments, not so much because of the technology" –Fernando Landgraf.

But Brazil is only just beginning to exploit this wealth on a large scale, while China practically holds a monopoly on its refining, about 90% of the world total, to supply its own electronics industry, electric vehicles, wind turbines, and many other equipment, as well as the industry of almost the entire world.

Rare earths have become the new mining and technological fever, due to the accelerated growth in their demand and, now, due to the trade war unleashed by the United States under the presidency of Donald Trump.

China’s threat to condition the exports of its rare earth chemical elements forced Trump to backtrack on his escalation of additional tariffs against its biggest economic rival, which reached 145% in April, and to enter into negotiations that continue with the tariff reduced to 30%.

Rare earths get their name not because of their scarcity, as they exist in many places, but because of their physical properties, such as magnetism, which are indeed limited, explained Nery to IPS, by phone from Brasilia, about this sector comprised of 17 chemical elements that also have other unique properties such as electrochemical and luminescent ones.

Geopolitical disputes tend to accentuate a movement by many countries to reduce their dependence on China’s rare earths.

Launch of the MagBras project to develop the entire rare earth chain in Brazil, from mining to permanent magnets, key components of electric motors, wind turbines, and numerous electronic products, on July 14, 2025, at the laboratory and factory that will serve the project, near Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state of Minas Gerais. Credit: Sebastião Jacinto Junior / Fiemg

Adding value

In Brazil, an alliance of 38 companies, scientific institutions, and development foundations, driven by the Federation of Industries of the State of Minas Gerais (Fiemg), through its arm of the National Service for Industrial Training, aims to develop the entire rare earth chain, “from mining to the permanent magnet.”

That magnet, which contains four of the 17 rare earth chemical elements, is the derivative with the highest added value due to its now indispensable use in electric motors, cell phones, many electronic devices, wind turbines, and defense and space technologies.

This will be the focus of the project called MagBras, as the Industrial Demonstrator for the complete production cycle of Brazilian rare earth permanent magnets was named and officially launched on July 14 in Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state of Minas Gerais.

The goal is to unite industry with universities and research centers so that Brazil does not continue primarily as a major exporter of raw materials, without added value, as is the case with coffee, iron, oil, and soybeans.

Rare earth processing technology was developed decades ago in many countries, which abandoned the activity in the face of China’s low-cost production, recalled André Pimenta, who leads the project as coordinator of the Rare Earths Institute of Fiemg.

Some of the 17 chemical elements of rare earths, critical for the future and whose demand is projected to multiply 30 times in the coming decades. After China, Brazil is the second country with the largest estimated reserves of these rare earths, for which a geostrategic and geopolitical battle has already begun. Credit: Icog

Better deposits

In addition to having large ionic clay deposits, which have advantages over the rocky ones in other countries, the scale of production and the scant or non-existent environmental requirements contributed to China’s advance towards a near monopoly, he noted.

Brazil has similar areas of ionic clay, a factor that, with the advancement of technologies, favors the country’s potential to emerge as an alternative producer with the possibility to compete, even if it is “difficult or even impossible” to surpass China, acknowledged the chemist Pimenta in a telephone interview with IPS from Belo Horizonte.

MagBras has a laboratory in facilities originally designed for a factory with the capacity to produce 100 tons of magnets per year, the only one existing in the southern hemisphere, which will serve for research and even production on that limited scale.

Nery, from Ibram, warns of the risk of focusing on a single resource to the detriment of the set of critical minerals, which in addition to rare earths includes lithium, cobalt, nickel, among others. These are scarce products.

There was already enthusiasm for lithium, due to the increased demand for cell phone and electric vehicle batteries; a few years earlier the same thing happened with niobium, he recalls.

“Technologies change and alter priorities,” he warned. That is why it is necessary to define a policy to promote the 22 critical and strategic minerals, with defined and flexible priorities.

The production of electric cars in Brazil has gained momentum in 2025, which will increase the demand for magnets, intended to be manufactured in Brazil with the rare earths abundant in some regions of the country. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Set of factors

Furthermore, value-added projects require a broad view of the different factors that affect the entire chain. Adequate infrastructure, with good roads, availability of energy, and sufficient demand for the chosen products are indispensable for success, he exemplified.

“Do we have firm demand for permanent magnets? The products that incorporate them, such as batteries, electric car motors, and wind turbines, are currently imported,” Nery pointed out.

In his opinion, “the government must promote conditions to generate internal demand, in a general effort, since industrial participation in the Brazilian economy has greatly reduced in recent decades.”

Research centers have already developed solutions for refining rare earths, the most costly process, but doing it on an industrial scale will require a lot of investment and time, according to Nery, a mining engineer.

In mining, any project takes at least five years in geological research, environmental licensing procedures, and operational preparation, he noted.

Brazil, which in the past sought rare earths in monazite, which is unfavorable because it contains radioactive material, now concentrates its extraction on ionic clay, which is better. “Its deposits are superficial, which facilitates research and limits environmental impacts,” he pointed out.

A concrete experience with this type of soil is that of Serra Verde, a company owned by two US investment funds and one British fund, with a plant in Minaçu, in the state of Goiás, in central-western Brazil.

It began operations in 2024 and has already exported US$7.5 million to China this year, according to Nery. It produces the oxide concentrate, a first step in processing, which enriches and increases the rare earth content index in the clay, which in the soil is only 0.12%, according to Serra Verde.

A positive note is that its concentrate contains the most in-demand elements because they are used to make permanent magnets: the light ones neodymium and praseodymium, in addition to the heavy ones dysprosium and terbium. The heavy ones are rarer and less present in rocky or monazite deposits.

But Serra Verde’s goal of producing 5,000 tons of concentrate per year and doubling that amount by 2030 seems distant. In the first half of 2025, it only exported 480 tons, it was revealed, as the company does not disclose its data.

Also in the state of Goiás, the current Brazilian epicenter of rare earths, another project, the Carina Module, by the Canadian company Aclara Resources, expects to extract mainly dysprosium and terbium starting in 2026, with investments of US$600 million.

“The critical phase of processing and the one that adds the most value is the separation of the rare earth elements, with high costs due to numerous and successive treatments, not so much because of the technology,” said Fernando Landgraf, an engineer and professor at the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo.

One kilogram of neodymium oxide, present in these heavy rare earths, is worth at least 10 times more than the five dollars for a kilogram of concentrate, he said by telephone from São Paulo.

Mining company Serra Verde, in Minaçu, state of Goiás, where the extraction of rare earths began, which, in an initial processing, were concentrated and exported to China. They contain four of the 17 rare earth elements used to produce permanent magnets, key components of electric motors, wind turbines, and military and space equipment. Credit: Serra Verde

The threat of uncertainty

In his assessment, “the biggest risk of the business is the uncertainty about the future,” especially now that rare earths have become a target and a weapon of geopolitics.

The demand for rare earths will grow significantly, but a large increase in production in the United States could lead to an oversupply. It is a limited market, far from the volumes of other minerals, such as iron ore.

“Uncertainty does not justify sitting idly by. Demand will grow, and the movement to reduce dependence began earlier, during the pandemic, which left many without essential respirators and medical equipment because there was nowhere to import from. It is a one-way street,” stated Pimenta.

Geologist Nilson Botelho, a professor at the University of Brasilia, considers the estimate of Brazil’s reserves to be reliable. Mining in Goiás is successful because it contains heavy rare earths, the “most critical” ones, which are among the “four or five most valuable elements.”

But there are many deposits in other parts of Brazil. In addition to the geological formation of its very extensive territory of over 8.5 million square kilometers, the temperate tropical climate, rainfall that infiltrates the soil, and the high plateau favor the presence of rare earths, he explained to IPS from Brasilia.

Another geologist, Silas Gonçalves, opposes the idea that mining in ionic clay has fewer environmental impacts.

Mining there alters the landscape and the soil, causes deforestation and diffuse damage, such as changes and contamination of the water table. These are different impacts, not lesser ones, he argued to IPS from Goiânia, the capital of Goiás, where he runs his geological and environmental studies company, called Gemma.

The mega-ship BYD Shenzhen arrived on May 28 at the port of Itajaí in southern Brazil, carrying 7,292 electric vehicles from the Chinese company BYD. It set a record for this type of transport, with unloading taking four days. Credit: Porto de Itajaí

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 7 2025 (IPS)

Residents near the port of Itajaí in southern Brazil celebrated the arrival of 7,292 electric and hybrid vehicles from China aboard the ship BYD Shenzhen on May 28 as a “historic event,” with unloading taking four days. 

It was a record in maritime vehicle transport, but similar operations had already occurred in Brazil and other Latin American countries. A year earlier, the port of Suape in northeastern Brazil received 5,459 units also from BYD, the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer."China has been pivotal... Beyond providing more affordable vehicles, its technological leadership and mass production capacity have shaped global trends." —Cristóbal Sarmiento.

China’s automotive industry, led by BYD, is the decisive factor driving electric mobility in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Over the past four years, the number of light electric vehicles in the region has nearly doubled annually, with a 187% jump in 2024, reaching 444,071 by the end of December, according to the Latin American Energy Organization (Olade), whose data excludes non-plug-in hybrids.

This is relatively small, representing only 0.7% of the world’s electric vehicle fleet and 0.3% of the region’s total light vehicles, as noted in Olade’s technical report in May. But it signals great expansion potential, now being fueled by Chinese vehicles.

Lower prices and improving quality make Chinese units competitive amid growing demand for transport electrification in the region, according to Fitzgerald Cantero, Director of Studies, Projects, and Information at Olade.

With their exports to the U.S. and the European Union (EU) practically blocked by 100% and 45.3% tariffs, respectively, Chinese electric vehicles see Latin America as “an attractive market” that remains open, along with Asia, he reasoned.

Industrial Hub of Camaçari in Bahia, northeastern Brazil, where BYD built its plant for producing electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, batteries, and auto parts. Spanning 460 hectares, it allows for expansions to double production to 300,000 vehicles per year. Part of the facilities were purchased from U.S. automaker Ford, which left the country. Credit: BYD

Renewable Energy and Lithium as Attractions 

An additional Latin American attraction is its abundance of renewable energy, Cantero told IPS by phone from Quito, Olade’s headquarters. Using sustainable electricity is essential to meet the goal of decarbonizing transport and reducing planet-warming emissions.

Moreover, some countries in the region are rich in minerals needed for vehicle electrification, such as lithium for batteries, copper for electrical components, and rare earths containing 17 chemical elements used in magnets for electric car motors, wind turbines, and other strategic technologies.

Thus, the region has become a priority for China, the automotive superpower where 12.87 million electric passenger vehicles were sold in 2024, plus 2.2 million exported—figures close to half of all new cars sold domestically and abroad, according to data compiled by Olade.

China’s leadership is more than absolute, as the next powers—the EU and the U.S.—produced only 2.4 million and 1.1 million electric vehicles, respectively, in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency.

Olade estimates that China accounted for over 75% of global electric vehicle sales. This share is likely to grow, as the European market has stagnated and the U.S. has rolled back its environmental policies.

“The (U.S.) electric vehicle industry has been discouraged by new legislation, which will have a dramatic impact on consumer preferences,” said Margaret Myers, director of the Asia and Latin America Program at the Inter-American Dialogue.

Meanwhile, China is boosting exports of its production surplus, particularly to Global South markets with fewer import restrictions, she noted.

For China, “electric vehicle production is part of a broader effort to improve its economy and secure dominance in key industries, including EVs and their batteries, renewable energy, artificial intelligence, bioscience, and other priorities,” Myers concluded to IPS from Washington.

Electric trucks made in China at the second edition of the International Chinese Auto Expo, held from July 24 to 27 at an events center in Santiago, Chile. These cargo vehicles began operating in large mining facilities and urban areas in Chile and are now becoming more widespread nationwide. Credit: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Large Markets Concentrate Sales 

For now, Latin America remains a net importer. Brazil and Mexico are the largest markets, accounting for 73.6% of electrified vehicle sales (including fully electric, plug-in hybrid, and non-plug-in hybrid models) in the region, according to data from the Latin American Association of Automotive Distributors (Aladda), headquartered in Buenos Aires.

Their share of the population is much smaller. Brazil, with 212 million people, and Mexico, with 130 million, make up just 51.2% of Latin America and the Caribbean’s 668 million inhabitants.

Argentina, in fourth place with 47 million people, does not rank among the top eight in motor transport electrification. Colombia, the third most populous with 53 million, is also third in Aladda’s ranking.

Colombia and Chile lead in electric buses, with 1,590 and 2,600 operating in their cities as of December 2024, respectively, according to Olade. Brazil, despite its much larger population, has only 900—far fewer than Chile, a country of just 18.5 million people.

A Chinese electric vehicle charges its battery at a dealership in south-central Mexico City. Sales of Chinese-made electric vehicles have grown in this Latin American country due to their lower prices compared to Western brands and financing options. Credit: Emilio Godoy / IPS

Three Waves

“The evolution of electromobility in Chile had its first wave between 2017 and 2020, focused on public transportation—specifically electric bus systems,” recalled Cristóbal Sarmiento Laurel, Director of Energy and Sustainable Development at the private Diego Portales University.

The goal was to introduce the new technology in a “more feasible way, since buses operate on controlled routes and schedules, making charging planning easier,” he explained. BYD was the key player in this phase.

The second wave, starting in 2021, saw a “steady rise in sales of light hybrid and fully electric vehicles, with growing market presence from Chinese manufacturers like BYD, Maxus, JA, DFSK, and Changan, which quickly gained ground in the domestic market,” he added.

“China has been pivotal in this journey. Beyond providing more affordable vehicles, its technological leadership and mass production capacity have shaped global trends. For Chile, this relationship isn’t just a commercial opportunity but also a concrete way to accelerate the energy transition,” Sarmiento emphasized.

“Transport accounts for 33.3% of Chile’s energy consumption, according to the National Energy Balance, and relies almost entirely on fossil fuels”, therefore, electrification helps mitigate climate change, Sarmiento told IPS in Santiago.

“Not using fossil fuels is a solution,” but electrified cars “promote individual mobility rather than transforming transportation systems or boosting public transit,” noted Antonio del Río, a researcher at the Renewable Energy Institute of Mexico’s National Autonomous University.

More electric buses—whether Chinese or from other origins—are the way forward, he argued. “The cost per kilometer for an electric vehicle is 60% lower than a conventional car,” he said to IPS in Mexico City.

By the end of 2024, Mexico had only 780 electric buses, according to Olade data—half as many as Colombia, or a quarter per capita.

Assembly line of electric and hybrid vehicles at BYD’s Camaçari plant in northeastern Brazil, which will initially produce 150,000 vehicles annually with potential to double output. The electric vehicle market has grown rapidly in Brazil and Latin America over the past four years. With mass domestic production, Brazil could become an export hub for these advanced-technology vehicles. Credit: BYD

Mexico mirrored the region’s surge in electrified vehicle sales, which reached 412,493 units in 2024, up 174.9% from 2022, according to Aladda. Brazil led growth among major countries with a 256.2% increase, while Mexico saw 142.2%.

Despite the sharp rise, electrified vehicles still represent a small share of total sales: 8.1% regionally on average, 6.8% in Brazil, and 6.1% in Chile in 2024. Colombia stands out at 25.8%.

The most dramatic two-year growth—665.3% regionally—was in plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), followed by pure electric vehicles (EVs) at 403%. Non-plug-in hybrids (HEVs) lost momentum in Brazil but grew in Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Peru, especially in 2024.

Another notable trend is the diversity of Chinese brands—23 in both Mexico and Chile. Chile has 52 brands total, including Chinese and others, according to Rodrigo Salcedo, president of Chile’s  Electric Vehicle Trade Association (Avec).

The influx of new brands has heightened competition, bringing more options, models, and prices that are gradually approaching those of conventional cars. However, “there’s a gap,” lamented Salcedo, pointing to the lack of information, workshops, and trained technicians for maintenance—except for buses, which benefit from Chinese technicians in Chile.

BYD cars for sale and test drives at an Itavema dealership, a BYD sales network, in Botafogo, a traditional middle-class neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Third Wave 

Meanwhile, a third wave of electric mobility is emerging in the region, following the initial phases of electric buses and the mass availability of light vehicles at falling prices. This new phase involves the establishment of assembly plants, including Chinese ones.

In Brazil, two Chinese automakers have begun local production of electrified vehicles. BYD (short for Build Your Dreams) started production in July at its assembly plant in Camaçari, Bahia, rolling out three models—one fully electric and two plug-in hybrids. And GWM (Great Wall Motors) is set to begin production this semester in Iracemápolis, São Paulo.

Symbolically, both manufacturers took over former plants of traditional automakers—Ford (U.S.) and Mercedes-Benz (Germany), respectively.

While Chinese-branded cars have been produced in Brazil since 2017 (such as those from the Caoa-Chery joint venture in Anápolis, Goiás), their electrified models, introduced in 2019, were limited in volume.

BYD’s plant marks a new era, designed to assemble 150,000 units annually initially, with plans to double that capacity. The project also includes battery and auto parts production, along with a logistics system, explained Mauro Pereira, general superintendent of Camaçari’s Industrial Development Committee (Cofic).

Cofic manages the Camaçari Industrial Park to create the best operating conditions for 88 local companies, including BYD.

“BYD is putting Brazil at the forefront of vehicle technology,” Pereira stated, anticipating 20,000 direct jobs and triple that in indirect employment. The plant could also turn Brazil into an export hub for vehicles and components, including batteries, to Latin America and possibly Europe.

The Camaçari plant benefited from land incentives and tax breaks, but the real driver was Brazil’s import tariffs on electric vehicles, introduced in January 2024. Starting at 10% (slightly higher for hybrids), they will gradually rise to 35% by 2027.

Chinese new-energy vehicles are cutting costs with advanced, efficient, and intelligent technologies—”they’re smartphones on wheels,” said Thiago Sugahara, VP of the Brazilian Electric Vehicle Association and GWM’s institutional relations manager. Users can control and monitor their cars remotely and safely via smartphone, he explained.

“An electric car is a battery with four wheels,” quipped Ana Lia Rojas, head of Chile’s Renewable Energy and Storage Association (Acera), highlighting both the vehicle’s key component —still  costly—,  and their potential to support power grids.

Colbert Marques, a sales consultant at Itavema (a BYD dealership network), noted that Chinese manufacturers halved EV prices. Today, models start at just over US$20,000, forcing Western brands to slash prices to stay competitive.

Buyers of EVs and hybrids “are more informed and tech-savvy, even older ones,” he observed, confident in his decision to switch to BYD in 2023, having driven traditional vehicles for 18 years.

With contributions from Orlando Milesi (Chile) and Emilio Godoy (Mexico)

Community orchard in Ribeirão, a neighbourhood in Florianopolis, the capital of the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. There are more than 150 such orchards in the city, which serve as a final destination for the compost produced from their organic waste. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
FLORIANOPOLIS, Brazil, Jun 26 2025 (IPS)

Living with her neighbours, getting to know them and chatting with them is what Lucila Neves enjoys most in the community orchard of Portal de Ribeirão, a neighbourhood in the south of Florianopolis, considered the most sustainable of Brazil’s 27 state capitals.

The biodegradable packaging entrepreneur chose to live in the capital of the southern state of Santa Catarina, where she came from Ribeirão Preto, 950 kilometres to the north.

She is one of the people who voluntarily take care of the huge variety of vegetables, medicinal plants and fruit trees planted on about 1000 square metres.

The neighbourhood’s residents accepted the planting started 15 months ago, because it cleaned up the area where a private company used to compost organic waste for the municipality, without the necessary care.

Gone are the mice, mosquitoes, cockroaches and the bad smell that had infested the place, said biologist Bruna do Nascimento Koti, a primary school teacher and permanent volunteer in the garden, where she was together with Neves on the day IPS visited the space.

Now the state-owned Capital Improvement Company (Comcap) also makes clean compost there, with organic waste collected by the population in closed plastic buckets distributed by the Florianopolis city government.

In addition to providing inexpensive and healthy vegetables without agrochemicals, the orchard promotes conviviality, with a Thursday tea gathering and sometimes collective cultivation on Saturdays, Koti said.

Bruna do Nascimento Koti is one of the volunteers who tends the garden at Portal de Ribeirão, in the south of the Brazilian city of Florianopolis, where community life is promoted and healthy food is provided to neighbours and volunteer gardeners. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

The Florianopolis municipality has chosen composting and recycling as the main alternatives for managing the solid waste generated by the city’s 537 000 people, to which many tourists and seasonal residents are added during the southern summer.

It is estimated that of the 700 tonnes of daily waste, 43% is dry recyclable waste and 35% organic waste, the use of which is to be increased in order to reduce the proportion of waste destined for landfill. There is 22% of non-recyclable waste left over.

Currently only 13% of the total is recycled, while the remaining 87% goes to the landfill in the neighbouring municipality of Biguaçu, 45 kilometres from Florianopolis, which receives waste from 23 cities, Karina de Souza, director of solid waste at the Florianopolis Secretariat of Environment and Sustainable Development, told IPS.

But official statistics point to significant progress. Food waste used in composting increased more than four times, from 1175 tonnes in 2020 to 5126 tonnes in 2024, according to Souza’s records.

Green organics, as waste from tree pruning and other vegetation is called, more than doubled during that period. Glass also increased by a factor of 2.5 and materials that arrive mixed and go through separation before recycling almost quadrupled.

The ‘Zero Waste’ programme adopted by the mayor’s office in 2018 sets a target of recycling 60% of dry waste and 90% of organic waste by 2030, a goal that seems far off.

Waste already separated for recycling, in this case glass. Tyres, plastics and cardboard are other materials collected for recycling at the Waste Recovery Centre near the city centre of Florianopolis in southern Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Waste has value

The Comcap Waste Recovery Centre, located in the Itacorubi neighbourhood, near the city centre and next to the Botanical Garden, is at the heart of the municipal policy to solve the waste challenge.

It concentrates the city’s large composting yard, a central facility for separating recyclable waste and another for transferring disposable waste and compacting it into larger trucks for transport to the landfill.

It also includes a Waste Museum, especially for environmental education, and an ecopoint where residents deposit their recyclable waste, such as wood, electronics, paper, plastics and glass.

There are nine ecopoints distributed throughout the city, which receive around 11 000 tonnes of recyclable waste per year for sorting and handling.

This waste, also collected from other sources, is transferred to warehouses where glass, packaging cartons, corrugated paper, plastics and tyres are collected separately for recycling. But they arrive mixed with rubbish and have to go through human separation and sorting, called triage.

This is the area of the Association of Collectors of Recyclable Material, which, hired by Comcap, separates the waste for the buyers, generally the recycling industry.

Of the 75 members, about 40% are immigrants, mostly Venezuelans, but also Peruvians, Haitians and Colombians, according to Volmir dos Santos, the association’s president, during IPS’ visit to the facility.

Founded in 1999, the group was initially made up of street waste collectors. With the advance of municipal management, selective collection in residences, industries and commerce, in addition to the ecopoints, they became ‘triadores’, those who separate, classify and sell the waste ready for recycling.

“We suffered prejudice, discrimination and shame, now we gain respect,” Dos Santos celebrated.

Two young Venezuelans who immigrated to Brazil and found employment at the Waste Valorisation Centre in Florianopolis. Haitian and Peruvian migrants also work at the facility. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

No incineration of waste

But the broad movement of recycling workers, from various associations and cooperatives, seeks to influence municipal plans. It opposes, for example, the burning of non-recyclable waste for energy generation, an alternative that is growing among industrial countries.

There are at least 3035 solid waste combustion plants in the world, known as Waste-to-Energy, said Yuri Schmitke, president of the Brazilian Association of Energy from Waste (Abren), which brings together 28 companies in the sector.

It is the way to achieve the goal of ‘zero waste’ or the elimination of landfills, since recycling has limits –there is always a percentage that cannot be reused and incineration replaces fossil fuels, he argued.

Countries such as Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Nordic European nations have managed to use 100% of their waste, he said, by eliminating these landfills or final solid waste deposits.

Restrictions and allegations of environmental and even sanitary damage have been dispelled in several European countries, Japan and Korea, with the implementation of these plants even in central parts of large cities, without such negative effects, he pointed out.

Paris already has three of them in its so-called extended city centre, where the population density reaches 15 000 people per square kilometre, he said.

“Incineration puts an end to the cycle, it excludes recycling definitively, and Brazil is very different from Europe, it has already had failed experiences,” countered Dorival Rodrigues dos Santos, president of the Federation of Associations and Cooperatives of Waste Pickers of Santa Catarina, which claims to represent 28,000 workers.

It calls for a broad debate between technicians and collectors on the subject, given that this alternative is beginning to gain followers in Brazil. The municipality of Joinville, with 616 000 inhabitants and 170 kilometres from Florianopolis, has plans to install a plant to generate electricity by burning waste.

Florianopolis is looking to send non-recyclable waste to the cement industry, which is interested in using it as fuel instead of fossil fuels, said De Souza, Florianopolis’ director of solid waste.

Aparecida Napoleão leads a waste collection movement in her building, an example of the benefits of separating and recycling different materials in the southern Brazilian city of Florianopolis. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Recycling first

“We defend the primacy of recycling over incineration. The goal is to improve recycling, we have not exhausted the advances,” according to Karolina Zimmermann, the engineer who works with the collectors.

Progress in recycling depends not only on new technologies, such as those that separate mixed or even melted materials, dyes and chemical elements in plastics or paperboard. The environmental education of consumers in order to separate waste is key to increase reuse.

Aparecida Napoleão is an example of how recycling monitoring has taken hold. In her building of 126 luxury flats, she spearheads a movement to separate all waste, from the small glass containers she sends to artisanal jelly producers to special papers that can be turned into notebooks, plastics and even bottle caps.

A retired social worker from the Florianopolis municipality, she has organised a chain of shelves and bins on the ground floor of the building for dozens of different types of materials. She tries to guide her neighbours, but recognises that even so, there are always those who put rubbish in the wrong place.

“It’s a lot of work, you have to be patient, explain, ask repeatedly until they understand the importance of separation,” she says.

A recycling, biodigestion and composting complex is being installed next to the landfill of the Intermunicipal Consortium of the Middle Valley of the Itajaí River (Cimvi), to take advantage of all the solid waste from 19 municipalities in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
TIMBO / FLORIANOPOLIS, Brazil , Jun 13 2025 (IPS)

In 2014, Santa Catarina became the first and only state free of open-air garbage dumps in Brazil. Now, 14 of its municipalities are seeking to also free themselves from landfills and make use of nearly all urban solid waste.

The Intermunicipal Consortium of the Middle Itajaí Valley (Cimvi) expects to process in recycling, biodigestion and composting more than 90% of the garbage, surpassing the 65% benchmark reached by the Nordic countries of Europe, emphasized its executive director, Fernando Tomaselli.“We have 36 landfills in the state, only three public, the rest are private and there is little interest in changing the system, because whoever dominates the landfill also dominates the garbage collection service”: Fernando Tomaselli.

“It is a utopia,” said the executive president of the Brazilian Association of Energy from Waste (Abren), Yuri Schmitke.

“The unrealistic goal compromises the project,” he warned. Several European countries, Japan and South Korea have already eliminated sanitary landfills – the areas for the final disposal of solid waste – but resort to incineration to generate energy with non-recyclable garbage, he added.

Cimvi rules out that alternative. Its goal is to expand recycling and the circular economy of waste to an unprecedented proportion. “Our obsession is to take advantage of everything, to prove that garbage does not exist,” said Tomaselli.

But recycling has limits. Europe, after many attempts and advances, covers 25 % of waste on average and 32 % in the exceptional case of Germany. In addition, 19% of the waste still goes to landfills, according to data from Abren, which had its sixth annual congress in Florianopolis, capital of Santa Catarina, on June 5 and 6.

Cimvi was created in 1998, with only five participating municipalities, to jointly manage several issues, but not yet garbage. It reached its current composition of 14 municipalities in 2017 after taking over the management of the sanitary landfill in 2016, previously in charge of the water and sewage authorities.

Its headquarters was installed in Timbo, a town of 46 099 people, according to the 2022 national census. The 14 municipalities had 283 594 residents that year, the most populous being Indaial, with 71 549.

Fernando Tomaselli, director of Cimvi, an intermunicipal initiative that promotes circular waste management in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Landfill and recycling

The landfill receives garbage from five other “partner” cities, in addition to the 14 in the consortium, with a total of between 5,000 and 7,000 tons per month. Environmental education campaigns in schools, businesses and the streets have gradually expanded selective waste collection.

Yellow sacks were popularized and disseminated where the population put recyclable waste which, collected by the municipalities, are taken to the Waste Assessment Center (CVR I) at the Cimvi headquarters, on the outskirts of Timbo.

“Today we recover 20 to 22% of recyclable waste, against a Brazilian average of 2%. We want to reach 27%,” Tomaselli told IPS.

“We receive an average of 60 tons a day, 24 hours a day, in three shifts, Monday to Monday,” said Rosane Valério, president of the Medio Vale Cooperative, hired to separate and send the waste to purchasing companies, at CVR I, where 87 recyclers are employed.

The cooperative has another unit to process waste from two other nearby cities, Ituporanga and Aurora, with a total of 33 300 people.

“Of the material received, we still discard 30% that comes mixed or dirty with food remains, sometimes blood that attracts mosquitoes, glass and other dangerous objects such as syringes and medicines, which generate major difficulties for recycling,” explained Valério.

A bench at the entrance of Cimvi’s headquarters, made of thermoplastic produced from waste that was previously considered non-recyclable and destined for landfills. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Thermoplastic

She regretted that “we do not know the origin, there is a lack of awareness of the population in the correct disposal”. In any case, half of that 30% of discarded waste can be used for the production of thermoplastic, a hard material like concrete, which is used to make benches for squares, sidewalks, pavements and walls.

The cooperative already operates a pilot plant, with experimental production that has not yet been sold externally. “The municipalities are the initial market for the thermoplastic plates, as well as for the compost from the composting,” says Tomaselli.

Abren’s president, Schmitke, is skeptical. The consortium municipalities have a limited, insufficient demand, and the population does not trust products made from garbage, he argued.

Jaqueline Wagenknetht and Maria Eduarda Pegoretti, Cimvi’s environmental education and communication advisors, promote environmental education in the so-called European Valley to improve selective garbage collection and promote tourism and sustainable living. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

But thermoplastic has been around for four decades and now there is equipment that facilitates its production at a high temperature, 160 degrees Celsius, and as an input, half of the plastic that is added to other waste, such as textiles, is enough, countered the director of Cimvi.

The use of local waste will take a leap forward with the inauguration of CVR II, which is expected in early 2026 and will use a large part of the organic waste for the production of biogas and biofertilizers. Another part will go to composting.

“The goal is to take advantage of 100% or 98%,” for which alternatives must be sought for waste, the “common garbage” for which there are still no ways to recycle, he said.

Cimvi headquarters, in the Sunflower Park, which combines ecotourism, sanitary landfill and urban waste utilization plants for biogas generation, recycling and composting. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Bottlenecks

One stumbling block is selective collection, which needs to be perfected. “In Milan, Italy, five types of garbage are separated at the source, be it food, plastics, paper, metals or glass. Here, it’s harder because everything is mixed together,” said Tomaselli.

That is why Cimvi gives priority to environmental education, through several campaigns such as “Vale reciclar”, and sustainable tourism, which highlights the beauties of the so-called European Valley, which includes other municipalities in addition to the 14 consortium members.

The Girasol Park was also created for this purpose, a tourist complex that includes the landfill, the Cimvi facilities and the surrounding forest, with trails for walks, said Jaqueline Wagenknetht, environmental education advisor.

Design and poetry contests among local students seek to promote the valley, which is called European because its population includes many immigrants, especially Germans, Italians and Poles.

The name Sunflower was chosen for the park because, in addition to its beauty, the flower symbolizes sustainability, as a source of oil and biofuel, the advisor explained.

Design of the future Sunflower Park, in which the green buildings, in the center, are intended for recycling and energy biodigestion. In the background on the left is the landfill already covered, able to receive solar energy panels. Credit: Courtesy of Cimvi

Cimvi benefits from the experiences of São Bento do Sul, a municipality of 83 277 people, 120 kilometers north of Timbo, which has a similar program that seeks to use up to 100% of the waste.

A process of dehydration of the organic part allows a better use of the waste, explained Jacó Phoren, consultant of the company 100lixo, which is involved in the project, during his speech at the Abren congress on June 6.

Fostering new companies that generate solutions for the waste industry is another focus of Cimvi, said Tomaselli.

In Curitibanos, a city 185 kilometers southwest of Timbo, with 40 045 people, the company Inventus Ambiental claims to have invented equipment that will facilitate the separation of garbage for better energy recovery or recycling, reducing the waste that makes landfills bigger.

Its pilot project will be inaugurated in a few months and is based on the use of 90-degree heat to treat organic material, informed Dirnei Ferri, director of the company.

Santa Catarina has already eliminated open dumps, although it is ignored if all of them have been cleaned up. Now it is a matter of “breaking the landfill trench”, said Tomaselli.

“We have 36 landfills in the state, only three public, the rest are private and there is little interest in changing the system, because whoever dominates the landfill also dominates the garbage collection service,” he concluded.

A digital meeting by Brazil’s Ministry of Science and Technology to discuss the use of artificial intelligence in the public sector. Remote work and debates have also increased the demand for digital infrastructure by boosting long-distance communication. Credit: Rodrigo Cabral / Ascom MCTI

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 30 2025 (IPS)

Brazil hopes to soon reap benefits of its largely renewable energy matrix. Data centers, whose demand is growing with the strides made by artificial intelligence, are the new frontier for these still-uncertain investments."The most serious issue in the government's program is that it aims to subsidize data centers for big tech companies... they propose bringing in data centers for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and others, with all the benefits." — Carlos Afonso.

This is even a matter of “digital sovereignty,” not just for Brazil, according to Dora Kaufman, a professor in the program on intelligent technologies and digital design at the Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo.

Nearly 60% of all Brazilian data processing currently takes place in the United States—and the figure continues to rise—posing a serious risk, as a natural disaster or government blockade could paralyze the country, she warned. “The probability of it happening is low, but the impact would be huge,” she told IPS by phone from São Paulo.

The National Data Center Policy is expected to change this scenario, according to the Brazilian government, which has promised to soon unveil the program. Its potential could attract two trillion reais (around US$350 billion) over the next 10 years, claims Finance Minister Fernando Haddad.

Exemptions from federal taxes and reduced import duties on equipment are among the incentives the government will offer investors. These measures anticipate policies already outlined in the recently approved tax reform, which will fully take effect by 2033.

The abundance of renewable energy, water, and land could also serve as a major draw in a world increasingly demanding sustainability in new projects.

Engineering and computer science students in Rio de Janeiro will form an essential workforce for the expanding digital economy, fueled by the government’s policy to encourage the proliferation of data centers in Brazil. Credit: Tomaz Silva / Agência Brasil

High Costs in Brazil 

Processing data in Brazil is 25% more expensive than abroad, primarily due to the tax burden, noted Kaufman. Removing this obstacle would pave the way for a surge in data centers, as “we have more than enough renewable energy and water,” she argued.

“Brazil has everything it takes to host many data centers, and the challenges are solvable. We need them not just to develop artificial intelligence but also for the growing digitalization of government and businesses,” she emphasized.

However, the voracious energy and water demands of digital infrastructure—especially for AI—are raising concerns among environmentalists and experts in energy and communications.

“Brazil first needs to implement a real energy transition. So far, we’ve only added renewable sources alongside fossil fuels. A just transition remains a huge challenge, requiring the electrification of transport—a priority due to the climate crisis,” said Alexandre Costa, a professor at the Federal University of Ceará in northeastern Brazil.

TikTok plans to set up a data center in Caucaia, a city of 355,000 residents in Ceará. Just 35 kilometers away, the Pecém port—which includes an industrial zone—has plans for a green hydrogen production hub, another major consumer of water and electricity.

Pecém already hosts a thermoelectric plant and a steel mill, both of which are highly water-intensive.

In the industrial zone of the Pecém port, in Ceará, wind turbine blades are manufactured. Nearby, there are plans to produce green hydrogen for export to Europe. The high consumption of electricity and water worries environmentalists in this and other regions of Brazil where large data centers are planned. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

 Fossil Fuels Still Dominate

The Northeast, Brazil’s poorest region, has become an attractive location for projects claiming to be sustainable, as it is already the country’s largest wind power producer and holds vast potential for solar energy.

However, the exploitation of strong, steady winds and abundant sunlight has already sparked criticism and protests from local communities. The expansion of these projects is encroaching on increasing amounts of land, creating conflicts with local populations and small-scale farming, noted Costa, a physicist specializing in meteorology and climate change.

Nationally, renewable sources accounted for 86.1% of electricity consumption in 2022, according to the government’s Energy Research Company. However, fossil fuels still made up 52.7% of Brazil’s total energy matrix, dominated by oil and natural gas, while coal held a small 4.4% share.

This means Brazil, where freight transport is still heavily reliant on diesel trucks, still has a long way to go in reducing fossil fuel consumption. This transition will require even more electricity.

Data centers will bring additional energy demand to an economy already anticipating a surge in consumption—driven by green hydrogen projects, artificial intelligence, and vehicle electrification, Costa warned IPS in a phone interview from Fortaleza, Ceará’s capital.

The same applies to water resources. “There’s no way to meet an infinite demand for these inputs,” he stressed. In his view, Brazil lacks an energy model that balances new demands, priorities, and the need for an increasingly clean energy matrix.

The electrification of vehicles is increasing electricity demand. Data centers create additional pressure on power generation from renewable sources to meet Brazil’s goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Credit: Marcelo Camargo / Agência Brasil

Dependence 

“The most serious issue in the government’s program is that it aims to subsidize data centers for Big Techs. We need them for our national networks, yet they’re proposing to bring in data centers for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc., with all the benefits,” criticized Carlos Afonso, a communications technology expert and one of the pioneers of the internet in Brazil.

He pointed to the lack of such infrastructure for public entities like Serpro (Data Processing Service) and Dataprev (social security database), which are vital for government operations, as well as the National Research Network that connects universities and other scientific and innovation institutions.

“Will they have to rely on data centers from these Big Techs in Brazil?” he questioned in a conversation with IPS.

It appears that both the government’s program for this sector and its green hydrogen initiative are primarily designed to meet external demands, with the goal of creating exportable goods and services.

This is why Kaufman argues for imposing conditions on data centers established in Brazil, such as sustainability based on renewable energy and zero greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency, and  allocating at least 10% of installed capacity to the domestic market.

The expert believes that the large data centers to be installed in Brazil will primarily serve AI training, which minimizes latency, the milliseconds of delay in long-distance communication from origin to destination.

But the reality—both in Brazil and globally—in the digital economy is one of deep dependence on the United States, a situation exacerbated by the policies of President Donald Trump, who prioritized the interests of the United States above all else, even international treaties.

“Three Big Tech companies from the United States—AWS/Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—control 63% of global data processing, forming a true oligopoly,” emphasized Kaufman. That dominance is expected to grow to 80%, she added.

According to the global statistics portal Statista, as of March 2025, the United States had 5,426 data centers—more than 10 times the number in Germany (529), the UK (523), or China (449).

The imbalance is even starker in hyperscale data centers, those occupying more than 930 square meters and housing over 5,000 servers. By the end of 2024, the United States accounted for 54% of global processing capacity, compared to 16% for China and 15% for Europe, according to Synergy Research Group.

In 2024 alone, 137 new data centers were built—a 13.7% growth rate—in a trend expected to continue, driven largely by advancements in artificial intelligence, notes the analytics and consulting firm based in the United States.

The infrastructure powering the digital economy, already connecting two-thirds of humanity and expanding rapidly with innovations like cloud computing and AI, remains largely unseen.

While cables, including intercontinental submarine lines, satellites, and telecom networks are well-known, data centers—the “brains” that store, process, and distribute information—operate in relative obscurity. Yet, they have become massive and strategically critical as global data traffic surges exponentially.

The Belo Monte hydroelectric plant on the Xingu River in the eastern Brazilian Amazon. With a capacity of 11,233 megawatts, it began operating in 2016 and caused severe environmental and social damage in the Volta Grande do Xingu, a river curve where most of the water was diverted into a channel for power generation. Credit: Joédson Alves / Agência Brasil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 25 2025 (IPS)

Indigenous peoples in Brazil have won a new right: a share in the profits of hydroelectric plants that cause them harm when built on or near their lands. 

This was established in a preliminary ruling by Supreme Court Justice Flavio Dino, who on Tuesday, March 11, recognized this right for Indigenous communities living in the Volta Grande do Xingu (VGX), a 100-kilometer stretch of the Amazon’s Xingu River. Most of its water flow was diverted into a channel for electricity generation.

The ruling responds to a petition from seven Indigenous associations in the VGX and still awaits ratification by the other 10 Supreme Court justices by late March. However, approval is virtually certain, as it aligns with Brazil’s 1988 Constitution.

It took 37 years for this constitutional benefit to take effect because the National Congress failed to pass a law regulating compensation for the impacts of energy and mining projects on Indigenous lands, Justice Dino noted in his 115-point, 61-page ruling.

Now, 100% of the royalties that the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant paid to the federal government as compensation for water use will go to the residents of three Indigenous territories affected by the permanent “drought” in the VGX, home to 1,324 people according to the 2022 national census.

Lawyers representing the Indigenous cause estimate this amounts to around 210 million reais per year (approximately US$36 million at current exchange rates).

The funds will be used collectively for community benefit. Justice Dino specified purposes such as expanding the Bolsa Família (a direct income transfer program) in affected villages, sustainable development projects, improving educational and health infrastructure, territorial security, reforestation, and demarcation of additional Indigenous lands.

Wild fruits that feed fish now fall on dry land due to the reduced flow in the Volta Grande do Xingu in the Brazilian Amazon. Its waters were diverted for the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant’s channel. Credit: Mati / VGX

A Right for All

This right extends to other similar cases—though not to mining—as there is still no legislation regulating constitutional provisions ensuring affected communities’ share in profits from hydroelectric and mining activities in “border zones or Indigenous lands.”

Justice Dino also set a 24-month deadline for Congress to finally approve regulations for such cases.

“Royalties are a victory. For the first time, we’ve gained a benefit—all we’ve had so far are losses because of the Belo Monte dam,” said Gilliard Juruna, chief of the Miratu village of the Juruna people (who are reclaiming their original name, Yudjá, meaning “the river’s owners”).

“Since 2019, fish no longer reproduce normally in the Volta Grande do Xingu,” the Indigenous leader told IPS by phone from his village in the municipality of Vitória do Xingu. Like most Brazilian Indigenous groups, the Juruna use their ethnic name as their surname.

The reason is that Belo Monte’s operation “steals” too much water from the VGX, a U-shaped stretch. The original dam project, designed in the 1970s under Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985), planned to flood 1,225 square kilometers of forest in the Volta Grande, including two Indigenous territories along its banks.

Stalled by Indigenous resistance and surplus energy from other large dams, the project was revived this century with a redesign to avoid flooding the VGX by diverting water through a channel.

But diverting enough water for a 11,000-megawatt plant (the world’s fourth-largest, operating at full capacity since 2019) has condemned the VGX to permanent drought, destroying the Indigenous and riverside communities’ way of life, which depended on fishing and river transport.

A constant legal battle pits Norte Energía, Belo Monte’s private operator, against environmental authorities demanding higher water flows in the VGX to ensure fish reproduction and ecosystem survival.

Court rulings have fluctuated, especially after environmental disasters and the expiration of Belo Monte’s operating license in 2021. The Brazilian Institute of the Environment now seeks to tie license renewal to a more ecosystem-friendly water flow schedule (hydrogram).

While awaiting renewal, the plant operates at only 31% capacity. Water releases for the river bend are dictated by power generation targets, ignoring the dehydrated stretch’s ecological needs.

The dehydrated or dried-up Xingu River forms small isolated ponds where trapped fish die. Before being diverted to supply the Belo Monte plant, it was connected to the river’s main flow. Credit: Mati / VGX

The Juruna lead an Independent Territorial Environmental Monitoring (Mati) initiative, tracking fish populations and other indicators based on water flow variations. Other Indigenous groups, riverside communities, and researchers also participate.

Their findings show that higher water levels from December to March (fish spawning season) are essential for life in the VGX. They’ve proposed a new hydrogram that, while not restoring natural flows, would mitigate current damage.

The piracema, the local spawning season for the inhabitants of the Xingu, must have enough water for the females to lay their eggs and for the fry to feed and grow. Without water, this process cannot occur, and sometimes—due to the sudden reduction in water flow caused by Belo Monte—the eggs or fry die on dry land, according to Josiel Juruna, coordinator of Mati.

“We’ll keep fighting for more water in the Volta Grande—for us, it’s life,” said Gilliard Juruna. But his people are adapting, turning to farming after commercial fishing collapsed. They are no longer commercial fishermen, only fishing for their own consumption—which is no longer guaranteed either.

The Juruna leader now grows cacao, whose price is on the rise, but they need technical support, irrigation, and fertilizers.

The compensation programs that Belo Monte is required to implement and fund, as a counterpart to harnessing the river’s energy potential, are not progressing. The company’s initiatives to support Juruna agriculture contribute little.

While schools are improving, and the village will have secondary education starting in 2026, there are no income-generating projects to replace lost fishing livelihoods, Gilliard Juruna lamented.

Though welcomed, royalties may further erode traditional Indigenous life.

One concern is that financial compensation could make it easier to license new hydro and mining projects, harming nature and Indigenous ways of life.

There have long been efforts to open Indigenous lands to destructive activities like mining—now under discussion in the Supreme Court, led by Justice Gilmar Mendes.

Royalties can encourage harmful projects to exploit mining and water resources in indigenous lands, “the most protected areas in Brazil”, agrees biologist Juarez Pezutti, a professor at the Federal University of Pará, who has participated in several environmental research projects in the Vuelta Grande.

Predatory activities in indigenous areas destroy their ecosystem services, cause social disasters, as seen in the Xingu, and lead to obesity, diabetes and other diseases, such as those that occur among Native peoples in the United States and Canada, whose territories are occupied by mining, he told IPS by telephone from Belém, capital of the Amazonian state of Pará, where Belo Monte is located.

Judge Dino is aware of these risks, which is why he insisted several times in his ruling that the decision on Belo Monte’s royalties “does not release any and all exploitation of the energy potential of water resources on indigenous lands.”

Such projects still require state approval and compliance with International Labour Organization Convention 169, which mandates free, prior, and informed consent from affected Indigenous communities.

By Mario Osava
MANAUS, Brazil, Mar 5 2025 (IPS)

Electricity is essential for the well-being and prosperity of traditional riverside communities in the Amazon, as demonstrated by the experience of the Santa Helena do Inglês community, located on the right bank of the Negro River in northern Brazil.

Energy security is equally crucial. In 2012, the 30 local families benefited from the “Light for All” program, a government initiative that installs cables and poles to bring electricity to poor and isolated communities across the country.

However, traversing hundreds of kilometers of Amazonian forests poses constant risks. Falling trees, harsh weather, and lightning have frequently left riverside residents without power.

For Lucilene Ferreira de Oliveira, a 39-year-old mother of eight and a cook at the Vista Rio Negro Inn who also prepares snacks and ready-made meals at home, being without electricity for three, four, or five days is devastating. It means no fresh or frozen food, no internet, and the inability to meet other basic needs.

The solution was to supplement the grid power with a solar plant consisting of 132 photovoltaic panels and 54 lithium batteries. This project, driven by the non-governmental Amazon Sustainable Foundation (FAS), chose Santa Helena as a model for other isolated riverside communities.

Reliable electricity has enabled the promotion of ecotourism, favoured by the region’s lush natural beauty and its proximity to the Anavilhanas Archipelago, a national park with stunning views, and Manaus, the capital of Amazonas State, home to 2.2 million people and a hub for business and tourism.

The Vista Rio Negro Inn, with its eight rooms, is a community-based enterprise that employs six local women for cooking and other tasks, divided into two teams that alternate every four days. It is managed by Keith-Ivan Oliveira, and has a communications assistant, 16-year-old Elizabeth Ferreira da Silva, who is also a distance-learning student.

Reliable electricity has enabled the promotion of ecotourism, favoured by the region's lush natural beauty and its proximity to the Anavilhanas Archipelago, a national park with stunning views, and Manaus, the capital of Amazonas State, home to 2.2 million people and a hub for business and tourism
Electricity has made internet access possible, enabling virtual classes. Students no longer need to travel to Manaus, which is only accessible by boat. A fast boat takes 90 minutes to cover the 64-kilometer distance. “Now they only need to go to Manaus to take exams,” Oliveira celebrated.

Before ecotourism, commercial fishing was the primary source of income. To support this, the government designated the area encompassing Santa Helena and 18 other riverside communities as the Negro River Sustainable Development Reserve (RDS) in 2008, covering 103,086 hectares.

The RDS is a conservation area that allows traditional residents, such as Amazonian riverside communities, to sustainably utilize natural resources.

The establishment of the reserve granted exclusive fishing rights to the local residents in the adjacent stretch of the Negro River, which had previously been subject to exploitative practices by fishing companies. Now, nearly all local families own boats with a cargo capacity of up to five tons, except for one with an 18-ton capacity.

However, fishing is only permitted during specific months for each species to avoid disrupting reproduction and fish availability.

The RDS emerged from a movement by riverside residents to secure their rights as traditional communities after 11 locals were imprisoned for illegal logging. A lengthy negotiation process with the Amazonas State authorities led to the creation of the conservation area with controlled extractive activities.

Communities can harvest timber but must adhere to approved forest management practices and limits.

An ice factory, in its final stages of construction, is expected to boost the productivity and income of Santa Helena’s fishing activities. It will have a daily production capacity of three tons and will make the community independent of ice suppliers from Manaus.

A newly installed solar plant with 84 photovoltaic panels will provide the necessary electricity for ice production.

In addition to cost issues, riverside residents often lost fish due to ice shortages or delays in obtaining it. With the factory, ice will no longer be a limiting factor for fishing and will instead generate income for the entire community, while also creating five permanent jobs and the potential to assist neighboring communities.

“The river is life, but it doesn’t work without energy” says Nelson Brito de Mendonça, president of the Santa Helena community.

However, the river – or rather, its waters – also dictates the lives of the riverside residents. A severe drought over two consecutive years devastated fishing and forced the inn to suspend operations between August and December 2024.

The river, which usually reaches the doors of the inn, receded hundreds of meters until the waters gradually began to return to their normal levels late last year, thanks to the arrival of rains. What has yet to return are the tourists, but the residents hope they will come back soon.

The two solar plants are part of a program by the Amazon Sustainable Foundation (FAS), which aims to consolidate and promote sustainable development models for Amazonian riverside communities.

Another example is a community in the municipality of Carauari, a seven-day boat journey from Manaus, where an 80-panel solar plant is being used to boost the production of oils from native Amazonian fruits, such as andiroba (Carapa guianensis) and murumuru (Astrocaryum murumuru).

The cable-stayed bridge of Hortolandia, a symbol of the modernization of this southern Brazilian city, alongside tall buildings and the city’s extensive tree cover, which has made it a model of sustainable urban development. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
HORTOLANDIA, Brazil , Feb 26 2025 (IPS)

Almost everything seems new or under construction in the southern Brazilian city of Hortolandia, from its wide avenues and cable-stayed bridge to its large buildings and riverside parks.

Even the city hall itself, the Palace of Migrants, will celebrate its first anniversary on May 29, and its main parking lot is still under construction, but already bears the city’s new hallmark: solar panels on its roofs.

A municipality of 240,000 people located 110 kilometers from São Paulo, Hortolandia seized the opportunity presented by cost-effective technology and legal incentives to generate its own electricity for public sector consumption.“We want to grow, but also preserve. The city must care for its environment, seek new ways to think about energy, water, and consumption”: Donizete Faria.

The 21 photovoltaic plants built since 2023, some in the final stages of completion, will save 80% of the city hall’s electricity costs, according to Fernanda Candido de Oliveira, director of the Lighting Department of the municipal Public Works Board.

The remaining 20% will be covered by the energy efficiency program, which began earlier and has already replaced all old urban lighting with LED lamps. In this way, the city will become self-sufficient in electricity, limiting expenses in this area to distribution network usage fees and maintenance costs.

In addition to the 26,500 public lighting points, the self-generation system will power 200 municipal service locations, saving approximately 4.5 million reais (US$ 800,000) annually, which will be reinvested in various sectors of local administration.

Fourteen schools, four health units and a sports stadium have their roofs covered with solar panels. In total, 5,000 panels are already generating energy, and others already installed will soon begin operation.

The city hall will house three photovoltaic plants, one on its roof and two in its parking lots, one of which is still under construction. In total, it will have 1,800 panels.

The plant for the new social events center, which is nearing completion, will have 1,568 solar panels already visible from the cable-stayed bridge, whose two parallel decks of aerial cables are suspended by three horizontal connecting columns, a structure that symbolizes Hortolandia’s modernization.

The parking lot of the Hortolandia city hall, still under construction, features photovoltaic panels on its roofs, one of the 21 solar plants that will generate 80% of the electricity consumed in the 200 municipal offices and public lighting systems. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Economy and Environment
The primary goal of the program is economic, saving resources for other areas, but it also benefits the population, Oliveira noted. “The energy efficiency of LED lamps allowed us to grant a 10% reduction in residents’ electricity bills,” she explained.

“We were the ugly duckling of the Campinas metropolitan region,” which includes 20 municipalities and a total of 3.5 million inhabitants, but “now we are a unique case in these innovations,” a reference point, she proudly stated.

“Solar energy hit the mark, an extraordinary achievement,” said Dirson Pereira da Silva, the receptionist at the Santa Clara Ecological Park, which features a lagoon at its center.

After 36 years living in a city that “buried all its streams,” Araraquara, 170 kilometers away, he returned to his hometown and his passion for the lagoon in 2023.

The seven parks in Hortolandia, most of them designed to protect watercourses, confirm its environmental vocation, which also underpins its commitment to solar energy.

The municipality has identified over 50 springs and strives to conserve or restore them as needed, according to Eduardo Marchetti, Secretary of Urban Planning and Strategic Management. This requires maintaining or expanding riparian forests.

Hortolandia is a “tree city” recognized in 2023 by the international Arbor Day Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Washington that seeks to reforest the world.

An ecological park around the Santa Clara lagoon, where residents and students stroll and visit the Environmental Observatory, an important center for nature preservation located in Hortolandia. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Trees Against Floods

The city used to suffer from floods caused by the overflowing of the Jacuba stream, with frequent losses for riverside residents and businesses. This was overcome by building four reservoirs and caring for the springs and riparian forests, recalled Marchetti, who has lived in the municipality since birth.

Trees are also a requirement for financing from international banks. For example, to build the cable-stayed bridge, the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean (CAF) required the planting of 120,000 trees as a condition for its soft loan.

“Maintaining green parks has its costs. We lost 30,000 trees due to lack of care, such as removing weeds that take their nutrients,” Marchetti noted.

Hortolândia was founded in 1991 after separating from Sumaré, a municipality of 280,000 inhabitants. Its territory is small, covering 62.4 square kilometers.

“In the 1970s, we were a rural area that received many industries, especially in the 1980s. This led to a population explosion, accompanied by high violence, reaching 102 murders per 100,000 inhabitants,” recalled Josemil Rodrigues, a journalist who advises Mayor José Nazareno Gomes.

Fernanda Candido de Oliveira, director of public lighting, with the engineer and systems analyst who control the electricity generation system of Hortolandia’s city hall. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Planning for Transformation
The development of the new city received a significant boost starting in 2005 under Mayor Angelo Perugini, “a visionary” to his supporters.

In 2005, sewage coverage was limited to 2% of wastewater; now it reaches 98%, with 100% treatment. Only 40% of the streets were paved; now 99% are, and homicides have dropped to 13 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to data provided by the journalist.

“Long-term planning was key. Hortolandia’s vocation is to be a smart and sustainable city,” he stated. Solar energy is part of this goal and has made the city a national reference, Rodrigues emphasized.

The photovoltaic panels are a logical consequence of the environmental vision of the city’s leaders. The current mayor, Gomes, was the Environment Secretary under his predecessor, Perugini, who was elected four times starting in 2005 and died of COVID-19 in 2021, at the beginning of a new municipal term.

Additionally, environmental education is a priority in the “political-pedagogical project” of all municipal schools, observed Donizete Faria, director of the Department of Pedagogy and Continuing Education at the Education Secretariat.

Eduardo Marchetti, Secretary of Urban Planning and Strategic Management of Hortolandia, where seven ecological parks and forests protect the southern Brazilian city from floods and improve local quality of life. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Solar energy is too recent to assess its impact on education, but energy efficiency has been a permanent topic in schools for many years, including through visits to ecological parks and the Environmental Observatory, a specialized center located in Santa Clara Park.

The fact that 14 schools have solar plants on their roofs will help “children take ownership of the photovoltaic panels, see them, and have hands-on lessons about renewable energy and consumption,” Faria hopes.

“We want to grow, but also preserve. The city must care for its environment, seek new ways to think about energy, water, and consumption,” he concluded.

The operation and maintenance of the photovoltaic network installed in the city cost little. Systems analyst Alessandro Alves monitors everything from his computer connected to all the plants, and electrical engineer Renan Queiroz intervenes if repairs are needed.

Since the plants have a guaranteed lifespan of 25 years and the inverters last 10 years, there will be no pressing concerns, such as equipment disposal or recycling, for many years, Queiroz reassured.

Hortolandia’s urban master plan has an environmental focus, due to flooding and the need to manage water resources, Marchetti explained. Water reuse, green roofs, and solar energy are part of the tax incentives for property owners.

The new plan, already approved, maintains the focus on the environment but adds technological innovations. “We are a technological city,” with several IT and pharmaceutical companies, concluded the Secretary of Urban Planning.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva during his visit to a school in Salvador, the capital of the northeastern state of Bahia, on October 17 last year, where all the students raised their cell phones to take photos with the leader. Credit: Ricardo Stuckert / PR

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 27 2025 (IPS)

It was necessary to repel the “invasion” of mobile phones in Brazilian classrooms, even to spark a debate about the use of technology in education, according to Silvana Veloso, an educator with extensive experience on the subject.

On January 13, Brazil enacted a law that bans “the use of personal portable electronic devices by students during classes, recess, or breaks between classes at all levels of basic education,” making it the first Latin American country to impose such a nationwide restriction."Technology must be introduced in each school in an organized manner, avoiding the current chaos”: Bernardo Baião.

An unusual agreement among various opposing political factions allowed the new law to be passed by the National Congress in December 2024. Only a few far-right lawmakers, primarily from the Liberal Party, voted against it.

They wanted students to have access to phones to film “indoctrinating practices” by teachers and expose Marxist ideological activism, which they claim is contaminating Brazilian education. However, even some of their legislators supported the law.

Restricting mobile phones in schools aims to “safeguard the mental, physical, and psychological health of children and adolescents,” as stated in the approved Law 15.100. It includes exceptions for pedagogical use, emergencies involving risks, or health and disability issues.

The new law took immediate effect, with no transition period, and will be enforced starting in February, when the school year begins in this country of 212 million people.

“This law is small and limited, but positive because it mobilizes the community, parents, teachers, and even the school cafeteria staff, sparking debate,” Veloso said. She does not reject technology in schools but advocates for its appropriate use.

As an educator, Veloso led the BH Digital program, a digital inclusion initiative in Belo Horizonte – the capital of the southern state of Minas Gerais, with 2.3 million inhabitants -, from its inception in 2004 until 2012.

The program established telecenters with 10 to 20 internet-connected computers in public institutions like libraries, assistance offices, cultural centers, and NGOs, as well as a mobile unit – a trailer equipped to teach computer classes in neighborhoods.

With 40 of her 60 years dedicated to education, Veloso also served as Secretary of Education for Rio Acima, a municipality of 10,000 residents, from 2022 to 2024. During her tenure, she implemented a technology program in local schools, including robotics labs. She continues to work as a teacher and advisor on the subject.

Rio Acima and many other municipalities received computer equipment, such as desktops and tablets, but lacked the knowledge to use them effectively.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva with the Minister of Education, Camilo Santana, as they enact a law in Brasilia on January 13 that bans the use of cell phones and other mobile electronic devices in classrooms nationwide. Credit: Ricardo Stuckert / PR

Unprepared Schools and Teachers

Just as with the overwhelming presence of mobile phones, schools and teachers are generally unprepared to integrate new technologies into teaching, Veloso lamented. They have not developed pedagogical projects to incorporate these tools.

Regarding mobile phones, which are owned by a vast majority of students, Veloso has witnessed troubling cases. In response to school violence, which surged in late 2022 and early 2023 – with five assaults and 11 deaths in five Brazilian states – students aged nine and ten in Rio Acima organized self-defense networks via WhatsApp.

Instructions on using kitchen knives to “bleed the bandits” who might invade schools and the preparation of Molotov cocktails were part of the group’s discussions, until a mother found out through the students themselves, Veloso told IPS over the phone from Rio Acima, where she lives.

The leader of the movement was just 10 years old and headed several WhatsApp groups. “They were reproducing the violence” they feared becoming victims of, Veloso noted.

Another earlier case, from 2017, came to light when a student was found with cuts on her arm. It involved girls self-harming, encouraged by a website that promoted competitions among those who could cut themselves the most.

Training, particularly for teachers, to manage and leverage technological innovations is the central challenge facing education, Veloso argued.

“Technology does not cause regression; we are the ones responsible. Humanity has always sought interactive communication. What we have achieved is marvelous – phones that allow us to talk while seeing the other person’s image are fascinating,” but they require debate and dialogue for proper use, she concluded.

A poster by the Rio Acima City Hall promoting the use of tablets and computers in the environmental education of students. Credit: Rio Acima City Hall

The Harm of Mobile Phones

Numerous studies highlight the negative effects of mobile phones on learning, including attention deficits, social media addiction, and increased anxiety among students.

Brazil has become the first Latin American country to pass a law restricting mobile phones in schools, following a global trend. A quarter of the 194 member states of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) have already adopted restrictive measures, particularly in Europe and Asia.

Although the law takes effect in February, its full implementation requires regulations and protocols for schools managed by states (secondary schools) and municipalities (primary schools).

After political consensus, driven by the proven distraction caused by mobile phones in both schools and workplaces, the new law now prompts reflection on pedagogical projects in schools.

“Technology must be introduced into each school in an organized manner, avoiding the current chaos,” said Bernardo Baião, coordinator of Educational Policies at Todos pela Educação, a nonprofit civil society organization advocating for quality basic education in Brazil.

Two students from Rio Acima participate in the municipality’s school technology program, aimed at better utilizing digital resources in education. Credit: Rio Acima City Hall

The proliferation of mobile phones, combined with social media, has a cognitive dimension, affecting learning. Students themselves admit that it distracts them from their studies.

“More screen time, less learning,” emphasized Baião, a history graduate turned educator, who has worked full-time for the Todos pela Educação movement in Rio de Janeiro for the past three years.

Other aspects of the technological challenge include the emotional impact on those who “cannot live without social media” and the social interaction aspect of “living and playing at school, making it naturally noisy, without the silence of mobile phones, which bring distant people closer while pushing away those nearby,” he told IPS.

“Technology is not the enemy. We must combine different tools. Printed books are better for memorization, but digital ones are more suitable for personalized teaching, addressing different needs and interests,” he added.

“The teacher is more important than the computer or phone screen; technology cannot replace them,” he stressed.

The ban on mobile phones in schools had already been implemented in many private schools, and four of Brazil’s 26 states had passed their own legislation. In fact, 28% of schools had already adopted a total ban, with few exceptions, by 2023, according to the Internet Steering Committee.

This committee includes government and civil society participants, including academics and industry representatives. It assists in internet governance, maintaining neutrality against political and private interests, and established the core principles of Brazil’s internet law, the Civil Rights Framework for the Internet.

The swift passage of the national law was due to near-consensus in public opinion. A survey conducted by the non-governmental Locomotiva Institute in October 2024 showed that 82% of respondents supported banning mobile phones in schools.

Maria Aparecida dos Anjos points to where the stream, now reduced to a trickle of water, reaches when flooded in the community of Santa Helena do Inglês, one of the riverside towns along the Rio Negro, a large tributary of the Amazon, in Brazil

By Mario Osava
MANAUS, Brazil, Dec 20 2024 (IPS)

The flow of the igarapé always dropped for three months every year, but now it has been dry for two years in a row, complains Maria Aparecida dos Anjos, looking at the trickle of water that when flooded reaches the stilts of her wooden house, 50 metres away and on a slope of more than 10 metres high.

The stream, known as igarapé to the riverside dwellers, flows into the Negro river, the great northern tributary of the Amazon, whose flow has dropped by more than 15 metres compared to the rainy season, affecting the essential river transport and the fish-based diet of the local population.

The unprecedented drought temporarily interrupted the growing bonanza of the 30 families of the Santa Helena do Inglês community since they received electricity from the government’s Light for All programme in 2012, reinforced in 2020 by solar energy provided by the non-governmental  Sustainable Amazon Foundation (FAS).“Energy is life, or perhaps the river is life, but without energy it doesn't work”: Nelson Brito de Mendonça.

The Vista Rio Negro community lodge, with eight rooms, has had to suspend its activities since August this year because of the drought. Ecotourism is an important source of income for the community near Anavilhanas, an attractive river archipelago.

Half of the lodge’s income is share among the community, while the rest goes to salaries, expenses and maintenance.

The guests would spread the word on “the suffering to get to the lodge”, having to walk hundreds of metres on uneven ground and mud, given the distance from the riverbank, and “no one would come anymore”, explained Nelson Brito de Mendonça, 48 and president of the community for the last 22 years, when IPS visited the place.

Berth at the Santa Helena do Inglês lodge, where the Negro River flows during the rainy season in the Brazilian Amazon. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Communities only accessible by river

Santa Helena is only accessible by river. It takes an hour and a half by speedboat to travel the 64-kilometre distance between the community and Manaus, the Amazonian capital of 2.2 million people. The “Englishman’s” addition comes from a British couple who lived there in the past.

“The inn used to receive occasional guests during the dry period, but it only closed completely in 2023 and 2004,” the two years of severe drought, said Keith-Ivan Oliveira, 54 and manager of the establishment, located at the entrance to the community, with a berth where the water comes in, but now hundreds of metres from the river.

He hopes to reopen the inn in January. For that “the water has to rise a lot, otherwise the big boats can’t reach it,” because of the risk of getting stuck on the sandbanks, he said.

Ecotourism, also practised by several local families in their small individual dwellings, was only made viable by electricity, especially from solar energy, which complemented the energy transmitted by cables, which was insufficient and frequently interrupted by trees blown down by rain and winds.

Air conditioning, indispensable for tourist comfort in the Amazonian heat, takes a lot of energy.

The Pousada Vista Rio de Negro, opened in 2014 as a source of income for the Santa Helena do Inglês community, home to 30 families of fisherpeople, cassava farmers and artisans in the Brazilian Amazon. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

No power, no water, no food

“Other communities suffer water shortages, but we don’t because we have two sources of energy, the cable network and solar power. If there is no electricity, there is no water, which is then pumped,” Oliveira said.

Santa Helena uses water from an 86-metre deep well that reaches three elevated reservoirs in the highest part of the community. From there, the water drains by gravity to the consumption premises.

For Dos Anjos, who is 59 and heads a typical local family with eight children and six grandchildren, most of them living in Santa Helena, electricity means the comfort of having a refrigerator and not having to keep meat in salt, as well as fans to keep out the heat, television and other electrical appliances.

Lucilene Ferreira de Oliveira, 39, who also has eight children, benefits doubly. She is a cook at the inn, which earns her about 700 reais (US$120) a month when it is open, and she prepares ready-made food at home that she sells in the community. The refrigerator and electric oven are indispensable to her.

Keith-Ivan Oliveira, manager of the Pousada Vista Rio Negro, at the entrance of the ice factory under construction, which will have its own solar energy. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

She highlights the educational improvement for the children. “The school now has air conditioning, which is turned on when it is very hot, a benefit for everyone,” she said.

The electricity also favoured the internet connection that allows for virtual classes, which is necessary since the local school only covers the first five years of Brazilian primary education.

Elizabeth Ferreira da Silva, 16, a granddaughter of Dos Anjos, is completing her ninth and final year of primary school online. The knowledge she has accumulated on the web has facilitated the work she does with the inn’s communications, which is essential in attracting tourists from far away, including foreigners.

The community actually tried solar energy before, in 2011, but it was a very small plant that was soon rendered useless by lightning. Now it has a modern plant with 132 panels and 54 lithium batteries, installed by UCB Power, a company specialising in energy storage, which is sharing the project with FAS.

The solar panels of the plant that will supply the ice factory in the Amazonian community of Santa Helena do Inglês, in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. It will produce three tonnes per day. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Ice empowers fishing

In addition, Santa Helena already has another plant, with 84 panels, for the operation of an ice factory that is expected to be launched in a few months, with a capacity of three tonnes per day.

This is another project promoted by the FAS and vital to enhance the income of the Amazonian coastal villages, fisherpeople by nature.

“With our ice, we will no longer have to buy it in Manaus, to preserve the fish and sell it at a better price,” Mendonça celebrated. The inhabitants often lose their fish for lack of ice and “already had to give it for free to the trading companies,” he said.

“Energy is life, or perhaps the river is life, but without energy it doesn’t work,” he said, admitting that the ice factory only came about because the community managed to get help for the second solar plant.

The network of electricity distribution cables reached the Brazilian Amazonian community of Santa Helena in 2012, but with insufficient power and frequent interruptions. Solar plants installed later overcame the shortfall, but encourage activities that increase demand and require more energy. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

The river dwellers are gaining independence as fisherpeople and reducing their conservation and transport costs, which results in higher profits and better productivity and quality of the fish, Oliveira summarised.

This process points to the beginning of transformations in Santa Helena and the other 18 communities of the Rio Negro Sustainable Development Reserve (RDS), an environmental conservation area of 103,086 hectares in which its inhabitants remain, taking advantage of their natural resources but in a sustainable way.

The reserve was created in 2008 after eleven dwellers were arrested for illegal logging and sparked a movement for traditional peoples’ rights, sources of income and dignified livelihoods.

Negotiations with the Amazonas state authorities in the capital Manaus resulted in the creation of the RDS. As a result, the inhabitants of the reserve gained the exclusive right to fish in the local section of the Negro River and the departure of the companies that carried out industrial and predatory fishing.

The riverside dwellers became fisherpeople on a commercial scale and today have 13 boats, almost all of them with a capacity of five tons of fish. The ice factory has taken activity to a new level, even if the drought temporarily threatens the activity.

Timber extraction is limited to personal use and sustainably managed forests. Fishing, ecotourism and the cultivation of cassava (manioc), from which flour is made in the various “flour houses”, are the main sources of income.

Lucilene Ferreira de Oliveira, the inn’s cook, also produces meals for sale at her home, an activity that requires sufficient energy for her refrigerators and electric oven, in the small community of Santa Helena do Inglês, in Brazil’s northeastern Amazon. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

An example

This is a model to be replicated in the many Amazonian riverside communities, according to Valcleia dos Santos Lima, manager of sustainable community development at FAS.

The community of Bauana, in the municipality of Carauari, in the southwestern Brazilian Amazon, has already installed a plant with 80 photovoltaic panels and 32 batteries. In this case, the idea was to launch “a productive chain of factories that benefit from andiroba and murumuru oil,” this graduate in public policy management told IPS.

These are two Amazonian species, respectively a tree and a palm tree (Carapa guianensis and astrocaryum murumuru) whose fruits produce oils for medicinal and cosmetic use.

Energy is key for Amazonians to thrive, to add value to bio-economy products and to promote community-based tourism. In addition, almost one million inhabitants of the Amazon do not have electricity and 313 of the 582 communities in which the FAS operates only have it for four hours a day, Lima recalled.

“In this context, it is important that renewable energy can meet social demands as well as the demands of the economy and employment,” she concluded.

Ressembling moon craters, Brazil's micro-dams - barraginhas in Portuguese - have become a successful solution for storing water and preventing soil erosion in rural areas. Credit: Luciano Cordoval

By Mario Osava
SETE LAGOAS, Brazil, Dec 11 2024 (IPS)

They look like attempts to copy the moon’s surface, in some cases, as craters multiply in the grasslands. But they are actually micro-dams, barraginhas in Portuguese, which have spread in Brazil as a successful way to store water and prevent soil erosion in rural areas.

The creator of the project encouraging these holes is Luciano Cordoval, an agronomist who works for the state-owned Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) in Sete Lagoas, a municipality of 227,000 people in the state of Minas Gerais, central Brazil.

He recommends the barraginha should be 16 metres in diameter and deep enough to hold 1.2 metres of water. Its earthen edges rise 80 centimetres above the water level, with a spillway for the excess. In practice, these dimensions vary greatly.

The Barraginhas Project, promoted by Cordoval from Embrapa in Sete Lagoas, which is mostly dedicated to maize and sorghum research as one of the company’s 43 units, was directly involved in the construction of some 300,000 micro-dams, estimates the agronomist.

But the innovator believes that in all they reach two million throughout the country, as many institutions, companies and municipalities have adopted the innovation, recognised as a social technology, and spread it on their own initiative.

Cordoval’s intense training activity contributes to this, calling the disseminators of his barraginhas, who stand out in various regions of Brazil, his “clones”. The agronomist also promotes exchanges among municipalities, in which groups that have already built many micro-dam farms pass on their knowledge.

These micro-dams are suitable for land with a low slope. Embrapa recommends not to build them on slopes steeper than 15%.

For steeper slopes, Cordoval suggests another way of retaining water, which he called “contour lines with cochinhos”, i.e. ditches that follow the contour lines but are interrupted by a succession of water tanks in the form of troughs, which in Brazil are called cochos de agua.

Large landowners and small farmers recognise the benefits of these ways of retaining rainwater. In many cases, water shortages disappeared, springs were revived and with them small watercourses.

Antonio Alvarenga, owner of 400 hectares in Sete Lagoas, is an exemplary case of pioneering. He built his first 28 micro-dams with support from Cordoval in 1995, two years before Embrapa’s Barraginhas Project was formally launched.

He continued to build them and estimates to have added “more than 100” to the initial 28. The farm of degraded and dry land was totally modified. The recovery of the water table has allowed him to have an “artificial” 42,000 square metre lagoon and to quadruple the number of cattle on his property.

The water retained in the micro-dams feeds the water table that makes the lagoons viable and recovers the wells that are the source of drinking water for millions of rural families in Brazil. This is proven by photos that show the water level in the wells rose a little after the construction of the barraginhas.

The success of the micro-dams is especially evident on degraded land, which is estimated to exceed 90 million hectares in Brazil, mainly due to extensive cattle farming.

The aim is to restore moisture in a large part of the country, affected by deforestation, agricultural expansion and other human activities.

Climate change aggravates water scarcity in a wider territory, especially in the Semi-Arid, which covers 100 million hectares in the interior of the Northeast region, and in the Cerrado, Brazil’s savannah-like region, which extends over 200 million hectares.

In addition to micro-dams, contour ditches and other forms of rainwater harvesting reduce the erosion that impoverishes the soil and silts up rivers in Brazil.

A type of barraginhas, generally smaller in size, which also proliferate in Brazil, are built alongside roads as a way of preventing erosion.

This G20 ministerial meeting, held in Rio de Janeiro on February 28 this year, discussed the global energy transition, with biofuels as a central issue. Credit: Paulo Pinto / Agência Brasil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 5 2024 (IPS)

Holding this year’s presidency of the Group of 20 (G20) large industrial and emerging economies is allowing Brazil to push forward the dream of creating a global biofuels market without the current trade barriers.

Brazil is trying, at least since the beginning of this century, to free up global trade in ethanol, but so far without success. The scenario is more favourable now, with the worsening of the climate crisis and other countries joining the production and consumption of bioenergy.

Presiding the G20 this year, Brazil is in charge of the issues and projects to be discussed, creating working groups and promoting agreements, which will crystallise at the group’s annual summit to be held on 18-19 November in Rio de Janeiro.“There is a conflict of interests, of split personality. If Brazil wants to lead in biofuels, it must rule out new oil exploration”: Pedro de Camargo Neto.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government has promoted social issues and included biofuels as a central aspect of the energy transition. Several of its proposals were approved in sectoral working groups or meetings of ministers, experts and civil society throughout 2024.

“The current context, driven by Brazil’s more active leadership in the G20 and regulatory progress on alternative fuels, offers a more optimistic outlook for the country’s success in expanding its biofuels market,” summarised Rafaela Guedes, senior fellow at the Brazilian Centre for International Relations (Cebri).

“The focus is no longer limited to ethanol,” she said in an interview with IPS in Rio de Janeiro. New products, such as sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and bio-bunker for maritime transport, open up multiple markets and reduce the risk of dominant suppliers.

These are joined by biodiesel and green diesel, both derived from animal and vegetable inputs but different in their production process and properties, the latter being chemically identical to fossil diesel.

Then there is ethanol, already produced on a large scale, and biomethane, equivalent to natural gas and the product of refining biogas extracted from animal manure, and agricultural, urban and industrial waste.

All these products gained new regulations and incentives in Brazil through the so-called Future Fuels Law, passed by the legislative National Congress in September and effective from 8 October 2024.

The new legislation should attract investment and reduce trade barriers by defining rules and standards in a country that leads biofuel production and presents itself as “a supplier and also a strategic partner for innovation and energy security”, said Guedes, an economist specialising in energy transition.

The biogas and biomethane plant of Cocal, a company that produces ethanol and sugar from sugarcane and biogas, biomethane and other derivatives from waste, in Narandiba, in the southern Brazilian state of São Paulo. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Fear of dependence

Ethanol thrived as a free trade fuel partly out of fear of being held hostage by a few producers. Brazil and the US account for around 80% of its global production, with 35.4 billion litres and 58 billion litres respectively in 2023.

Brazil tried to encourage production in countries with high production or potential for increased sugar cane planting, such as India, Cuba and Mexico, in order to lower barriers to international ethanol trade.

In addition to the fear of dependency, environmental and food security concerns remain another stumbling block. It is argued, especially in Europe, that bioenergy takes land away from food production.

That was the claim of Cuba, which until the 1980s was the world’s largest exporter of sugar, but whose sugar cane production subsequently fell to the point where it is now practically limited to supplying the domestic market of 10 million inhabitants, who are suffering from a severe energy crisis.

But now India, previously reluctant, has joined ethanol production, as have other countries, since its consumption, blended with gasoline, has spread to more than 70 countries. Investment in biofuels has increased in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“This diversification of producers reduces the possibility of monopolies” and thus the fears of dependency, according to Guedes, who says growth in the production capacity of emerging countries and the consequent expansion of global supply are favourable factors for a freer global market for biofuels.

“India has invested heavily in biofuels in its energy security and emissions reduction strategy. Its policies of using agricultural waste to produce ethanol and biodiesel contribute to increasing its productive capacity, as a potential exporter in the medium term,” she cited as an example.

Other Asian and Latin American countries are using their abundant biomass and organic waste resources to produce bioenergy, biomethane and green diesel, in what represents another model.

Rafaela Guedes, an economist specialized in energy transition, believes conditions are favourable for the creation of an international biofuels market, as Brazil desires. Credit: Cebri

Inputs are waste, not food

Restrictions based on food security were also relaxed because biofuels are largely made from waste, whether agricultural, urban or industrial.

Second-generation (2G) ethanol, made from waste such as bagasse, is another solution. The United States and Brazil have plants producing it, which are set for rapid expansion.

In Brazil, Raizen, a large sugar and bioenergy producer with the participation of the British oil consortium Shell, has been operating its first 2G ethanol plants since 2015 and estimates that this technology can produce 50% more ethanol than a similar area planted with sugarcane.

Guedes also adds that the International Energy Agency has defined sustainable agricultural practices, such as crop-livestock-forest integration, which is expanding in Brazil, traceability in production chains and criteria for defining sustainable energy, which strengthen confidence in biofuels that benefit the climate.

These are policies that promote so-called low-carbon agriculture, preserve soil quality and ensure that Brazil’s agricultural frontiers can expand sustainably and without affecting food security, she said.

Ambiguity

But Brazil’s decision to promote biofuels, even internationally, causes bewilderment according to Pedro de Camargo Neto, a cattle rancher who leads a movement of agribusiness, that of large farmers, that seeks to reconcile his sector with environmentalism, after decades of stubborn antagonism.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (center) visited Raizen’s bioenergy park in Guariba, a sugarcane-producing municipality located 340 kilometers from São Paulo in southern Brazil, in May. Credit: Ricardo Stuckert / PR

“There is a conflict of interests, of split personality. If Brazil wants to lead in biofuels, it must rule out new oil exploration,” he told IPS by telephone from Bandeirantes, a municipality in the central-western state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where he has a farm.

He criticizes the intention of Petrobras, the national oil company, to drill near the mouth of the Amazon River in search of oil deposits.

Large oil deposits are believed to exist in the Equatorial Margin in northern Brazil, an extension of the sea basin that already produces oil in Guyana and Suriname.

New and abundant stocks would make oil and gas cheaper, to the detriment of biofuels, argued Camargo, who has previously chaired the Brazilian Rural Society, a key farmers’ group, and held top positions in the agriculture ministry.

“Brazil does not know what it wants,” he said.

This is because it promotes a free and global market for biofuels, for economic and environmental reasons, and at the same time wants to become an oil producer, to the detriment of the climate and its own strategy.

The country currently ranks eighth in the world in oil production, with 4.3 million barrels (each holding 159 litres) per day on average in 2023.

The country should advocate international measures to make fossil fuels more expensive. This would enable a biofuels boom everywhere, with increased investment in a market in which Brazil is already a leader. Europe has already taken steps in this direction, Camargo said.

Oil exploration near the mouth of the Amazon is blocked by demands from the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, which considered Petrobras’ evaluations and guarantees insufficient.

An authorisation or denial of exploratory drilling will be ‘technical’, based on local environmental impacts, according to Environment Minister Marina Silva.

This is a mistake, according to Camargo, who calls for a broader assessment, not because of the local consequences, but due to the global climatic effects, i.e. greenhouse gas emissions, and because of the economic strategy of prioritising biofuels, which also favours the country’s foreign policy.

Biogas is a champion of sustainability, offering clean, renewable energy and helping to solve the organic waste problem by transforming it into biofuels, says Alex Enrich-Prast, a professor at universities in Brazil and Sweden. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 7 2024 (IPS)

“I don’t know of a more sustainable technology for the transformation of society than biogas,” said Professor Alex Enrich-Prast, an activist for this energy alternative with a highly diversified and decentralised expansion in Brazil.

It is not only a renewable and clean energy source, obtained by the anaerobic degradation of organic waste, he argued before entrepreneurs and stakeholders gathered at the 11th national Biogas Forum on 2-3 October in Rio de Janeiro.

Biogas, he added, is also key to the world’s ability to deal with rubbish and waste in general, a problem that punishes humanity, which makes this energy circular.“Biogas follows segmentation by type of substrates. Its business model for sugar cane is different from that of pig farming, dairy cattle, basic sanitation, and other crops”: Cícero Bley Junior.

A researcher on the subject at Brazilian universities and at Linkoping University in Sweden, biologist Enrich-Prast surprised his audience by saying that “biogas, in Brazil, is more relevant for the production of biofertilisers than for energy”.

In Europe, the expansion of this energy source responds to the ‘geopolitical strategy’ of reducing dependence on Russian gas in a continent whose temperatures require heating. The war in Russia-invaded Ukraine uncovered the drama.

In the case of Brazil, a tropical agricultural power, the dependence on imported fertilisers, which account for more than 80% of national consumption, stands out, explained the professor.

As Russia and Ukraine are major suppliers of fertilisers, the war prompted an increase in domestic production, to be partially covered by waste whose biodigestion generates both biogas and an improved manure, rid of gases. The resulting fertiliser, which contains micronutrients, can produce a better fertiliser than chemical ones.

In addition to the geopolitical and economic risks, imported fertilisers are of fossil origin, undermining the low-carbon agriculture that Brazil is trying to promote as part of its climate change mitigation goals.

Renata Isfer, president of the Brazilian Biogas and Biomethane Association that promotes the Biogas Forum, an annual meeting, which took place in Rio de Janeiro in September. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

High cost is the stumbling block

“The difficulty is the cost. Biofertilisers are still more expensive than fossil or mineral fertilisers, and agriculture is not willing to pay that price,” Renata Isfer, president of the Brazilian Biogas and Biomethane Association (Abiogás), the forum’s promoter, told IPS.

Technological advances and the scale of production could reduce costs, but the global market’s environmental demands could lead to a faster path by setting more sustainable and less polluting production, she acknowledged.

In any case, “biogas is vital. There will be no human colonisation on Mars without biogas there,” Enrich-Prast, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro currently on loan to his counterpart in São Paulo, told IPS.

In the midst of his teaching, the specialist promotes cooperation between Brazil and Sweden. Together with other researchers, he founded the company Inova Biogás, with the aim of contributing to energy productivity and the quality of biofertilisers.

He values the experience of Europe, where biogas, which when refined becomes biomethane equivalent to natural gas, is now a significant energy input, having explored much of its potential.

In Brazil it is an emerging industry, still lacking in public policies, investments, proprietary technologies and regulations, which is being developed through private, sectoral and experimental initiatives and is designing an expansion through local arrangements, in a territorial decentralisation and by productive ecosystems.

A truck that uses biomethane as fuel and can travel more than 500 kilometres with its eight yellow canisters. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Segmentation

“Biogas follows segmentation by type of substrates. Its business model for sugar cane is different from that of pig farming, dairy cattle, basic sanitation, and other crops,” summarised Cícero Bley Junior, an icon of the sector, currently with his consulting company Bley Energías.

“Everything is biogas, but biogas is only part of the process and the business”, from the activities that generate the substrate or input for biodigestion to the biomethane used in various types of industry, in trucks and other vehicles, he said.

Founder, first president and current president emeritus of Abiogás, Bley drove the biogas movement in southwest Brazil when he was superintendent of renewable energy at Itaipu Binacional (2003-2016), the hydroelectric power plant shared between Brazil and Paraguay on the border between the two countries.

A business model is emerging around the agro-industrial cooperative Primato, in Toledo, a municipality of 150,000 inhabitants in the west of the southern state of Paraná and the country’s largest producer of pork, where Bley currently concentrates his work.

In the transport of animal feed alone, the cooperative has 70 trucks, each of which travels an average of 200 kilometres a day using diesel.

The plan underway to replace fossil fuel with biomethane would result in huge cost savings and a reduction of 89% in greenhouse gas emissions, he said.

Local arrangements are emerging or may emerge all over the country, with an abundance of biomass, from the melon-producing export area in the northeastern state of Alagoas, to another nearby fishing community that grows and consumes cassava, to the heart of the Amazon with many macrophytic aquatic plants, he said.

For the time being, the main production of biogas and biomethane is concentrated in older landfills and in more recent years in sugar cane ethanol plants.

Biogas and biomethane plant of a power plant of Cocal, an ethanol and sugar producer in the west of the southern Brazilian state of São Paulo. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Local production and consumption

One of these, Cocal, in the west of the southern state of São Paulo, supplies part of its biomethane to the gas market in three nearby cities. For this purpose, Necta, which distributes natural gas in most of the state, has built a local pipeline network.

This is also planned to supply a 16-plant ceramics cluster in Santa Gertrudes, another small São Paulo city of 24,000 inhabitants. But this is not the priority of Comgás, the gas distributor in the east of São Paulo state, which includes Santa Gertrudes.

A major problem in the ceramics pole, the city’s air pollution has been reduced by the adoption of natural gas as an energy input, instead of the former use of coal and firewood, according to David Penna, the company’s engineering manager.

The current priority is the replacement of diesel consumption by trucks on the roads with biomethane, which is considered equivalent and does not require technological alterations to vehicles.

Studying the flow of trucks on the roads with statistics is now one of the tasks undertaken by several natural gas distribution companies to identify priority locations for future refuelling stations.

But these are long-term plans, as replacing diesel trucks with gas-powered ones takes time, since these vehicles have a long service life and the automotive industry is slowly increasing production of gas-powered trucks, Penna told IPS during the Biogas Forum.

(Re)energisa, an energy transition company, part of the Energisa electricity generation and distribution group, has also embraced biogas, after concentrating on solar photovoltaics.

It is installing a plant in Campos Novos, in the centre of the southern state of Santa Catarina, Brazil’s largest pork exporter, to generate 25,000 cubic metres of biomethane per day, using waste from the surrounding meat and dairy industry.

It solves the problem of waste from local industry, but the focus is on the production of biofertilisers through composting, according to Roberta Godoi, vice-president of Energy Solutions at (Re)energisa.

Iná de Cubas next to the biodigester she obtained with the Energy of Women of the Earth project, in the municipality of Orizona, in the Brazilian state of Goiás. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
ACREUNA / ORIZONA, Brazil , Aug 26 2024 (IPS)

A community bakery, family production of fruit pulp, and the recovery of water springs are some of the initiatives of the Energy of Women of the Earth, organised since 2017 in the state of Goiás, in central-western Brazil.

A common resource is non-conventional renewable energy sources, such as solar and biomass, which are fundamental to the projects’ economic viability and environmental sustainability.

The network includes 42 women’s organisations in 27 municipalities in Goiás, a state that, like the entire central-western region, has an economy dominated by extensive monoculture agriculture, especially soybean, corn, sugar cane and cotton.

It is an adverse context for small-scale family farming, due to low population density and distant urban markets. A movement to strengthen the sector has intensified in this century, with the Agro Centro-West Family Farming Fairs promoted by local universities.

There are 95,000 family farms in Goiás, 63% of the state’s total number of farms.

“The network is the link between the valorisation of rural women, family farming and energy transition,” Gessyane Ribeiro, an agronomist who coordinates the project that uses alternative energy sources to empower women in agricultural production, told IPS.

The Energy of Women of the Earth project, which generated the network, is promoted by Gepaaf, a company known by the Portuguese acronym of its name, Management and Elaboration of Projects in Consultancy to Family Agriculture, and born from a study group at the Federal University of Goiás.

Non-repayable funding from the Caixa Economica Federal, a state bank focused on social and housing support, allowed the company, in partnership with two institutes and the university, to deploy actions involving 92 women farmers and to set up 60 family projects and another 16 collective projects until June 2023.

In Acreúna, a municipality of 21,500 inhabitants, 14 women farmers run a bakery that provides a variety of breads, pastries, cakes and biscuits to local public schools, which have around 3,000 students. They are women from the Genipapo Settlement, where 27 families received plots from the government’s land reform programme.

Solar energy made the settlement’s Residents’ Association’s enterprise viable, along with basic education schools in nearby towns. The National School Feeding Programme requires beneficiary schools to allocate at least 30% of their purchases to family farming.

In Orizona, a municipality of 16,000 people, Iná de Cubas received a biodigester and eight photovoltaic panels, which generate biogas and electricity for its production of fruit pulp, also for school meals.

Another technology distributed by the project, the solar pump, recovered and preserved one of the springs that form a stream in Orizona. The equipment, powered by solar energy, pumps water from the spring to a pond belonging to Nubia Lacerda Matias, where her cows quench their thirst.

Before, the animals went straight to the spring, fouling the water and damaging the surrounding forest. The area was fenced off, protecting both the water and the vegetation, which grew and became denser, to the benefit of the people who live downstream.

Indigenous people gathered in Brasilia during the Free Land Camp, which is held every April in the capital, demonstrate against the time frame law, with the National Congress building in the background. Credit: Gustavo Bezerra / IndiBSB

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 20 2024 (IPS)

A never-ending battle threatens the indigenous rights that seemed clear and secure in Brazil, until the extreme right emerged in 2018 with a force challenging the civilisational advances set out in the Constitution.

After three decades of progress in the demarcation of their territories and other victories, Brazil’s indigenous peoples have suffered setbacks since the administration of former president Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022). Now that the government is friendly to their demands, they face an insidious enemy: the time frame.

“I see no prospects for a favourable solution,” admits Mauricio Terena, a lawyer and coordinator of the legal department of the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (Apib), formed by the country’s seven main indigenous organisations.“The rights of the indigenous minority are the negotiable part within a larger negotiation to calm the alleged democratic crisis. But granting a snack to mitigate the crisis feeds the monster that the STF wants to devour”: Juliana Batista

“We are worried, our expectations are not good”, agreed Juliana Batista, a lawyer at the Instituto Socioambiental, an indigenous and environmental non-governmental organisation.

Both are referring to the conciliation process convened by the president of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), Gilmar Mendes, in search of an agreement on the indigenous lands, between the indigenous peoples themselves and the legislators who passed a law in the National Congress imposing a time frame.

This time frame, a rule limiting indigenous peoples’ rights only to the lands they had occupied up to 5 October 1988, the day the Constitution was enacted, is the weapon of a far-right offensive that has sown uncertainty and setbacks among indigenous peoples.

On 21 September 2023, the STF deemed this framework unconstitutional, after years in which this notion, embraced by some judges, prevented several demarcations. The Constitution assures indigenous people “original rights over the lands they have traditionally occupied”, which is the opposite of a date.

But Congress rebelled against this ruling and six days later passed a law setting the time frame and amendments that weaken indigenous autonomy and the protection of their territories.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva vetoed most of the measures, including the time frame. But three months later Congress overrode the veto, in an open challenge to the president, the STF and the Constitution.

The makeshift camp where indigenous Guarani-Kaiwoá people live in Douradina, a municipality in the central-western state of Mato Grosso do Sul, awaiting the final demarcation of their territory. In July and early August they were attacked by landowners’ gunmen, who wounded 10 people. Credit: Bruno Peres / Agência Brasil

The risks for indigenous peoples

“Conciliation has no sense on a thesis that the Supreme Court has already deemed unconstitutional. It looks like a move of self-preservation by the Supreme Court in its disputes with Congress,” Terena told IPS, referring to the worsening conflicts between the two branches of government that have been roiling Brazilian politics for the past five years.

The STF’s battles, previously more frequent with the executive branch due to Bolsonaro’s abuses of power and lies, including in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic, are now common with the legislative branch, where the extreme right has grown stronger, despite Bolsonaro being defeated in his 2022 bid for re-election.

Judge Mendes is reportedly trying to flexibilise the dispute, mainly with the “ruralistas”, the agribusiness caucus, the largest in Congress and upset by the STF ruling, which considers it hostile to rural property and a factor of legal uncertainty for the powerful rural sector.

To this end, it has set up a Conciliation Commission, a series of STF hearings when a matter under its consideration is particularly controversial and could become conflictive. In this case, it is made up of 24 members, mostly legislators and government representatives.

Apib has only six members and feels it has been left with a dramatic choice.

Terena belongs to this indigenous group that feels at a disadvantage and has threatened to withdraw from the negotiations at the first hearing, on 5 August, given the adverse rules for indigenous peoples dictated by Mendes, as rapporteur of the time frame processes in the STF.

The judge decided after that hearing to consult the indigenous communities before deciding. The second hearing will be on 28 August.

Indigenous people protest in front of the Supreme Federal Court in Brasilia on 3 March 2024 against the law that reinstated a time frame for the demarcation of indigenous peoples’ lands, which was deemed unconstitutional by the same court but remains in force, fuelling conflict. Credit: Rafa Neddermeyer / Agência Brasil

Contradictions weaken the Supreme Court’s role

Among the proposed rules, one states that if a party walks out from the negotiations these will not be interrupted. Another says that resolutions may be adopted by a majority vote. No conciliation is possible without one of the interested parties, nor is it imposed by a vote, Terena argued in his interview with IPS by telephone from Brasilia.

The decision must be delayed because there are many leaders to be heard and “many risks in withdrawing from or remaining in the commission,” said the member of the Terena people, one of the most numerous in Brazil, who live in the central-western state of Mato Grosso do Sul.

“I think the risks are greater in being present, because it would mean accepting these rules and legitimising a meaningless conciliation process,” the lawyer said.

Moreover, the indigenous people, the most affected party in this issue, are a minority in a commission that can vote on resolutions, Batista added.

The damage to indigenous rights is prolonged and accumulating.

The STF took two years to conclude the trial on the time frame and did not suspend the law’s validity, even though its main precept is unconstitutional according to the country’s highest court, the ISA lawyer pointed out.

“This contradiction weakens the authority of the STF. Mendes adopted a position that was more political than legal, so as not to confront the economic interests of a strong sector”, that of agribusiness, she also said by telephone from Brasilia.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva received in Brasilia on 10 August leaders of the Guaraní-Kaiwoá people, who live in territories that are too small or are fighting for the demarcation of their lands, sometimes under armed attack by large landowners. Credit: Ricardo Stuckert / PR

To the detriment of the minority

Batista warned that “the rights of the indigenous minority are the negotiable part, in a larger negotiation to calm the alleged democratic crisis. But granting a snack to mitigate the crisis feeds the monster that the STF wants to devour.”

Terena stressed that since it seems unfeasible to defend the constitutionality of the time frame, “the object of the negotiation” by the ruralists is the compensation to landowners for the land in their possession that they may lose when indigenous rights are restored, and the economic exploitation, be it mining, agricultural or other, of the demarcated territory.

So far, those occupying land recognised as indigenous are only entitled to compensation for the improvements and works they have contributed to the territory, where economic activities are restricted and subject to indigenous acceptance.

Anti-indigenous forces may also benefit by putting obstacles to the demarcation of reserves, to delay the process. Compensation for those with legitimate land titles, a measure already approved by the STF, could make many demarcations unfeasible for a government with severe fiscal constraints, Batista said.

“What happens to indigenous people who do not get the land they need and are entitled to? Forced assimilation by the surrounding society, but also many deaths, including in conflicts over land, suicides of those who are not assimilated,” he warned.

The intended conciliation should prioritise obtaining “land to compensate and resettle occupants of territories under demarcation”, and for the growing indigenous population, said Marcio Santilli, a founding partner of ISA, in an article published by the organisation.

Genocide

The indigenous population, estimated at three to eight million when the Portuguese arrived in Brazil in 1500, fell to 294,131 in the official 1991 census, which for the first time counted those who declared themselves indigenous. Previously they were considered to be mestizos.

Historical genocide flared up during the military dictatorship (1964-1985). But it was precisely during this period that resistance manifested itself in the reaffirmation of indigenous identity and the struggle for rights, recognised in the 1988 Constitution, at least in relation to their land.

Three decades of democracy and constitutional rights prompted a renaissance of indigenous peoples that was reflected in the 2022 census: a total of 1,693,535 declared themselves indigenous, 5.7 times the 1991 population.

The Constitution encouraged the demarcation of 451 indigenous territories, 84.6% of Brazil’s total, in the three decades following the military dictatorship, according to data from ISA, which accumulates an extensive database on indigenous peoples.

But that progress was interrupted during the Bolsonaro government, a representative of the same forces that backed the military. The current administration has resumed demarcations and other indigenist policies, but with the limitations imposed by the power of the far right in Congress and in agricultural and religious sectors.

President Lula promised to ratify the 14 indigenous lands that were already demarcated and ready for final approval at the start of his government in January 2023, but four have yet to be ratified. Brazil has 533 of these territories already formalised, while another 263 are in various stages of demarcation.

A group of ‘barraginhas’, the micro-dams that retain water that runs off into the ground, benefiting vegetation and accumulating water in the soil to supply lagoons. Credit: Courtesy of Lucyan Vieira Listo

By Mario Osava
SETE LAGOAS, Brazil, Aug 18 2024 (IPS)

Water shortage is over, springs have emerged or become perennial, small ponds with fish have formed and pastures have become greener and more permanent, all thanks to the ‘barraginhas’, the Portuguese name given in Brazil to micro-dams that retain rainwater and infiltrate it into the soil.

This is a common claim among the many farmers who have adopted the technique developed and promoted by Luciano Cordoval, an agronomist and researcher at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), a public entity comprising 43 research centres throughout the country.“The more the climate crisis worsens, the greater the need to capture rainwater and accumulate reserves”: Luciano Cordoval.

Cordoval has worked since 1983 at the Embrapa Maize and Sorghum unit, based in Sete Lagoas (Seven Lagoons, in Portuguese), a municipality with a population of 227,397 in the southern state of Minas Gerais, where he further specialised in irrigation and soil conservation.

His Barraginhas Project was launched in 1997 with government investment. But the specialist has been promoting micro-dams long before as a way to “capture water from streams and promote its storage in the soil, avoiding erosion, sedimentation and environmental pollution, with increased volume in the springs”, according to his resumé.

Luciano Cordoval explains the functions of barraginhas in his office at the Maize and Sorghum unit of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation in Sete Lagoas, a municipality in central Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

One hundred micro-dams create a lagoon

Antonio Alvarenga, a pioneer of the initiative, built 28 micro-dams on his 400-hectare farm in Sete Lagoas in 1995, with the support of Cordoval’s project. “These were degraded and dry lands, affected by major erosion,” he recalled.

In a short time, the barraginhas filled and emptied several times and water began to flow in the lower part of the farm, which had previously been totally dry. The engineer by profession, who became a part-time cattle farmer, was then able to have his dream pond, which after extensions now covers 42,000 square metres of his land.

With the other micro-dams already built, he now has “more than 100” and has plans for another 40. The effect can be seen in the recovered springs and the abundance of water that allows him to irrigate the pastures in the dry season and double his livestock productivity.

“Before I used to raise only one cow on two hectares, today there are two animals on each hectare,” he told IPS in Sete Lagoas, highlighting the good results of the innovation.

“I became a producer of water, which fills my ‘artificial’ lagoon. Water is everything,” he praised. The benefits visible to the naked eye encouraged his neighbours to build their own micro-dams, with help from the mayor’s office. In addition, a television report helped spread the word about this ‘social technology’, as it is called.

Some of the micro-dams built in 1998, including on the farm of engineer Antonio Alvarenga. Credit: Luciano Cordoval

Also in the Amazon

In Floresta do Araguaia, 1,800 kilometres from Sete Lagoas, in the southeast of the northern Amazonian state of Pará, another cattle farmer, with some 6,000 hectares and 2,000 head of cattle, also points out impressive data.

“This part of Pará is not rich in water,” contrary to the general belief that it rains profusely in the whole Amazon region, says Pedro de Carvalho, a veterinarian from Minas Gerais, a state in southeastern Brazil, but who lives in the eastern Amazon since 1974.

“It rains a lot in the last two months of the year, but not the rest of the year,’ he told IPS in a telephone interview from his ranch. There is cerrado, a kind of Brazilian savannah, in the area, not Amazonian forest, he adds.

“I didn’t have enough water, I had to buy it from tanker trucks, and a lot of my cattle died of thirst,” he recalled.

But having been friends with Cordoval since they were young, he knew his ideas and began to build his barraginhas. He believes he now has 168 in all, although he is uncertain of the precise number. He bought an excavator to build and improve them, “because everything can be improved.”

João Roberto Moreira in the lagoon formed by water from springs revitalised by a chain of 11 barraginhas on the hill of preserved forests on his 200-hectare property in Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Some sceptics of such innovation in the region recommended artesian wells. “Pure ignorance. Where you draw water and don’t replenish it, it tends to run out. The barraginhas supply the water table,” he observed.

An example is Unai, a city in Minais Gerais, which drilled many artesian wells and then had to deactivate 70% of them, “because they dried up,” he explained.

In his case, he no longer needs to buy water, having it stored in ponds where there are fish. Animals such as the capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), a large rodent native to South America which lives around water, the collared peccary (Dicotyles tajacu, an American wild pig), various birds and even bees, wasps and ants have proliferated on his farm.

Carvalho, a veterinarian specialising in reproduction, was one of the pioneers of Amazon colonisation in the 1970s. He first settled near Araguaína, a municipality of 171,000 inhabitants in the north of the state of Tocantins, where he has a farm of “between 3,000 and 4,000 hectares”.

Today, however, he is more dedicated to the farm in Floresta do Araguaia, a municipality with only 18,000 people, but where he foresees a promising future due to the expansion of soya bean.

A group of 23 engineers from 20 African countries visited different experiences of the Barraginhas Project, a social technology of easy application to capture, collect and disseminate water in rural areas. Credit: Barraginhas Project Archive

The multiplication of water

The barraginhas have spread throughout Brazil, from large to small farms. Cordoval and Embrapa were directly involved in the construction of some 300,000, but he estimates there may be two million of these micro-dams nationwide.

The first project, sponsored by the federal government’s Water Resources Board starting in 1997, sought to build 960 units near Sete Lagoas, Cordoval recalled in an interview with IPS at his Embrapa office in Sete Lagoas.

Between 2005 and 2008, some 3,600 were built in the northeastern state of Piauí, in a project promoted by then congressman Wellington Dias, later governor of the state and now minister of Social Development.

From the beginning, a priority was to train disseminators. “The results often turn the beneficiaries into my ‘clones’, who incorporate the DNA of the barraginhas and disseminate them out of passion, without thinking about the money,” Cordoval said.

“Barraginhas are like financial savings. You should stockpile water when there is abundance, for times of scarcity. The more the climate crisis worsens, the greater the need to capture rainwater and accumulate reserves. The growth of the country, cities and population demands more water for water sustainability,” he explained.

In 2011, a group of 23 engineers from different parts of Africa came to Sete Lagoas to learn about the local experience with micro-dams.

This social technology has received several national awards that promote other technologies also seeking to produce or protect water.

This is the case of septic tanks and biodigesters that prevent contamination of the water table. They are small multi-purpose ponds with an impermeable canvas floor to prevent water losses and an irrigation system for family farmers.

An alternative for plots of land with a slope above 10%, which is the recommended limit for establishing barraginhas, is a linear ditch that follows the contour line and withstands torrents on slopes of up to 25%.

Barraginhas and their annexes are a health factor, by improving the availability of good quality water, reducing medical expenses and increasing family income. In addition, they contain erosion, thus reducing sedimentation of watercourses, Cordoval pointed out.

A variant of this technology is built on roadsides, precisely to prevent deterioration due to erosion.

Barraginhas also prevent erosion on unpaved roads near their edges. Credit: Courtesy of Luciano Cordoval

Reclaimed springs and wells

For João Roberto Moreira, a.k.a. Betinho, a small cattle farmer with a herd of about 50 dairy cows, the major benefit of the 11 barraginhas built in 1998 on the hill of his farm was to intensify and perpetuate the springs that supply the three families that share the 200-hectare property.

“It was a blessing. The springs used to dry up, the water didn’t drain to the houses and attempts to pump it failed. Now there is water all year round. I’ve never seen so much water reaching us by gravity”, through four hoses from the top of the hill, he said.

There is also water left over for three lagoons, where they raise fish.

In Cáceres, a municipality of 90,000 inhabitants in central-western Brazil, Samuel Laudelino Silva, a chemist and retired professor at the State University of Mato Grosso (Unemat), has built 43 barraginhas of different sizes and a kilometre-long ditch on his increasingly water-scarce farm.

A 208-metre deep well, which did not produce water after a landslide reduced it to a depth of 135 metres, now provides 2,640 litres per day, enough for essential needs on the farm. It has water starting at a depth of 48 metres.

“Governments should promote the large-scale installation of this technology, including as a way to mitigate the droughts and fires that have been plaguing the Pantanal, a large wetland area on Brazil’s border with Bolivia and Paraguay, in recent years,” Silva told IPS in an interview by email.

Cáceres is located in the upper Pantanal, in the state of Mato Grosso.

An igapó, a flood-prone wooded area on the Vuelta Grande of the Xingu River, with fruit on the dry ground. This is where the piracema, or fish reproduction, was supposed to take place, frustrated by the scarcity of water released by the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant on this stretch of the river in the eastern Brazilian Amazon. The fruits are lost and stop feeding the fish by falling on the ground and not in the water. Credit: Mati / VGX

By Mario Osava
BELÉM, Brazil, Jul 28 2024 (IPS)

The decade-and-a-half-long battle for life in the so-called Volta Grande (Big Bend) of the Xingu river, a stretch of the river dewatered by the Belo Monte hydroelectric power plant in the Brazilian Amazon, has a possible solution, albeit a partial one.

The mega power project divided the waters of the Xingu. It has taken up most of the river and emptied the now 130-kilometre U-shaped Reduced Flow Stretch (TVR, in Portuguese), whose banks are home to two indigenous groups and a community, all affected by the depletion of fish, the basis of their livelihood.“We have become illiterate about the river, and the fish. We no longer know how to read what is happening in the river”: river dweller.

A proposal drawn up by these villagers and scientific researchers makes it possible to recover the minimum conditions for the reproduction of fish, which have declined since the plant began operations in 2016. The goal is to mitigate the project’s negative impacts on the people living in the area.

But Norte Energía, the concessionaire of Belo Monte, estimates that this alternative would cost it a 39% reduction in its electricity generation. The dilemma pits the vital needs of the riverside population against the company’s economic feasibility.

Belo Monte, 700 kilometres southwest of Belém, is one of major power and logistics projects that abounded in Latin America in the first two decades of this century. It is the third largest hydroelectric plant in the world, with a capacity of 11,233 megawatts and an expected effective generation of only 40% on average.

Josiel Juruna, speaking at a July meeting of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science, in the city of Belém, in the Brazilian Amazon. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

The Xingu river in the eastern Amazon region attracted energy interest because of its average flow of 7,966 cubic metres per second and the gradient that allowed Belo Monte to have its main power plant with a water fall of 87 metres.

But its flow has excessive variations, with floods 20 times higher than its low water level. With less than 1,000 cubic metres per second in low water, it lowers the plant’s average annual generation.

To prevent the flooding of the Volta Grande of the Xingu (VGX) and, within it, of the two indigenous lands of the Juruna and Arara peoples, a canal was built to connect the two points of the curve, diverting about 70% of the river’s waters and draining the life out of the curved section.

A sarobal, an island of stones and sand, prone to flooding in the Vuelta Grande of Xingu, in Brazil’s eastern Amazon. It used to be a fish breeding site, but lost that function due to the water shortage caused by the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant, which diverted 70% of the river’s water into a channel used for power generation. Credit: Mati / VGX

The power plant and the ecosystem’s disruption

In addition to taking away water, the project disrupted the environment, especially water cycles, and thus human, animal and plant life. “We have become illiterate about the river, and the fish. We no longer know how to read what is happening in the river,” said a river dweller at a hearing organised by the Public Prosecutor’s Office in August 2022.

Piracema, the upstream migration of shoals of fish during spawning, is vital to sustain livelihoods in the VGX, stresses Josiel Juruna, local coordinator of the Independent Territorial Environmental Monitoring (Mati).

Belo Monte deteriorated the quality of life of river dwellers by making piracema unviable.

That is why Mati, led by some 30 university scientists and local researchers, prioritised the monitoring and recovery of the piracema, understood as a site for procreation, apart from monitoring and measuring other ecological aspects in the stretch most affected by the hydroelectric plant.

An Independent Environmental and Territorial Monitoring team observes critical points in the low-flow section of the Xingu river, whose waters have been diverted to the canal that feeds the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant in the Brazilian Amazon. Credit: Courtesy of Juarez Pezzuti

As a result of their participatory research, launched in 2014 by the Juruna people and the non-governmental Instituto Socioambiental, in 2022 Mati presented to environmental authorities the Piracema Hydrograph, which indicates the flow necessary for the reproduction of fish in the VGX.

This is an alternative to hydrographs A and B, which govern the flow of water that Belo Monte releases to the VGX, in defined quantities for each month, to meet the conditions agreed for the operation of the hydroelectric plant. They are also called Consensus hydrographs, applied according to different pluviometric conditions.

These flows were defined in the environmental impact studies carried out by specialised companies, but paid for by Norte Energía, to obtain the license for the construction and operation of the plant.

A sample of the hydrographs that should govern the amount of water destined each month to the Vuelta Grande of the Xingu river to sustain its ecological functions. In purple and with flow figures for each month, the hydrograph proposed by indigenous people, riverside dwellers and scientific researchers to recover the lower and more productive piracemas. Credit: Mati / VGX

Piracema, key to river life

Indigenous people have always disagreed with these hydrographs because they do not ensure the necessary flow for maintaining the ecosystem, which is indispensable for the fish, the basis of their diet and the income they obtain from the sale of surplus fish.

It releases insufficient water at inappropriate times, ignoring the dynamics of the piracema, according to Juruna.

“The Belo Monte hydrograph only allows flooding in April, but the piracema requires lots of water between January and March, so that it fills the sarobal and igapós, where the female fish arrive to spawn and then the males for fertilisation,” he told IPS in Belém.

The word sarobal in Brazil defines an island of stone and sand, flooded and with vegetation of grasses and shrubs that provide food for the fish. Igapó is also a flooded area of banks and small waterways, with trees and vegetation that produce fruit and other foodstuffs.

Without water, the fish do not have access to their breeding grounds or to the fruits, which fall on the dry ground. Juruna often shows a video of a curimatá, a fish abundant in the Xingu, with dried eggs in its belly. It “couldn’t spawn” because there was no water in the piracema at the right time, he explained.

Apart from more water, the Piracema Hydrograph requires bringing forward the release of more water for the Vuelta Grande by at least three months. And maintaining the flood for a few months is also indispensable to feed the fish with the fruits falling in the water and not on the ground.

In fact, it is necessary to increase the flow of the VGX with ‘new water’ from November onwards, so that the fish start to migrate. “Without the right amount of water at the right time, there is no piracema”, the basis of river life, stresses a Mati report.

Fish killed by a fall in water flow in the Xingu river’s Vuelta Grande. Credit: Mati / VGX

Irrecoverable way of life

The Piracema Hydrograph will not restore the former way of life in the Vuelta Grande. That would require restoring past conditions, without the hydroelectric plant, admitted Juruna. His goal is to rehabilitate “the lower piracemas”, i.e. the sarobals and the floodable igapós with a little more water than what Belo Monte releases.

“The higher piracemas will no longer exist,” he lamented.

There will be no fish as before, the Juruna have already become farmers and mainly cultivate cocoa. A recovery of the piracemas will allow them to fish for their own food, but hardly for sale and income, he said.

Community life has declined among the indigenous people, who increasingly feed themselves on ‘city products’ and move more and more to Altamira, a city 50 kilometres away from the indigenous land of Paquiçamba, where the Jurunas live.

With Belo Monte, a road to the city was built and motorbikes have multiplied in the indigenous village, Juruna observed. Their way of life has been profoundly altered, but the indigenous people are resisting the death of their river and the Mati have added their traditional knowledge to scientific research.

Biologist Juarez Pezzuti, a professor at the Federal University of Pará, based in Belém, and a member of Mati, believes it necessary to dispel the idea of Belo Monte and other hydroelectric plants, especially those in the Amazon, as sources of sustainable energy.

“They emit greenhouse gases in a similar proportion to fossil-fuel thermoelectric plants,” he told IPS. In addition to flooding vegetation when the reservoir is formed, they continue to do so afterwards, because as their waters recede, the vegetation that will later be flooded is renewed.

Their downstream impacts are only now beginning to be studied. In the Amazon, they dry up the igapós, as has already been seen in the Balbina power plant near Manaus, capital of the neighbouring state of Amazonas.

It is a technology in decline, whose social, environmental and climatic costs tend to be better recognised and call into question its benefits, he concluded.

The historic headquarters of Belém's port administration is now being rebuilt as a 255-guest hotel, to host delegates to the climate summit to be held in late 2025 in the Brazilian Amazonian city. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
BELÉM, Brazil, Jul 25 2024 (IPS)

Hotels and other amenities may be lacking for participants at the 30th Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP30), in this northern Brazilian city in late 2025, but the bottom line is they will have a unique experience in the Amazon.

Discussing the Amazon in the Amazon itself distinguishes COP30 from its predecessors and contributes to more objective talks on the global climate crisis and to the resolution of long-standing demands of Belém, a true Amazon capital, according to Elizabete Grunvald, president of the Pará Business Association (ACP).

Belém is the capital of the state of Pará, in the eastern Brazilian Amazon.“No city, with the exception of megacities like New York or Tokyo, has the infrastructure for events like the COPs.": Elizabete Grunvald.

“The conference is an opportunity to unblock many projects that have been stalled for decades in the city,” Grunvald told IPS in an interview. As an example, she pointed to the luxury hotel that will emerge from the adaptation of an 18-storey building near the port, which served as the headquarters of the Federal Revenue Bureau until it burned down in 2012.

Twelve years later, the national government ceded the property to the state of Pará, which gave it in concession to the private sector for conversion into a hotel. COP30 has brought about drainage initiatives, the widening and repair of streets, the construction of urban parks and a large convention centre.

But the new hotel, with 255 rooms, a 230 square-metre presidential suite and six smaller special suites, will do little to reduce the city’s hotel shortage.

“Belém has 18,000 hotel beds, we would need another 30,000,” says Grunvald, who believes the estimation of 80,000 COP30 participants coming to the city is an exaggeration. She expects 60,000, nothing comparable to the almost 100,000 who attended the Dubai COP28 in 2023.

Elizabete Grunvald, president of the Pará Business Association, predicts Belém will have a positive transformation with the influx of investment and international tourists from the COP30. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Three cruise ships will serve as hotels, with a capacity of 7,000 to 8,000 guests. Three more ships could be added, according to the ACP president. For this purpose, the Guajará Bay, in western Belém and gateway to the Atlantic, will be dredged.

Campaigns will encourage residents, including wealthy mansion owners, to host or rent their homes to COP30 visitors. “They will earn dollars or euros and will be able to enjoy a pleasant holiday,” Grunvald argued.

Schools and other public buildings will be made available to participants on a budget. Schools will be on holiday during the conference and civil servants will telecommute to alleviate urban mobility.

The port of Belém, in Guajará Bay on the Atlantic, where at least three cruise ships will be anchored to serve as hotels for more than 7,000 participants in the climate summit in late 2025. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

A park for COP30

The official conference, organised by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), will take place in the City Park, currently under construction, which will include an airport and an area of 560,000 square metres that will house two convention centres, as well as other gastronomy and culture hubs, with theatres and museums, including one for aircraft.

It is the main urban project, along with 12 others, being developed by the mayor’s office and the government of the state of Pará. In all, investments will amount to the equivalent of US$750 million dollars.

Grunvald, who oversees the preparations for the mega climate event and mobilises the business community, is optimistic about what COP30 could represent for the development of Belém and the Amazon. It will attract investment and put the city on the global tourism route, she anticipates.

“No city, with the exception of megacities like New York or Tokyo, has the infrastructure for events like the COPs. But the shortcomings and failures do not erase the impression of visiting the Amazon, the contact with the peculiar goods and culture, different from the rest of the world. Participants will become our advocates,” Grunvald confided.

Two geographers and two urban planners were on the panel that debated Belém’s dilemmas on the road to the climate summit in 2025. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

She personifies the transformation the capital of Pará is going through, being the first woman to preside over the ACP, founded in 1819 as the second business association in Brazil, after that of the northeastern state of Bahia.

Although having the ‘business’ adjective in its name, it is a unique multi-sectoral guild, which also includes industry, services and even water business. Hence its broad interests in the climate conference.

COP30 also confronts Belém and its 1.3 million inhabitants with its climate adversity. It will be the second hottest city in the world by 2050, with 222 days of dangerous temperatures per year, with more than 32 degrees Celsius or 89.6 degrees Fahrenheit, predicted Carbon Plan, a US non-governmental organisation.

Only Pekanbaru, Indonesia, will surpass it, with 344 days of extreme heat. In third place, with 189 days, will be Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the venue for COP28.

The City Park is being built on the site of a former airport in the city of Belém, in the Brazilian Amazon. It will include two convention centres to host the climate summit in 2025. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Poor infrastructure

Today, Belém is a poor city, longing for its past prosperity as a gateway for goods and people to and from the Amazon, which is reflected in its historic downtown, expanded during the golden age of natural rubber in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It now faces the challenge of hosting thousands of foreign authorities, including dozens of heads of state and government, for COP30 in November and December 2025, with a poor infrastructure for hotels, transport and basic sanitation. Open sewage canals criss-cross the city.

Treated water reaches 71.5% of its population, but sewage covers only 15.7% and wastewater treatment is limited to 3.5%, explained geographer Olga Castreghini, a retired university professor currently involved in Amazonian projects, during the annual meeting of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science, held in Belém from 7 to 13 July.

Sewage canals litter the landscape of Belém, a city surrounded by water where drainage is vital and sewerage serves only 15.7 percent of the population. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Mega-events and their white elephants

The city’s challenges toward COP30 was the theme of a panel shared by two geographers and two urban planners from local universities, who are part of a group of researchers who gather to analyse the projects, the organisation and the legacy of the summit for Belém and the Amazon.

The bulletin Focus on the COP informs on the academic monitoring of what Castreghini defined as a “niche, not massive, mega-event”, which attracts participants focused on the environment and climate, “very interested in the Amazon.”

The geographer seeks to accompany “the conflicts between the urgencies of local society and the demands of the mega-event,” which could affect the sustainability of projects after COP30.

She recalled the white elephants and numerous unfinished works left by two massive mega-events of the past decade in Brazil: the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

The light rail transit system was abandoned after initial works in Cuiabá, capital of the central-western state of Mato Grosso. Some stadiums survive underused, while the Olympic Park deteriorates unused in Rio de Janeiro, as do neighbourhoods and airports built for the Cup in the northeast.

Architect and urban planner Helena Tourinho fears that, as usually happens in these mega-events, the process of gentrification will accelerate, with some neighbourhoods gaining value and their poor inhabitants being expelled to the outskirts of the city.

COP30 unleashed a wave of works that privilege some neighbourhoods to the detriment of the historic downtown of Belém. Tourinho told IPS that the investments in the city centre, taken care of by the mayor’s office, amount to the equivalent of US$14 million, while in other neighbourhoods they rise to US$185 million.

The historic downtown has suffered gradual degradation since the 1970s, stressed by an invasion of street and informal commerce, mostly in cheap Asian products.

“The environment being built over or emptied was not altered, unlike the nature of its activities,” said the urban planner, along with disasters such as fires and collapsed houses.

Without revitalisation or restoration programmes, the historic downtown of Belém, an urban asset, seems forgotten and under increasing siege by real estate businesses in the surrounding area, she concluded.

One of the terminals of the port of Açu on its inner side, in a channel dredged to a depth of 14.5 metres to receive vessels of up to 3.7 metres draught and a variety of cargoes. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
SÃO JOÃO DA BARRA, Brazil, Jul 10 2024 (IPS)

With barely 10 years in operation, the port of Açu is now the second in Brazil in cargo transport and seeks to become an industrial and energy transition hub. But so far it has contributed little to local development, causing environmental and social damage.

The megaproject, which is presented as “the largest private deep-water port and industrial complex in Latin America”, occupies 130 square kilometres in the municipality of São João da Barra, some 30 kilometres from the city and 320 kilometres northeast of Rio de Janeiro, in the state of the same name.

It channels 30% of Brazil’s oil exports and 24 million tonnes of iron ore transported through a 529-kilometre-long pipeline from the mine of the Brazilian subsidiary of the British transnational Anglo American, in Conceição do Mato Dentro, a municipality in the neighbouring southern state of Minas Gerais.“It’s an enclave without social, political and economic interests in the surrounding territory, with no connection to local reality": José Luis Vianna da Cruz.

In 2023, 84.6 million tonnes of cargo will pass through this port, 27% more than in 2022. This growth averages 30 % annually since it started operating in October 2014, according to its management.

“Here you can arrive and leave by sea and land without the queues of trucks that affect other ports, such as Santos,” Brazil’s largest, located in the neighbouring state of São Paulo, said Eugenio Figueiredo, president of the Port of Açu Operations management company.

Its location outside urban centres is one of the local advantages he mentioned to a group of journalists, including from IPS, who visited the port on 4 July. In addition, the main export products do not arrive by road. Oil comes by sea from offshore wells in the Atlantic and iron ore by pipeline.

The Port of Açu, the second largest cargo port in Brazil, stretches into the sea to receive giant ships destined to transport iron ore and oil. Credit: Wikimedia commons

The depth, of 14.5 metres at the terminals sheltered within a canal and 25 metres at the advanced jetty in the sea, is another favourable point to facilitate access for giant ships. Being private speeds up the operations, lacking the bureaucracy of public ports, according to Figueiredo.

So far, the company reports that it has invested the equivalent of 3.7 billion dollars in this mega-infrastructure, and plans to invest a further 4.070 billion over the next 10 years.

Oil, energy transition and industry

Being some 80 kilometres away from the Campos Basin, where offshore oil fields were discovered in the last four decades, allows Açu to offer a base for oil companies that is not only a port. A helicopter pad enables the rapid transport of people and light equipment to the oil platforms.

The large industrial area already hosts two flexible pipeline factories for deepwater oil exploration and extraction. A 1300 megawatt natural gas-fired thermal power plant is also operating in the area and another with a capacity of 1700 megawatts is under construction.

The president of the Port of Açu Operations, Eugenio Figueiredo. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Of the 130 square kilometres of the industrial port complex, 40 kilometres make up the Caruara Private Natural Heritage Reserve, the largest conservation area of restingas, a coastal ecosystem of sandy, not very fertile soils and low vegetation. The remaining 90 square kilometres are under port and industrial occupation, with 22 companies already installed.

The reserve was created after the company that owns it delimited the area of the port and industrial complex, with two objectives: the environmental protection of the restinga and, in the part closest to the urban centre, to prevent encroachment by the population.

The complex also aims at energy transition, initiated by the natural gas-fired power plants. Plans include the future production of green hydrogen, harnessing the great potential of photovoltaic and wind power generated in the sea near the coast, where favourable winds blow.

The increasingly large wind turbine blades will have to be manufactured locally, and space available for this industry is another advantage of the Açu complex, Figueiredo said.

The map shows the 130 square kilometres of the Açu Complex, with 40 kilometres in green representing the Caruara Reserve, a coastal ecosystem of sand, lagoons and low vegetation. The rest is destined for the port and the industries being installed in its logistic hub. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Logistical bottleneck

The port is now seeking to attract more agricultural exporters from the closest states, Minas Gerais and Goiás, already present since 2020. For this, Minas Port, one of the companies operating in the port, inaugurated on 4 July two warehouses with a capacity for 65,000 tonnes of grain.

“It is a super-port, with a fantastic terrain, successful in the export of iron ore and oil, and with a strategic location in the centre-east of Brazil, which demands large scale ports. But it has a fragility: its land connection”, said economist Claudio Frischtak, specialised in infrastructure and president of Inter.B Consultoría, interviewed in Rio de Janeiro.

The port is remote from major agro-export production regions and access roads are inadequate. Its future expansion depends on a railway connecting to the existing network of Brazil’s Vale group, the country’s largest iron ore exporter, which lies some 300 kilometres away, he said.

That distance could be more than halved if Vale builds an 80-kilometre section already agreed with the local government, and another 87-kilometre section under study.

But Prumo Logística, controlled by US fund EIG and owner of the port of Açu, is hoping that a railway will be built between Rio de Janeiro and Vitoria, the capital of the central-eastern state of Espírito Santo, which would reduce to 50 kilometres the stretch needed to connect the port to an extensive rail network, Figueiredo said.

Moreover, the success of the industrial project requires attracting investors, a difficult feat without “reasonable logistics”, with rail and good roads, said Alcimar Ribeiro, an economist and professor at the State University of Northern Rio de Janeiro (UENF).

Economic alternatives to the Açu complex are necessary because the Campos basin, a nearby source of oil, is already “mature”, with a declining production. “In 2010 it represented 87% of Brazilian oil production, today only 20%,” Ribeiro told IPS in São João da Barra.

Flexible pipes used in deep sea oil exploration, manufactured by the two industrial plants installed in the Açu Complex. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Far from local development

The area of influence of Açu, mainly São João da Barra, with its 36,573 inhabitants according to the 2022 census, and Campos dos Goitacazes, with 483,540 inhabitants, has been in economic decline for several decades, after the sugar cycle ended.

The port offers 7,000 direct jobs, including those of companies installed in the area, 80% of them to local workers, according to Caio Cunha, manager of Port Relations and the Caruara Reserve.

But most of them are temporary jobs, in the construction of port expansions and currently of the second thermoelectric plant, Ribeiro explained.

In addition, local employees are generally low-skilled, with outsiders being hired for more skilled jobs, says Sonia Ferreira, leader of the neighbourhood association SOS Atafona, a beach district in São João da Barra, which has lost more than 500 homes to erosion by the sea.

One positive effect of the port is that it has sparked young people’s interest in studying, she acknowledged. But she hopes the port will make structural investments in health, education and urban infrastructure, to effectively improve the quality of local life.

Caio Cunha, manager of Port Relations and the Caruara Reserve at the port of Açu. In the background, photos of native fruits. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

The central problem is that the megaproject is “an enclave without social, political and economic interests in the surrounding territory, with no connection to local reality. It only lacks a wall to separate itself, having its own heliport, hotel and shopping mall, for its self-sufficiency”, said sociologist José Luis Vianna da Cruz.

Having automated operations, the port and the companies located here employ few workers, said this professor at the Fluminense Federal University with a doctorate in regional development, by phone with IPS from Campos.

The megaproject did increase tax revenues for local municipalities, but did not reduce poverty nor unemployment in the region.

Da Cruz also questions the number of jobs reported by the port – 7,000 – and argues they would not compensate for the unemployment caused by the expropriation of the land of 1,500 families who lived there to make way for the port and industrial complex.

Many of these families received less than fair compensation or are still fighting for their rights, he added.

The current owners of the port are not to blame. It was the Industrial Development Company of the State of Rio de Janeiro (Codin) which prepared the land where the port is located at the beginning of this century.

But the salinisation of lagoons and the water table, which affected farmers and even the water for urban consumption, was due to the improper disposal of mud removed for deepening the canal where 11 port terminals were installed, according to Da Cruz, author of several studies on the socio-environmental impacts of local projects.

Osnir da Silva Rubez prepares the furrows that will take water from the São Francisco river to irrigate his crops in the Brazilian Semi-arid ecoregion. He refuses to join the local drip or micro-sprinkler irrigation system, which is more efficient in water use, fertilisation and soil protection. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
JUAZEIRO, Brazil , Jun 12 2024 (IPS)

Osmir da Silva Rubez refuses to join the drip system, and is the only one among the 51 families living in the Mandacaru Public Irrigation Project in Juazeiro, a municipality in the state of Bahia, in the Northeast region of Brazil, to maintain the furrows that carry water to their crops.

The São Francisco River, which rises in the state of Minas Gerais, near the centre of Brazil, and flows northeast, has boosted irrigated agriculture in its 2,863 kilometres, much of it in semi-arid territory, with rainfall averaging between 200 and 800 millimetres per year.

It is a privileged basin, located in a region that suffers from water scarcity, especially in the increasingly recurrent droughts, when small rivers and streams dry up.

Water availability, immense due to the river’s large flow, was increased by the construction of two hydroelectric dams North and South of Juazeiro, a city of 238,000 people, which has developed a fruit-growing industry, mainly for export.

Mangoes and grapes are the main local crops, grown on large private farms and in the irrigation projects of the state-owned São Francisco and Parnaíba Valley Development Company (Codevasf). Export activity highlights the contrasts and inequalities of the so-called Semi-arid ecoregion.

Drip irrigation hoses on an Agrodan farm on an island in the São Francisco River, in Brazil’s arid Northeast. The company claims to be the country’s largest mango producer and exporter. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Flood irrigation

“The ditches that were initially used for irrigation are wasteful in their use of water. Drip irrigation is mostly used nowadays, since it uses only the necessary water, is monitored by computers and measures of soil humidity,” explained Humberto Miranda, chair of the Bahia Federation of Agriculture.

“Before, only 30 per cent of the water was used, today more than 90 per cent is used, which means that little is lost,” he said during an IPS tour of various localities in Juazeiro to visit farms and organisations involved in the irrigation project.

In Mandacaru, the system that enabled the switch to drip irrigation, with ponds and pumping, was implemented in 2011, explained Manoel Vicente dos Santos, one of the first settlers in the project launched in 1973. “Irrigation by furrows was unstable, bringing more water to one plant than to others, a waste,” he recalled.

But Rubez resists the change. In addition to the investment required in pumps and hoses, the drip system uses a lot of electricity, about 1,000 reais (200 dollars) a month. “And I have no heirs to leave the system to,” the 60-year-old single man joked with IPS.

Suemi Koshiyama, a Japanese immigrant who became a large producer of grapes and mangoes in the São Francisco river valley, in arid lands in the municipality of Juazeiro, in northeastern Brazil, shows the hose that irrigates his vineyard, drip-fed from above and not on the ground. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

The drip system is a step forward in these irrigation projects. Apart from saving water, it improves soil management, reducing erosion and controlling chemical fertilisation by directing it to the roots through the water, says José Moacir dos Santos, general coordinator of the non-governmental Regional Institute for Appropriate Small Farming (Irpaa).

But irrigation projects, whether Codevasf or private, do not favour local development, concentrate income, nor offer seasonal jobs during harvests, and they promote inequality, Dos Santos criticised.

Prosperity for the few

The wealth amassed by export fruit farming stays in the hands of a few, but creates a perception of prosperity that attracts many poor people to Juazeiro and neighbouring Petrolina, a city of 387,000 people separated by the São Francisco river and linked by a bridge.

Migration to these two fruit-growing capitals of the Brazilian Northeast “swells their populations, especially their poor and infrastructure-poor peripheries, while emptying nearby cities,” said the activist, son of Manoel Vicente, one of the project’s settlers.

In his opinion, an “injustice” has been done, because the river supplies the fruit-growing industry that exports its water contained in the fruit to Europe, the United States and Japan. But it does not do the same for the entire riverside population, which also has to resort to other, more distant springs.

Water pumping station from the São Francisco river to irrigate fruit farming at a project near Juazeiro, a production and export hub for fruit, especially mangoes and grapes, in Brazil’s arid northeast. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

In addition, most of the farmers have no irrigation. Communities encouraged by the government many years ago and traditional farmers in the basin have no access to water from the river, nor to the financing or other public project perks.

The dominant monoculture of fruit trees forces food imports. Juazeiro and Petrolina, with a combined population of 625,000, produce less food for local consumption than Campo Alegre de Lourdes, a municipality 350 kilometres away with only 31,000 inhabitants, compared Dos Santos, an agricultural technician.

The flow of goods, with fruits leaving and other products arriving from various parts of Brazil, has transformed the Juazeiro Producer Market into Brazil’s second largest agricultural trade hub, surpassed only by São Paulo, a metropolis of 12 million inhabitants – 22 million if its large metropolitan area is added.

“The fruit-growing hub is an artificial system that concentrates the best soils and water of São Francisco on islands and generates the illusion of growth in Greater Juazeiro and Petrolina, where only 5 per cent of the land is suitable for irrigation, with water for only 2 per cent,” said Roberto Malvezzi, an activist with the Catholic Pastoral Land Commission.

Maciela de Oliveira Silva in the shop where she sells products from the Mossoroca and Region Family Farming Cooperative, such as sweets, jellies and liqueurs made from native fruits from the so-called “grassland fund”, a collective area where farmers extract fruit, produce honey and raise goats and sheep. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Suitable alternatives

For Malvezzi, who has a degree in philosophy and theology, the Semi-arid region’s main economic and productive vocation is small livestock, such as goats and sheep, rather than agriculture.

A mistake that has cost it multiple crises and impoverishment, as well as the environmental destruction of the Semi-arid region, was the historical expansion of cattle in Northeastern Brazil, whose interior is mostly semi-arid.

The industrial and commercial chain for goats should be developed, including slaughterhouses and services such as technical assistance and health surveillance, said Malvezzi, who was born in the state of São Paulo, studied philosophy and theology there, but lives in the Northeast since 1979.

The Semi-arid is a region of family farming, and for nearly three decades has seen a transformation process seeking to adapt its development to local conditions, including the climate. “Living with the Semi-arid”, which means rejecting colonial influences and impositions of the past, is the goal.

Main canal supplying an irrigation project with water from the São Francisco river in the Semi-arid region. Secondary canals and local pumps in the fruit orchards complete the system that replaced irrigation by flood furrows, practically abolished because of the waste of water. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Small animal husbandry, instead of water-intensive cattle farming, and rainwater harvesting, both for human and animal consumption and for agricultural production, are some of the proven and effective ways.

In the state of Bahia, a traditional agrarian singularity has been institutionalised, the “grassland fund”, a large collective land, managed for the extraction of native products, such as fruits, and the raising of goats and sheep. Horticulture is expanding strongly throughout the Semi-arid region.

The Family Agricultural Cooperative of Massaroca and Region (Coofama), in the municipality of Juazeiro, is an example of a grassland fund, whose jellies, liqueurs and other native fruit products, such as umbu, and honey, are sold on the nearby highway and in cities.

‘Quiosco da Umbuzada’ is the name given to the roadside shop in the village of Massaroca, and ‘Central da Caatinga’, a shop in the city of Juazeiro, sell the products of Coofama and other family farming cooperatives.

“Goats survive better in prolonged droughts, they eat leaves even from tall trees,” Coofama farmer Maciela de Oliveira Silva, who runs the roadside shop, where she works from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on a minimum wage, equal to 280 dollars, told IPS.

Eggs are another viable and promising food production in the Semi-arid, according to the Association of Small Producers of Canoa and Oliveira, led by Gilmar Nogueira Lino, owner of some 1,000 hens, also in the south of Juazeiro.

The association’s 60 families produced 17,444 dozen eggs in 2023, said Lino. “The hens are faster than goats, start providing income in a few months and don’t require large spaces,” he told IPS.

On his half-hectare property, the farmer has chicken coops and a shop that sells food, drinks and cooking gas. He also donated the land for the association’s headquarters. He only had to overcome the prejudice that “raising chickens is a woman’s business.”

A village with 9,144 solar panels about eight kilometers from Juazeiro, a city and municipality in Brazil's semi-arid Northeast region, hosts a failed electricity and income generation project, which for three years enabled investments in the urbanization and community development of the 1,000 resident families. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
JUAZEIRO, Brazil , Jun 10 2024 (IPS)

“I feel like a mother who lost her son to drugs, to vice, destroying himself,” says Lucineide da Silva, 56, mother of eight children and grandmother of 11.

With her lost son, she symbolizes a novel solar energy project that used the roofs of a village built by the government programme “My House My Life” in Juazeiro, a municipality with 238,000 people in the state of Bahia, in the Northeast region of Brazil.

The 174 two-story buildings, totaling 1,000 family housing units, turned into a small power plant, with 9,144 photovoltaic panels installed on their roofs. With an output of 2.1 megawatts and the capacity to supply 3,600 low-consumption homes, the installation generated electricity from February 2014 to October 2016.

In addition to self-supply, each family in the village earned income from energy surpluses sold to the local power distribution company. Of this income, 60 per cent was distributed among the villagers and 10 per cent went to equipment maintenance.

The remaining 30 per cent of the profits were invested in Morada do Salitre and Praia do Rodeadouro, the two complexes the unnamed village was divided into for community administration.

Lucineide da Silva helped install the solar panels, having been trained with other residents of the two complexes that make up the unnamed village in northeastern Brazil. Her efficient work and passion for the project earned her the nickname “Galician of the panels”. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Energy for community cohesion

This income enabled residents to urbanize the town, with trees, clean streets, speed bumps for vehicles and security officers. Also, two community centers were built, offering medical and dental care, as well as computer and sewing courses.

Such benefits helped build a real community, with a sense of belonging and social organization, the stated goal of the project, developed by the company Brasil Solair and financed by the Socio-environmental Fund of the Caixa Economica Federal, a state bank with social purposes.

“It’s the best of the My House My Life villages I know,” assured Toni José Bispo, 64, despite his criticism of the solar project. “I had no benefit, the panels break the tiles, better take them all off as a neighbor did,” said the food merchant, who built a store in the front yard of his house.

A Community Center built by one of the two complexes in the city of Juazeiro, with income from the sale of electricity. Computer and sewing courses, apart from doctors and dentists, were other benefits of the small photovoltaic power plant installed in the village in northeastern Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

The useless photovoltaic panels have caused widespread complaints since October 2016, when the state-owned National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel) cancelled the license to operate the small power plant.

The project had been launched with a license from Aneel, with a three-year deadline for it to comply with the specific regulation for distributed generation, up to five megawatts and carried out by the consumers, who can produce energy for self-supply and not for sale.

Brazilian regulation only allows “prosumers” (consumer producers) to deduct from their electricity bill the amount of energy generated and supplied to the distribution network, which is the basis for the development of community or distributed electricity. Certain types of association, such as cooperatives, allow this benefit to be shared, but without commercial purposes.

With the non-compliance by Brasil Solair, a company that disappeared from the market, and Caixa Economica Federal, the 9,144 photovoltaic panels remain for the last eight years a sad reminder of the project that was to be the inspiration of other My House My Life communities, which since early 2019 has provided 7.7 million homes.

Toni José Bispo’s small store, set up in front of his home, as is typical of the northeastern Brazilian town, has caused strong competition in a community with low demand and income. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Social decay

The town, with an estimated population of almost 5,000, is evidently in decay. Aging, fading walls, broken or missing roof tiles, garbage in the streets that was not noticeable during IPS’ previous visit in June 2018, are the most apparent signs. Some panels also appear damaged.

Violence and drug trafficking are other side-effects that can be attributed, at least in part, to the impoverishment of the local community.

Nicknamed “the Galician of the panels” because she excelled in their installation, Lucineide da Silva is “proud” of working on the project, as one of the trained villagers, and dreams of its restoration.

“We have many poor families. Solar energy would help them with their expenses, to have air conditioning to counter the heat, that is strong here”, he said.

“This complex is better than others, it gets top marks, but if the project were active it would be a reference for everyone”, said Da Silva, who rejected offers to continue installing panels, because she would have to work far away. She prefers to take care of children and senior citizens.

Gilsa Martins was an administrator in one of the two complexes organized for community management. She failed in her attempt to restore the photovoltaic energy and income generation project, but did not lose hope of giving back to her community the benefits of distributed generation. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Gilsa Martins, who was a community administrator of the Morada do Salitre complex during the good years while the project was active, and the bad ones that followed, still hopes to restore it. At 66, she is willing to “return to Brasilia” to negotiate with the government, as she has done in the past.

The useless photovoltaic panels have caused widespread complaints since October 2016, when the state-owned National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel) cancelled the license to operate the small power plant

“Everything is deteriorating as a result of the neglect we are subjected to, with no support from the public administration,” she lamented. The computer and sewing courses are cancelled, and without the income from the solar power plant “we no longer have dentists or doctors here, since the public authorities don’t contribute anything,” she added.

The numerous stores in residential front yards reveal a lack of income sources. Many try to survive with informal businesses in a local market with insufficient demand. “Too much competition and not enough buyers,” Bispo said.

“The local population is sustained by the jobs offered by the irrigation districts, including young people who finish high school, but they have no opportunities in nearby commerce and industry,” he explained.

Juazeiro is at the center of an irrigated agriculture hub, with water from the São Francisco river pumped to seven irrigated districts or perimeters where the government settled small, medium and large farmers, and to large independent farms that stand out as the largest producers of mango and grapes for export.

Hired workers commute daily on buses from these companies and from the districts, generally subject to the seasonality of the fruit. “They are our salvation,” said Martins.

The Bolsa Familia, a government income transfer program, also “protects many unemployed mothers. That’s why we don’t go hungry here,” he said.

But people complain about inadequate transportation. They only have one bus to commute to the city of Juazeiro, the municipal capital, eight kilometers away. It is a common adversity among My House My Life communities, usually located far from the city and its urban infrastructure and services.

A roof with solar panels and transformers installed on a neighboring building. This equipment is going to waste since the small power plant was shut down in 2016. Brazilian restrictions on distributed or community generation make its restoration difficult. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Solar roofs

Complaints against photovoltaic panels are also widespread, assured Martins. “Many complain of holes in the roof and blame them on the panels, others want them removed,” he said.

“Since the panels were installed I’ve had leaks in the roof, draining down the walls. Then they spread to one room and the corridor, then to two rooms. My husband plugged them with cement. We have already lost a bed and a closet,” explained Josenilda dos Santos, 37 and with five children.

She remembers having received income from electricity only for three months, 280 reais (about 120 dollars at the time) the first time and only 3 per cent of that the last time. “I will take all of them off, since they are useless, they only heat the rooms,” she concluded.

“The sun, like water, is a common wealth, but only capital appropriates it. Solar roofs for decentralized electricity generation can generate income for the population and reduce poverty, especially in the countryside,” according to Roberto Malvezzi, a local activist with the Catholic Pastoral Land Commission.

The failure of the My House My Life pilot project hinders a promising path, in addition to wasting 9,144 panels already installed on the roofs.

A view of the port of Atafona's fishing boats on the Paraíba do Sul River. The sedimentation of the mouth of the river makes it difficult for larger vessels to enter and they have started to operate in ports in other locations, with additional costs and losses for the economy of Atafona. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
ATAFONA, Brazil , May 17 2024 (IPS)

Coastal erosion has been aggravated by climate change and has already destroyed more than 500 houses in the town of Atafona in southeastern Brazil. Movements led largely by women are working to combat the advance of the sea and generate economic alternatives.

Atafona, one of the six districts of São João da Barra, a municipality of 37,000 inhabitants, is 310 kilometers by road northeast of Rio de Janeiro. It is a town with its own identity. Fishermen, who were joined by middle-class families from nearby large cities, built their vacation homes there.

Sonia Ferreira did so in 1980, when she lived in Rio de Janeiro. She moved permanently to Atafona in 1997, when she witnessed the disappearance of the three blocks that separated her house from the beach. In 2008, she saw the town’s tallest building—four stories—collapse across the street from her house.

She has photos recording the downfall of the building that housed a supermarket and a bakery on the first floor and a hotel upstairs. Her house would have been the next victim, but the sea granted her an 11-year grace period. “I will only leave when the wall around the house falls,” she would tell her family when they pressured her to move to a safer place.

Sonia Ferreira, 79, the president of SOS Atafona, stands next to the remains of a four-story building that the sea toppled in 2008. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

But from 2019 to 2022, the sea level started to rise again. “In 2019, the first piece of the wall fell. I fixed up the little house at the back of the lot and moved in, but I kept the big house with the furniture until 2022, when the water reached the house and the floor gave way,” she told IPS at her current home, near her daughter’s house.

“The sea does not hit in overpowering waves, but erodes the sandy soil, infiltrates underneath the buildings, undermines their structures, and the house is basically left hanging in the air,” she described.

In late 2022, she decided to demolish the “big house” in a painful process after sadly seeing the wall fall down in pieces. But then she could not live in the small house in the backyard, which was invaded by a large amount of sand, so she was taken in by her daughter. Widowed, she has two other children who live abroad.

At the age of 79, Sonia Ferreira channels her love for the area as president of SOS Atafona, an association with about 200 active residents, mostly women, who debate and lobby the public authorities for solutions to stop the advance of the sea and other problems in the neighborhood.

Sonia Ferreira stands in front of what was left of her home, which she decided to demolish in 2022 after coastal erosion knocked down its outer walls and washed out the sandy base, leaving just columns. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Fishermen Suffer Climate Injustice

“Fishermen have been hit the hardest,” she said, as vacationers have resources such as other homes.

The original settlers are the main victims of climate injustice in Atafona. The rising sea level and the intensification of the northeast wind not only destroyed their houses but also exacerbated the siltation at the mouth of the Paraíba do Sul River, limiting the access of boats to the fishing port on the river through a narrow channel.

Faced with the difficulties, the larger vessels prefer to deliver their fish to distant ports, some 100 kilometers to the north or south, at the expense of the local economy, lamented Elialdo Mirelles, president of the São João da Barra Fishermen’s Colony.

The president of the São João da Barra Fishing Colony, Elialdo Meirelles, is photographed at the repair port for fishing boats on the Paraiba do Sul River, near its mouth. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Meirelles estimates that about 400 fishing families lost their homes on Convivência Island, which was in the Paraíba do Sul River delta, where the problems began.

Only 200 families were given new houses by the government, while the rest were dispersed or have been living for years with the benefit of “social rent,” a small sum from the municipality to help pay for rental housing.

That is why he believes that the houses engulfed by the sea in the entire area numbered much more than the 500 or so estimated by the city government and that the erosion actually began before the 1960s, which is the time frame indicated by researchers.

Dunes are growing and threatening the streets and coastal housing in a part of Atafona Beach after the sea and sand destroyed more than 500 houses on the beach closest to the mouth of the Paraiba do Sul river. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

“I was born on Convivencia Island in 1960, where my grandfather and father lived. My father lost two houses there, I lost two, and two of my brothers lost one each. The northeast wind was the cause,” he said. In 1976, the government began to remove settlers from the island, and the last ones left in the 1990s.

Then many families living in Pontal, the end point of the river’s right bank, also lost their homes. “Five streets were submerged,” he noted. As the island disappeared, that mainland area lost a barrier against the wind, he said."The sea does not hit in overpowering waves, but erodes the sandy soil, infiltrates underneath the buildings, undermines their structures, and the house is basically left hanging in the air." —Sonia Ferreira

Meirelles, who sought a new home away from the shoreline on his own, represents 680 registered fishermen in his entire municipality of São João da Barra, 56 percent of whom are from Atafona.

Causes of coastal erosion

“Climate change definitely aggravated the problem unleashed by several factors, especially human action that reduced the river’s flow,” said Eduardo Bulhões, marine geographer and professor at the Fluminense Federal University.

The main factor was the transfer of water from the Paraiba do Sul river to the Guandu river system, which supplies nine million inhabitants of outlying areas of Rio de Janeiro and was inaugurated in 1954. Since then, there have been expansions that have drastically reduced the flow of water in the river that runs into Atafona.

The river rises near São Paulo and crosses almost the entire state of Rio de Janeiro—in other words, a densely populated area of 1,137 km. Its waters, destined for other cities, industries, and hydroelectric generation, lost the volume and strength to carry sediment to the delta at the mouth as a barrier against the sea.

In addition to engulfing Convivencia Island and many blocks of Atafona, the sea advanced upstream, salinizing many kilometers of water table and affecting the municipality’s water supply.

The collapse of houses due to erosion is also caused by their irregular construction on dunes that have always existed in the town and are growing on part of the beach, said Bulhões.

The northeast wind, which is intensified by climate change and pushes the waters that erode the constructions and the sands that threaten to clog the coastal road and nearby houses, contributes to this, he said.

A solution to coastal erosion depends on studies to identify long-term feasibility and effectiveness, and the city government is preparing terms of reference to contract the studies, reported Marcela Toledo, São João da Barra’s secretary of environment and public services.

Women-led projects

This municipality is also located in an area impacted by oil exploration in the Campos basin, offshore Rio de Janeiro state. Due to environmental requirements, the state-owned oil company Petrobras, the main explorer, is financing the Pescarte Environmental Education Project to mitigate and compensate for these impacts, carried out by the North Fluminense State University (UENF).

In the project, which is focused on fishing as the most affected activity, women constitute the vast majority. The main proposals approved were refrigeration plants, industrial kitchens, fishmeal factories and processing plants, said Geraldo Timoteo, a professor at the UENF and the head of Pescarte.

In the Pescarte team, initially looking at environmental education and now at production, 48 out of a total of 59 employees are women. Of the 14 supervisors, 11 are women.

Fernanda Pires, an activist seeking solutions that add value to fish, runs the Arte Peixe cooperative, which produces eight types of fish and shrimp snacks in Atafona, Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS.

The organization of artisanal fishermen and their families is the central objective of the long-term (2014–2035) project. It also seeks to increase income through expanding the use of fish and providing better access to markets and cooperatives.

Now the idea is to promote aquaculture based on experiments conducted at the UENF.

Pescarte has also accumulated knowledge about the world of fishermen. It conducted two censuses in the 10 participating municipalities in 2016 and 2023, Timoteo told IPS.

In the second one, 46 percent of the people interviewed were women and 21 percent of them were responsible for 100 percent of the family income. In 37.9 percent of the cases, they shared this responsibility with their husbands.

Fernanda Pires is one of the participants of Pescarte in Atafona. Her activism for fish processing as a way of adding value is reflected in her practice as leader of the Arte Peixe cooperative, which produces eight types of fish and shrimp snacks.

Founded in 2006 by her mother, Arte Peixe has 20 female members, seven of whom work directly in production. The profits are limited, serving as a supplement to the main income obtained from other work or employment. Pires is a municipal employee, but new markets open up prospects for better profits in the future.

The leading role played by women in overcoming the problems in Atafona, threatened by coastal erosion and the decline in fishing, is perhaps due to the fact that “they study more, and have greater concern for the future, and a stronger sense of community,” said Bulhões.

In Pescarte, its directors observe that while men prioritize fishing in itself, upgrading their boats and equipment, and are absent from the city, spending more and more time at sea every day, women take care of processing the fish, sales and adding value; that is, they focus more on the future of the activity and of their lives.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Note: This feature is published with the support of Open Society Foundations.

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Excerpt:

Loana Defaveri, technical manager of Cetric, is photographed at the bioenergy ecopark in Chapecó in southwestern Brazil. The aerial photo in the background shows the various components of the complex, which receives industrial waste and produces biogas, electricity, biomethane and other by-products. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
CHAPECÓ, Brazil , Apr 29 2024 (IPS)

Biogas sounds like redemption, the conversion of the sinner. Its production involves extracting energy from filth, from the most disgusting environmental pollution, and at the same time avoiding the worsening of the global climate crisis.

The Industrial and Commercial Solid Waste Treatment Center (Cetric) is dedicated to extracting biogas from the waste that abounds in the municipality where it is based, Chapecó, in southern Brazil. “Making use of industrial waste is an important and innovative niche in Brazil, opening up new paths for the emerging biogas market.” -- Heleno Quevedo

With a population of 255,000 and numerous meat processing plants, Chapecó is a main hub in the western part of the state of Santa Catarina, the largest national producer and exporter of pork and also a major poultry producer.

For this reason, biogas production is proliferating in the region, using manure from pig farms, partly due to pressure from environmental authorities to prevent animal waste from continuing to contaminate rivers and soil to the detriment of the environment and human health.

On Apr. 3, the Federation of Santa Catarina Industries launched the Decarbonization Hub program, with the goal of treating 100 percent of swine manure in the next 10 years, among other challenges to meet the agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It does not seem feasible, but it points in the right direction.

The Cetric group of companies was founded in 2001 with a specific mission: to take care of waste from nearby agribusiness and other smaller sources, from its evaluation and collection to its transportation, processing and disposal.

It then expanded nationally. Today it is active in 12 of Brazil’s 26 states, with four Bioenergy Ecoparks, including the first one in Chapecó, 17 transshipment units with warehouses and 19 emergency teams at strategic points.

“Making use of industrial waste is an important and innovative niche in Brazil, opening up new paths for the emerging biogas market,” said Heleno Quevedo, an energy engineer and creator of the news portal Energía e Biogás, in a telephone interview with IPS from Santo André, a city neighboring São Paulo, also in the south.

The photo shows a truck running 100 percent on biomethane and, in the background, the industrial waste landfill in Chapecó, in southwestern Brazil. The company Cetric acquired another 28 trucks that will use fuel from its own production. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Industrial waste as a business

Cetric’s business is the management of waste wherever it is, not just landfills, chemical engineer Loana Defaveri, the company’s technical manager, told IPS. Guidance on the handling of this material in industries is part of their activity.

The company also acts in emergencies, such as accidents with dangerous loads on highways, cities or production sites. It is a kind of firefighter in these cases and deploys specialized personnel with the necessary tools and vehicles for prompt assistance, dispersed throughout 19 locations in the country.

In mid-April, a team dealt with a spill of propionic acid, used to preserve food, when a truck overturned in Paraná, a neighboring state. The most frequent are accidents involving trucks carrying fuel such as ethanol and diesel, Defaveri said at the company’s facilities.

The CSTR reactor is more productive than covered lagoon biodigesters because temperature, acidity and other indicators of the substrate that generates biogas are controlled. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

A Command Center, a rotating team of four people, monitors by video the fleet of more than 200 Cetric trucks 24 hours a day from the company’s headquarters and the emergencies addressed.

But the ecopark in Chapecó is the heart, the center of innovations and the circular economy of the Cetric Group, which is involved in a range of activities.

Bioenergy production began in 2005, but was suspended due to the scarcity and low durability of biogas equipment. It resumed 15 years later and now has five covered lagoon biodigesters and a continuous stirred tank reactor, known as CSTR.

Only organic material is used for this purpose. The waste collected by the company is class 1, hazardous waste, generally chemical, and class 2, which includes inert waste such as iron scrap or concrete, and waste that degrades, such as organic waste, which is the bioenergy part.

Four generators produce one megawatt of electricity with the biogas produced at Cetric’s own ecopark. This power supplies the consumption of the Brazilian company’s industrial solid waste treatment complex. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Biogas from landfills and biodigesters

From the large landfill covered with impermeable black tarpaulin, which accumulates most of the garbage, biogas is extracted that only serves to generate heat, because it contains little methane, Defaveri explained. Burning this biogas reduced 80 percent of the firewood previously consumed in the ecopark.

For electricity generation and the refining that converts it into biomethane, the biogas that comes out of the biodigesters, which has 71 percent methane, and the reactor, with 73 percent, is used, she said.

In this energy sector, four biogas generators produce one megawatt of power, electricity estimated to be sufficient for the company’s consumption.

Another part of the biogas is refined by membranes, activated carbon and other processes to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) and sulfuric acid (H2S) to obtain biomethane, which is the fuel used by a 100 percent gas truck and 15 other hybrid trucks that consume gas and diesel.

Another 28 trucks recently acquired in Chapecó will also use 100 percent biomethane or natural gas as fuel, as the two gases are equivalent.

A truck stores biomethane in yellow cylinders, ready to supply trucks transporting industrial waste being treated at the Cetric Ecopark in Chapecó, a municipality in southern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Productivity still low

But production is still not very efficient, despite the progress represented by the CSTR reactor. “We only produce 10 percent of our biogas potential, but we are increasing productivity with technological advances, new investments and personnel training,” Defaveri noted.

Cetric Chapecó currently produces 250 cubic meters of methane per hour and intends to reach 1,500 cubic meters per hour, i.e. six times the volume, which requires heavy investment and also depends on the substrate, as they call the input, she said.

The effluent resulting from this process undergoes a complex treatment, which includes waste separation, sand filters, membranes, electrolysis and even a reverse osmosis device.

This makes it possible to obtain water of sufficient quality for reuse in washing vehicles and other equipment, chemical engineer Diego Molinet told IPS. The solid part goes to composting for processing that can result in biofertilizer.

The effluent cannot be used as fertilizer, a common practice among small biogas producers such as pig farmers, because it can saturate the soil, with an excess of some components, such as phosphorous, said Molinet.

Diego Molinet, a chemical engineer at Cetric, holds in his hands the result of the treatment of effluents from the industrial waste treatment process, with production of biogas and biomethane: a glass with clean water for non-potable reuse and another glass with solid material that can be converted into fertilizer after composting. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Effluent treatment also produces ARLA 32, a pure urea compound that is mandatory in heavy vehicle exhaust to reduce the emission of pollutant gases, such as nitrogen oxide. It is of growing use in the automotive industry.

“Cetric enjoys a good reputation” and plays an important role in Chapecó by preventing the city from having to send its industrial waste to other municipalities, Marck Gehlen, the city government director of the environment, told IPS.

Its emergency service has already controlled several accidents in the city. One was a fire at a fuel distribution company, whose rapid control prevented contamination of water courses and risks to the population, said Gehlen, an environmental engineer who has worked in the sector for more than 10 years, three years as director.

One concern is the sometimes dangerous truckloads of industrial waste that crisscross the city, he admitted.

With four meatpacking plants on the periphery of the city, Chapecó has had some problems, such as the stench emitted by the plants, although that was brought under control years ago. In general, the companies have adopted measures to avoid environmental damage and one of them has already transferred potentially polluting activities away from the city.

Leide Aparecida Souza, president of the Association of Residents of the Genipapo Settlement in the rural area of Acreúna, a municipality in central-western Brazil, stands next to breads and pastries from the bakery where 14 rural women work. The women's empowerment and self-esteem have been boosted by the fact that they earn their own income, which is more stable than from farming, and provide an important service to their community. CREDIT: Marina Carolina / IPS

By Mario Osava
ACREÚNA/ORIZONA, Brazil , Apr 16 2024 (IPS)

A bakery, fruit pulp processing and water pumped from springs are empowering women farmers in Goiás, a central-eastern state of Brazil. New renewable energy sources are driving the process.

“We work in the shade and have a secure, stable income, not an unsteady one like in farming. We cannot control the price of milk, nor droughts or pests in the crops,” said Leide Aparecida Souza, who runs a bakery in the rural area of Acreúna, a municipality of 21,500 inhabitants in central Goiás."The Network is the link between the valorization of rural women, family farming and the energy transition. We chose family farmers because they are the ones who produce healthy food." -- Jessyane Ribeiro

The bakery supplies a variety of breads, including cheese buns and hot dog buns, as well as pastries, cakes and biscuits to some 3,000 students in the municipality’s school network, for the government’s school feeding program, which provides family farming with at least 30 percent of its purchases. Welfare institutions are also customers.

The bakery is an initiative of the women of the Genipapo Settlement, established in 1999 by 27 families, as part of the agrarian reform program implemented in Brazil after the 1964-1985 military dictatorship, which has so far settled 1.3 million families on land of their own.

Genipapo, the name chosen for the settlement, is a fruit of the Cerrado, the savannah that dominates a large central area of Brazil. Each settled family received 44 hectares of land and local production is concentrated on soybeans, cassava and its flour, corn, dairy cattle and poultry.

Six solar panels will reduce the costs of the women’s bakery, installed on the former estate where 27 families were given land in Acreúna, in the Brazilian state of Goiás, as part of the country’s ongoing agrarian reform program. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Bakery empowers rural women

The women of the Association of Residents of the Genipapo Settlement decided to create a bakery as a new source of income 16 years ago. They also gained self-esteem and autonomy by earning their own money. In general, agricultural and livestock income is controlled by the husbands.

Each of the women working at the bakery earns about 1,500 reais (300 dollars) a month, six percent more than the national minimum wage. “We started with 21 participants, now we have 14 available for work, because some moved or quit,” Souza said.

A year ago, the project obtained a solar energy system with six photovoltaic panels from the Women of the Earth Energy project, promoted by the Gepaaf Rural Consultancy, with support from the Socio-environmental Fund of the Caixa Econômica Federal, the regional bank focused on social questions, and the public Federal University of Goiás (UFG).

Gepaaf is the acronym for Management and Project Development in Family Farming Consultancy and its origin is a study group at the UFG. The company is headquartered in Inhumas, a city of 52,000 people, 180 km from Acreúna.

Due to difficulties with the inverter, a device needed to connect the generator to the electricity distribution network, the plant only began operating in March. Now they will see if the savings will suffice to cover the approximately 300 reais (60 dollars) that the bakery’s electricity costs.

Iná de Cubas stands next to the biodigester that she got from the Women of the Earth Energy project in the municipality of Orizona, in the center-east of the Brazilian state of Goiás. The biogas generated benefits the productive activities of small farmers in rural settlements, as do solar plants on a family or community scale. Image: Mario Osava / IPS

“It’s not that much money, but for us every penny counts,” Souza said. Electricity is cheap in their case because it is rural and nocturnal consumption. Bread production starts at 5:00 p.m. and ends at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. from Monday to Thursday, according to Maristela Vieira de Sousa, the group’s secretary.

The industrial oven they use is low-consumption and wood-burning. There is another, gas-fired oven, which is only used in emergencies, “because it is expensive,” said de Sousa. Biogas is a possibility for the future, which would use the settlement’s abundant agricultural waste products.

Alternative energies make agribusiness viable

Iná de Cubas, another beneficiary of the Women of the Earth Energy project, has a biodigester that supplies her stove, in addition to eight solar panels. They generate the energy to produce fruit pulp that also supplies the schools of Orizona, a municipality of 16,000 inhabitants in central-eastern Goiás.

The solar plant, installed two years ago, made the business viable by eliminating the electricity bill, which was high because the two refrigerators needed to store fruit and pulp consume a lot of electricity.

The abundance of fruit residues provides the inputs for biogas production, an innovation in a region where manure is more commonly used.

The refrigerators in which Iná de Cubas keeps the fruit and fruit pulp that she prepares for sale to schools in Orizona in central Brazil consume a great deal of electricity. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

“I only use an additional load of animal feces when I need more biogas,” said Cubas, who gets the manure from her neighbor’s cows, since she does not raise livestock.

On her five hectares of land, Cubas produces numerous species of fruit for her cottage industry.

In addition to typical Brazilian fruits, such as cajá or hog plum (Spondias mombin), pequi or souari nut (Caryocar brasiliense) and jabuticaba from the grapetree (Plinia cauliflora), she grows lemons, mangoes, oranges, guava and avocado, among others.

For the pulp, she also uses fruit from neighbors, mostly relatives. The distribution of her products is done through the Agroecological Association of the State of Goias (Aesagro), which groups 53 families from Orizona and surrounding areas.

Agroecology is the system used on her farm, where the family also grows rice, beans and garlic. The crops are irrigated with water pumped from nearby springs that were recovered by the diversion of a road and by fences to block access by cattle, which used to trample the banks.

“The overall aim is to strengthen family farming, the quality of life in the countryside, incomes, and care for the environment, and to offer healthy food, without poisonous chemicals, especially for schools,” explained Iná de Cubas.

Biodigesters made of steel and cement, solar energy for different purposes, including pumping water, rainwater collection and harvesting, are part of the “technologies” that the Women of the Earth Energy project is trying to disseminate, said Gessyane Ribeiro, Gepaaf’s administrator.

In the area where Iná de Cubas lives, the project installed five biodigesters and seven solar pumps for farming families, in addition to solar plants in schools, she said.

The eight solar panels on the roof of the Cubas family’s house, in the rural area of Orizona, make small agro-industrial processes viable, adding value to the wide diversity of native fruits from different Brazilian ecosystems, such as the Cerrado savannah and the Amazon rainforest, along with species imported throughout the country’s history. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Network of rural women

The Women of the Earth Energy Network, brought together by the project and coordinated by Ribeiro, operates in six areas defined by the government based on environmental, economic, social and cultural similarities. In all, it involves 42 organizations in 27 municipalities in Goiás.

The local councils choose the beneficiaries of the projects, all implemented with collective work and focused on women’s productive activities and the preservation of the Cerrado. All the beneficiaries commit themselves to contribute to a solidarity fund to finance new projects, explained agronomist Ribeiro.

“The Network is the link between the valorization of rural women, family farming and the energy transition,” she said. “We chose family farmers because they are the ones who produce healthy food.”

“We offer technological solutions that rely on the links between food, water and energy, to move towards an energy transition that can actually address climate change,” said sociologist Agnes Santos, a researcher and communicator for the Network.

Recovering and protecting springs is another of the Women’s Network’s activities.

Two solar panels run a pump installed in a spring in the forest to pump the water needed by the 29 cows owned by Nubia Lacerda Matias’ family in Orizona, in the state of Goiás, near Brasilia. Thus the cows stopped drinking water in the springs, which are now fenced off, vital to protect the water source for local families living downstream. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Nubia Lacerda Matias celebrates the moment she was invited to join the movement. She won a solar pump, made up of two solar panels and pipes, which bring water to her cattle that used to damage the spring, now protected by a fence and a small forest.

“It’s important not only for my family, but for the people living downhill” where a stream flows, fed by various springs along the way, she said.

But the milk from the 29 cows and corn crops on her 9.4-hectare farm are not enough to support the family with two young children. Her husband, Wanderley dos Anjos, works as a school bus driver.

Iná de Cubas’ partner, Rosalino Lopes, also works as a technician for the Pastoral Land Commission, a Catholic organization dedicated to rural workers.

In his spare time, Lopes invents agricultural machines. He assembles and combines parts of motorcycles, tractors and other tools, in an effort to fill a gap in small agriculture, undervalued by the mechanical industry and scientific research in Brazil.

Teachers protest in São Paulo on Jan. 9, 2024 for better working conditions and remuneration in public education in Brazil. Most teachers are women, and they face complex physical and mental conditions in exercising their profession. CREDIT: Roberto Parizotti / ProfeSP

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 15 2024 (IPS)

Alice went for eight weeks without Portuguese language classes after starting her first year of high school on Feb. 5 in this Brazilian city. Her chemistry teacher taught only two classes and disappeared. But the worst part is the classroom without air conditioning in the heat of more than 35 degrees Celsius some days during the southern hemisphere summer.

Her public school in a central neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, with more than 500 students, illustrates the conditions of public education in Brazil, with poorly paid teachers and the resulting poor work attendance, as well as precarious infrastructure and other problems."The statistics show a challenging scenario, with many students lagging behind because they flunk or drop out of school. In addition to the 'pe de meia' program and other measures, systemic policies are needed, such as adequate infrastructure, teachers and full-time education." -- Natália Fregonesi

It is precisely in secondary education – the last three years of high school after nine grades of primary and middle school – that the biggest bottleneck in Brazilian education is found, according to an assessment agreed on widely by experts. The first nine years are for students up to the age of 14 and the last three years for students between the ages of 15 and 17.

Since Mar. 27, the Senate has been discussing a reform of the New Secondary Education Law, which came into force only two years ago. The government, in office since January 2023, proposed the modifications whose key points were already approved by the lower house of Congress.

Brazil is thus trying to overcome the shortcomings in education that have placed the country among the lowest ranked in comparative assessments, such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which studies 81 countries.

The new reform raises from 1,800 to 2,400 the number of hours to be dedicated during the three years of high school to compulsory subjects such as mathematics, natural and human sciences, and the Portuguese, English and Spanish languages.

It also provides for the extension of full-time education to a minimum of seven hours per day, and in technical-vocational schools as well.

In full-time primary and secondary institutions, students are at school for at least seven hours a day, attend regular classes in the morning and extracurricular activities, such as technical courses, sports or special subjects in the afternoon, or vice versa.

In addition, they receive two or three meals at school and in some cases can take a shower there – an attraction for students from low-income families in a country marked by huge social inequalities.

Even so, opportunities are not the same for everyone because the nine years of public basic education are in the hands of the municipalities, secondary education is run by the state governments and university education is the responsibility of the central government.

The new reform now depends on ratification by the Senate.

In secondary education, another 600 hours would be allocated to optional subjects, depending on the students’ interests, and may be extended further in the case of technical courses.

Currently, the flexibility applies to 1200 hours, but without adequate management in many educational centers. Alice, the student who preferred to use a fictitious name, complained that the extra hours are used for classes of the regular subjects or without a specific purpose.

“One teacher spent a long time explaining what the colors of the national flag symbolize,” she complained to IPS.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced on Jan. 26, 2024 in Brasilia the “Pe de meia” (savings) program, which will pay poor students in public secondary education 40 dollars a month, as an incentive to stay in the classroom. CREDIT: Ricardo Stuckert / PR

Curbing the school dropout rate

The government also created the “pe de meia” program, which in Brazil means savings. It offers 2,000 reais (400 dollars) per year, divided into 10 monthly installments, to high school students whose families are poor and are registered in the government’s Unified Social Assistance Registry. To receive it, they must demonstrate at least 80 percent school attendance.

The aim is to curb the dropout rate, which is higher in secondary education than in primary or middle school.

In 2023, the number of students who dropped out of school totaled 480,000, according to the Ministry of Education’s school census, released on Apr. 2.

In this country of 203 million people, of the adolescents and young people aged 15 to 29, nine million are out of school and have not completed high school, according to 2023 data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).

The savings program seems like little money, but it is important “as a complement” for adolescents, who are generally engaged in informal work, and for low-income families, who benefit from social programs, said Natália Fregonesi, coordinator of Educational Policies at the non-governmental organization Todos pela Educação (Everyone for Education).

The annual IBGE survey points to the need to find work as the main cause of school dropout, which stands at 47.1 percent among young people aged 15 to 29 years. There is a strong contrast between men, with an index of 53.4 percent, and girls and women: 25.5 percent. Pregnancy is the second cause of dropout of girls and women, accounting for 23.1 of all young female dropouts.

Among boys and men, a lack of interest in studying is in second place, accounting for 25.5 percent.

Education Minister Camilo Santana released on Jan. 16, 2024 the results of the exam taken by high school students to enter universities. CREDIT: Marcelo Camargo / Agência Brasil

More time in school

“The statistics show a challenging scenario, with many students lagging behind because they flunk or drop out of school. In addition to the ‘pe de meia’ program and other measures, systemic policies are needed, such as adequate infrastructure, teachers and full-time education,” said Fregonesi, a chemist who specialized in education policies.

Full-time schools are an efficient model, as they create a different relationship between students and schools, offer other subjects in addition to the regular curriculum, help youngsters think more clearly about their future, and give students a leading role, in addition to having full-time teachers, the expert told IPS by telephone from São Paulo.

The idea is to increase the number of full-time schools, which already exist throughout the country, but in a very unequal manner. While in the state of Pernambuco, in the impoverished Northeast region, 66.8 percent of students are in full-time education, in the Federal District, where Brasilia the capital is located, the proportion is only five percent, and in São Paulo, the richest state, only 25.9 percent.

On average, only 21.9 percent of students in the public education system are in full-time schools.

But increasing the number of full-time schools requires a large investment and Brazil has limited availability of public resources. According to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which brings together 38 countries, Brazil ranks among the last in terms of spending per basic education student.

The National Education Conference, held in Brasilia in January 2024, was one of the hundreds of forums in which the high school reform to be approved by the Senate was discussed. The Chamber of Deputies has already approved a version, with an increase in hours and classes in regular subjects taken by all students and of technical courses. CREDIT: José Cruz / Agência Brasil

Putting a priority on technical-vocational education

Another measure being pursued is to expand technical education. In Brazil, only 11 percent of students enrolled in secondary school take technical courses, while the average exceeds 40 percent in the other OECD countries, said Fregonesi.

“There is a certain prejudice in relation to technical education in Brazil, where it is seen as ‘inferior’ to high school, as preparation for university,” he said. But vocational training is lacking in the national economy and prepares students just as well for higher education, he argued.

In Brazil, there is growing unmet demand for skilled labor, for example, in information and communication technologies, which makes it necessary to expand technical secondary education.

The country’s educational challenges are colossal. In 2023, there were 47.3 million students enrolled in primary and secondary education and 6.5 million in university courses. But there were 68 million Brazilians without basic schooling.

Above and beyond these figures, the fact remains that the falling birth rate is reducing the school population. In 2019, the year before the outbreak of the pandemic, 57 million students were enrolled in school. The pandemic reduced that number by 9.5 million.

Education in Brazil operates both as a factor of social ascent and, at the same time, of inequality. Around 20 percent of students from the higher income sectors attend private primary and secondary schools, which generally are better funded and produce better results than public schools.

In higher education, the situation is paradoxically reversed. The children of the higher-income segments, who are better educated in private schools, gain easy admission to public universities, which offer better education than private colleges and therefore better possibilities for professional advancement.

To correct this imbalance, progressive governments in recent decades created racial and social quotas or affirmative action to benefit the generally poorer blacks and students in public elementary and secondary schools.

All these measures and some policies, such as financing systems for basic education maintained by city and state governments, have fomented small advances in Brazilian education, which have fallen far short however.

That process suffered a setback with the pandemic and the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022). The current administration of left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is trying to get back on course.

An Air Force plane brings home Brazilians who managed to escape the war in Gaza as part of a humanitarian operation. Airplanes shorten distances but pollute the atmosphere and aggravate the climate crisis by emitting two percent of greenhouse gases. Sustainable biofuels can mitigate that damage. CREDIT: FAB

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 13 2024 (IPS)

Brazil is counting on biofuels to assert itself as an energy powerhouse in the near future, as a decisive supplier of low-carbon jet fuel, a requirement of the climate crisis.

The electrification of automobiles has tended to curb the strong ethanol and biodiesel agribusiness developed in the country since the 1970s. But demand for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) now offers the possibility of significant new expansion for many decades to come.

Electrically powered airplanes are not viable with current technology, and will not be for a long time. “Batteries are very heavy and store little energy,” said Arnaldo Walter, a mechanical engineer and professor at the University of Campinas."Brazil has favorable conditions for biofuels, such as available land, good climate and rainfall, although they are now more uncertain than before." -- Arnaldo Walter

Nor is green hydrogen, the fashionable ecological fuel, an alternative for aviation, because of the difficulty of storage and the need for temperatures of more than 250 degrees Celsius below zero to keep it in a usable liquid form. In addition, the entire design of aircraft would have to be changed, a process that could only be achieved in the long term.

Brazil has everything it needs to become a major producer of green hydrogen, which is generated by electrolysis of water, but requires abundant electricity from renewable sources. That is the case in this country, especially in the Northeast region, which has huge potential in wind and solar energy, in addition to ports closer to Europe than those of other competitors.

The solution is biomass-derived fuel, which does not require altering the format of aircraft or their turbines, by naturally replacing aviation kerosene, the use of which generates two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate requirements

“Not just any biofuel will do, it has to meet the requirements for environmental, social and economic sustainability certification,” Walter told IPS by telephone from the southern city of Campinas, with a population of 1.1 million people located 90 kilometers from São Paulo.

Deforestation, for example, is one of Brazil’s Achilles’ heels, given the reports of forests being cleared to grow soybeans, whose oil will probably be one of the main raw materials for SAF. It is not enough to decarbonize the fuel, but also the whole process of its production.

The goal is to meet the target set by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

“SAF is the only economically viable and available alternative, despite its sustainability challenges,” argued Amanda Ohara, a chemical engineer and fuel specialist with the non-governmental Climate and Society Institute, in an interview with IPS in Rio de Janeiro.

Soybean monoculture represents half of agricultural production and is the main Brazilian export. It occupies extensive areas of the Cerrado, the Brazilian savannah, and part of the Amazon rainforest, after extensive deforestation. It can now provide the oil for the production of sustainable aviation fuel, known as SAF. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Soybeans and sugarcane, abundant but disputed

Brazil is the world’s largest soybean producer, with an output of 154 million tons in 2023, about half of which was exported to China. Its oil is the main raw material for biodiesel, which is blended with fossil diesel in this country at a current proportion of 14 percent. Congress is discussing the possibility of raising it to 25 percent in the future.

In addition to its thriving agriculture, based largely on oilseeds and sugarcane, which can supply SAF plants, the country has ample potential for expansion.

“Brazil has favorable conditions for biofuels, such as available land, good climate and rainfall, although they are now more uncertain than before,” said Walter. Tens of millions of hectares of land degraded by extensive cattle ranching in the past can be used to recover production.

In Latin America’s largest country, with 850 million hectares of territory, only 61 million hectares were dedicated to agriculture and 164 million to cattle pastures in 2022, according to MapBiomas, a monitoring platform of a network of organizations focused on climate change.

The government set a goal of recovering 40 million hectares of degraded land in 10 years, almost the same as the area planted with soybeans today: 44.6 million hectares.

Soy already has a well-established market and consumers. Dedicating part of its oil to SAF competes with these uses and will require a large expansion of its cultivation, that is to say, new lands and the risk of deforestation, which together with changes in land use constitute the great source of greenhouse gases in the country.

They represent economic and environmental costs that drive the search for alternatives.

The macauba, a tropical palm tree whose scientific name is Acrocomia aculeata, is attractive because of its high oil productivity and its presence in almost all of Brazil, as well as in other Latin American countries under various names, such as coyol, corojo, grugru or macaw palm.

It has not yet been commercially produced, nor has it been domesticated, making it a long-term, risky bet.

But Acelen, a company controlled by the Mubadala Investment Company of the United Arab Emirates, is promoting a project to grow macauba palm trees on 200,000 hectares of land in northeastern Brazil to produce SAF as of 2026.

To this end, it has an oil refinery in Mataripe, 70 kilometers from Salvador, capital of the northeastern state of Bahia, acquired in 2019 from the state-owned oil company Petrobras.

Ethanol is another alternative raw material, which, like soybean oil, has the advantage of large-scale production, but competes with other uses. In Brazil, sugarcane is the main source of ethanol, whose consumption as a fuel is almost as high as that of gasoline.

In its anhydrous form, it currently accounts for 27 percent of gasoline sold, a mix that is expected to rise to 30 percent or even 35 percent. But ethanol is also used alone, in its hydrated form. In Brazil today, almost all cars have flexible engines, powered by gasoline or ethanol, or by a mixture of any proportion.

A photo of the monotonous landscape of sugarcane in one of the plantations in the interior of the state of São Paulo, which provides almost half of the sugar and ethanol produced in Brazil. The 31 billion liters of ethanol in 2023 could be tripled in 20 years by increasing productivity and monoculture, to provide surpluses for the production of SAF. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Cane and corn ethanol

Ethanol lags behind vegetable oils in the production of SAF, but will benefit from a production boom expected in the coming years. It will be able to triple its annual production, which totaled 31 billion liters in 2023, without the need to greatly expand the cultivated area, according to industry leaders.

Brazil is already the country that grows the most sugarcane in the world, which allows it to lead the sugar market and occupy second place in ethanol, surpassed only by the United States, where corn is the main source.

Raízen, a joint venture between the British oil transnational Shell and Brazil’s Cosan, is studying the new biofuel, also in partnership with universities, while expanding its ethanol production, of which it is the national leader.

It is a pioneer in second-generation ethanol, extracted from sugarcane bagasse and other cellulose-based waste. This ensures up to 50 percent more ethanol, without the need for more crops. The company has already started up eight plants of this type and expects to have 20 in operation by 2030, despite the fact that they are more expensive than conventional plants.

Sugarcane productivity should also increase in the coming years, according to agronomic researchers, who expect to see production rise twofold mainly due to the planting of new varieties with genetic improvements.

In addition, second-crop corn, generally planted after soybeans in the same area, has allowed an increasing production of ethanol, especially in the midwest region of Brazil. It already represents 17 percent of the national total.

There are other alternatives, such as fossil derivatives but with reduced greenhouse gas emissions, wood from trees that grow faster in tropical countries such as Brazil, animal oils, and even cooking oil.

Each one requires different technologies, with their own costs, maturation times and environmental effects, said Walter. Logistical conditions, dispersion or facilities for collecting raw materials can also determine the most promising alternatives.

“There is no single solution, no silver bullet. We will have to combine various alternatives, depending on the intended or possible scale,” Ohara said. The choice is no longer purely economic, but also responds to the climate emergency, because “gas emissions must be reduced as a matter of urgency,” she added.

The expansion of monocultures will be inevitable in a country like Brazil, which aims to ensure a sustainable supply, but the damage can be mitigated with agroforestry systems, combining oilseeds with other crops, which diversify the vegetation and conserve the soil, proposed the chemist and environmentalist who worked for six years with biofuels in the state-owned Petrobras consortium.

Women march for their rights on Mar. 8, 2023, in Brasília. Every International Women's Day, Brazilian women take to the streets in towns and cities to protest against sexism, racism and other factors of gender inequality. CREDIT: Lula Marques / Agência Brasil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 6 2024 (IPS)

Brazil is beginning to test the effectiveness of a gender pay equality law passed in July 2023, a new attempt to reduce inequality for women in the world of work.

This Friday, Mar. 8, International Women’s Day, is the deadline for companies with more than 100 employees to publish their first half-yearly salary transparency reports, with comparative data on remuneration and the distribution of hierarchical functions between men and women, and between different ethnic groups, nationalities and ages."If you are a black woman, your chances of suffering inequality increase. Restrictions pile up for women who are black and poor from the outlying urban neighborhoods, who are over 40 years old and have had little to no education." -- Marilane Teixeira

To break down the inertia of gender inequality, the United Nations agency that promotes women’s rights, UN Women, decided that this year’s theme for International Women’s Day would be “‘Invest in Women: Accelerate Progress”, which the global community has pledged to achieve by 2030.

The wage equality law “is a measure that just remains on paper, not a practical one,” said Hildete Pereira de Melo, an economist who has been studying gender inequality for more than 40 years and doubts the effectiveness of the new legislation.

Equal pay has been legally established in Brazil since 1943, when the Consolidation of Labor Laws was approved, but it is not enforced, she argued. Even in the courts, women accept any agreement as “the weaker party,” she told IPS in an interview in Rio de Janeiro.

Wage inequality is now punished

But now it is different: a penalty will be imposed on companies that do not publish their semi-annual report, a fine of up to 100 minimum wages, totaling 141,200 reais this year (28,500 dollars), argued Marilane Teixeira, a researcher at the Center for Trade Union and Labor Economics Studies (Cesit) of the University of Campinas.

With the reports from the companies and the data it obtains through other means, the Ministry of Labor and Employment will be able to publish the first results, with an overview of how the more than 50,000 large companies in Brazil deal with the issue of gender- and race-neutral wages.

Previously a company was subject to penalties in the case of “inequalities motivated by segregation,” identified through inspection by the authorities. But now there is a new requirement of a public report, Teixeira told IPS from Brasilia.

The new exposure of companies triggered widespread complaints and arguments that improper data would be revealed, but the report does not include “any stealth data, just averages and percentages of women employees and their positions” in the corporate hierarchy, she explained.

Reactions from businesspersons and repercussions in the media reflect “the impact of the measure” and the changes it will foment, said the economist, who helped the government draft the new law.

“It is a step forward and we hope that it sticks” and is effective, unlike many laws that remain only on paper, said Isabel Freitas, a social worker and technical advisor of the Feminist Center for Studies and Advice (Cfemea).

In a Jul. 30, 2023 demonstration, black women in Rio de Janeiro protest against racism, violence and inequalities of which they are the main victims. CREDIT: Tania Rêgo / Agência Brasil

Legislative advances

Her positive assessment is based on the “two novelties”: the requirement of the half-yearly report, which constitutes a “public transparency tool” and fosters equality, and the fine imposed on companies that do not comply, of three percent of the total wages and salaries paid by the company.

But the law has limits. It only applies to companies with more than one hundred employees, which means its effect does not reach the small and micro businesses that provide 70 percent of formal sector jobs nor the informal ones that account for about 40 percent of the total number of workers. And the fine cannot exceed the equivalent of 100 minimum wages.

It does not benefit, for example, domestic workers, who number six million in Brazil, mainly black women, who suffer the worst discrimination, Freitas lamented.

But the law is “one more step” that could help in the fight against “the basket of inequalities” affecting Brazilian society, especially women, she told IPS by telephone from Brasilia.

“If you are a black woman, your chances of suffering inequality increase. Restrictions pile up for women who are black and poor from the outlying urban neighborhoods, who are over 40 years old and have had little to no education,” she said.

Inequality suffered by women is not just a matter of wages. They are concentrated in lower paid activities, such as domestic work, basic education and the poorest paid parts of the health care system.

The scarce representation of women at all levels of power is a major obstacle. There are only 91 women in a lower house of 513 deputies and 15 women senators out of a total of 81. In other words, they make up only 17.8 percent of the current Congress (2023-2026) dominated by conservative legislators.

One of the main causes of these inequalities is the sexual division of labor, which assigns to women practically all the work of social reproduction and care tasks, the three interviewees concurred.

A meeting of women ministers of the current Brazilian government with 42 female mayors of large towns and cities to discuss women’s participation in politics and the Brazilian economy. CREDIT: Ministry of Health

Cultural hurdles

Added to this is a cultural heritage that uses promotion evaluation criteria that favor male workers, said Teixeira.

When it comes to promotions, companies generally take into account activities “that exclude women, such as weekend courses, trips and dinners with clients,” which are unfeasible for those who have to take care of the house, the children and sick members of the family, she said.

“In Brazil 42 percent of women are solely homemakers, and the other half who are in the labor market are also homemakers,” said Pereira de Melo.

The basic solution to the tangle of factors leading to inequality against women are full-time basic education schools and day care centers providing care for 10 hours a day, with universal coverage for all children in order to neutralize disadvantages for women in the workplace, she said.

The ideal would be full-time school for adolescents as well, but it should be available at least in the first stage, until students are 14 or 15 years old and the absolute need for maternal care is reduced, she said.

In addition, a broad cultural transformation of society would be necessary, especially in relation to the role of women, but culture is something that changes very slowly, she acknowledged.

Initiatives on several fronts are underway in Brazil to drive these changes.

On Mar. 5 the   launched, for example, the campaign “Justice for all women”, to highlight women’s rights in general, including girls, adolescents, pregnant and disabled women, and to promote a gender perspective in all the country’s courts.

Violence against women, reflected in the increase in rape, domestic violence and femicides – gender-related murders of girls and women – is currently a priority of the campaign and the judicial system.

The Articulação das Mulheres Negras do Brasil (Network of Black Women of Brazil) is working to coordinate the action of 45 organizations distributed throughout the country that in the month of March this year are planning 140 demonstrations.

For November 2025, it is preparing a “March against racism, violence and for the good life”, a national mobilization that will culminate in Brasilia, repeating the first march of its kind that took place in 2015, with about 100,000 participants, to demand the rights of 49 million women, that is, a quarter of Brazil’s population of 203 million.

It is a global struggle. “The global economy is based on the systematic exploitation of women,” concludes a study by Oxfam, a confederation of 21 social organizations around the world.

According to its data, women earn only 51 percent of what men earn, as they are concentrated in precarious and poorly paid jobs.

Excerpt:

A poster of the World Social Forum in Kathmandu, to be held Feb. 15-19, 2024. This is the second time that the Forum is holding its world meeting in Asia. The first was in Mumbai, India, in 2004, when it was attended by 111,000 people. CREDIT: WSF

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 13 2024 (IPS)

The World Social Forum (WSF) is today “more necessary than ever,” according to Oded Grajew, promoter and co-founder of the global civil society meeting – a festival of diversity that has not yet succeeded in fomenting or designing the “other possible world” that it predicted when it was created and adopted that motto.

The WSF, whose next edition will be held Feb. 15-19 in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, first emerged in 2001 in Porto Alegre, a city in southern Brazil, at the initiative of Brazilian organizations and social movements, in coordination with international groups.

The idea proposed by Grajew was to hold a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum, which meets annually in the Swiss Alps city of Davos. Hence the similar name but different focus, on social issues, the initial coincidence of dates in January, and the banners against neoliberalism and globalization.

The first edition brought together nearly 20,000 people from 117 countries. Participation grew and exceeded 100,000 people in several global meetings held in different countries, after the first three held in Porto Alegre, where it has returned on several occasions.

The meetings took place in the Indian city of Mumbai in 2004, then in 2006, the WSF was divided between Bamako (Mali) and Caracas, to be followed by Nairobi (2007), Dakar (2011), Tunis (2013 and 2015) and Mexico City (2022).

In addition to Porto Alegre, it returned to Brazil in 2009 (Belém, in the eastern Amazon) and 2018 (Salvador, in the northeast). And it expanded into national, regional and thematic forums, promoting debates on a range of issues, from economic to environmental and climate, gender, ethnic, sexual minorities, and disabilities questions.

But the WSF has been in decline since the last decade. It has lost its initial charm and repercussions, and its current impact on global crises is hardly noticeable, especially since it was born as a movement that did not aim to reach conclusions, but rather to generate debates and demonstrate that “another world is possible.”

“We are losing the game so far,” Grajew told IPS by telephone from Sao Paulo. “The climate crisis has worsened, inequalities and conflicts have grown, with the risk of nuclear war, confidence in democracy is declining and global governance is lacking. These are enormous risks that threaten the human species.”

All of this increases the need to revitalize the WSF, because it is about strengthening civil society, the only way to solve the challenges, in the view of its organizers.

The WSF, despite everything, has already left a legacy as a “space for making connections and mounting resistance by society around the world,” Grajew said. It contributed to raising the visibility of the climate emergency on the international agenda, strengthened the anti-racist struggle and fostered alliances that made indigenous peoples “political actors in a way that they were not before,” he said, to illustrate.

In Brazil, it was the increasingly strong civil society that prevented a coup d’état that would have installed a dictatorship and returned the far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro to office, said Grajew, currently an advisor to several institutions and president emeritus of the Ethos Institute for Business and Social Responsibility, a businessman turned social activist who remains so at the age of 80.

A picture from one of the first editions of the World Social Forum, in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, showing the globe seen from the South, which has been a repeated part of its logos, as well as its slogan: “Another world is possible”. The assembly style that does not reach conclusions has been at the same time the strength and weakness of the movement. CREDIT: Claes

Solutions and resources are available

“Today we know what the problems of humanity are and how to solve them; what is lacking is political will,” Grajew argued.

“Our problem is not economic, it’s not a lack of resources; it’s a problem of political and social organization,” said Ladislau Dowbor, an 83-year-old economist who always addresses the WSF. “Global GDP is 100 trillion dollars per year, equivalent to 4,200 dollars a month per family of four people. It is enough for a decent and comfortable life for all. All that would be needed is a tax of only four percent on the fortunes of the richest one percent of humanity.”

The WSF is an attempt to create a connected political force from the profusion of organizations and social movements in which civil society seems to be fragmented, with a multiplicity of banners, from environmental to feminist, anti-racist and egalitarian.

There was an explosion of social diversity in the 1960s and 1970s, with the affirmation of multiple identities and their struggles, which seek convergence in processes such as the WSF. These are generally progressive movements, which are not automatically connected together.

The most immediate antecedent was the so-called “Battle for Seattle,” the city in the northwest U.S. state of Washington that in 1999 brought together anti-globalization activists during a World Trade Organization summit, demanding globalization of the people and not of the economy.

“It’s a long-term process. Diversity is a richness, but sometimes it is divided by identity sectarianism,” said Daniel Aarão Reis, a 78-year-old historian who extensively studied Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship and the Soviet revolution.

In his view, the consolidation of opposition to or containment of the damage caused by capitalism in the current situation faces two adverse factors.

“One is the decline of the working class, which since the late nineteenth century, concentrated in the cities, had a demographic weight and organized strength to lead that struggle, attracting other popular segments, which were sometimes even a majority of the population, such as peasant farmers. But it has suffered demographic losses, slow but evident since the 1970s,” Aarão Reis said.

Another is the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which gave way to unbridled capitalism, with the “restoration of tsarist traditions.” This hit progressive forces even if they were critical of authoritarian socialism. For a long period Moscow had supported, for example, national liberation struggles.

Photo of a march of the Thematic Social Forum on Older Adults in Porto Alegre, southern Brazil, in January 2023. Thematic, national and regional forums proliferated around the world after the first global meetings of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, from 2001 to 2003, and in Mumbai, India, in 2004. CREDIT: Tânia Rego / Agência Brasil

Far right can unite progressives

“Creating connections between the myriad of dispersed currents, without a powerful hub such as workers’ struggles, with their unions and parties, is a great challenge. But sometimes an external enemy helps foment these connections. That was the case of Nazism, which gave rise to a broad alliance against it,” the historian said in an interview with IPS in Rio de Janeiro.

The far right, which brings together racism, threat to democracy, misogyny and other retrograde stances, can “help condense that dispersed nebula that the left has become,” said Aarão Reis, a professor at the Fluminense Federal University.

In the case of the WSF, its apparent loss of momentum exacerbated internal divisions in the International Council which is responsible for managing the forum.

“The WSF is like the spiritual exercises of the church, which benefit those who are present, but are basically internal, and don’t spread to society,” by not expressing itself on the burning issues of the world and thus making it impossible to communicate outwardly, Argentine- Italian Roberto Savio, co-founder and president emeritus of Inter Press Service (IPS), who was an active member of the International Council, said from Rome.

This is how the 89-year-old expert on South-South communications described the disagreement of some activists and advisers with the Charter of Principles that defines the WSF as “a plural and diversified space” of reflection and connection of entities and movements, that is “non-partisan” and “non-deliberative.”

Screenshot from the closing assembly, on Jan. 31, of the World Social Forum 2021, which was held only in digital format that year. The difficulties of organizing an unprecedented online meeting did not prevent, according to the organizers, 9,561 participants from 144 countries and 1,360 organizations from taking part in 751 activities, including workshops, round tables, debates and sectoral assemblies. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Not a party

Chico Whitaker, another co-founder of the Forum and a fervent defender of the Charter of Principles, said “We have to continue being a space for connection, for the search for alternatives and forms of action, for new paths. Action is a function of the participating organizations and movements, not of the Forum.”

The discrepancy has existed since the beginning of the WSF and stems from “an old culture of hierarchical, autocratic politics,” he told IPS by telephone from São Paulo.

At 92 years of age, Whitaker regretted that he was not able to travel to Kathmandu which was “too far away,” and that he would be engaged in “very limited” digital participation.

The edition in Kathmandu will be hybrid, both face-to-face and digital, but the time zone difference between the capital of Nepal and São Paulo, for example, is nine hours, which makes it difficult to follow the activities from afar.

That is why the debates of greatest interest in the Americas will be held at night in the Nepali capital, said Rita Freire, representative of the Ciranda network, which is in charge of the WSF collaborative communication at the International Council.

Freire, a 66-year-old journalist and editor of the Middle East Monitor, also represents an alternative of political action “within the process of the Forum, but maintaining the Charter of Principles.”

A new body is being tested in Kathmandu, the Assembly of Struggles and Resistance with social movements, which will adopt political positions and declarations. “But it will do so in its own name and not in the name of the Forum,” Freire clarified from São Paulo by telephone a few hours before taking a flight to Kathmandu.

Holding the gathering in Asia opens new horizons for the WSF, as it is the most dynamic region of the global South, at least in economic terms, agreed Freire and Whitaker. It reflects a mobilization of the social organizations of Nepal and neighboring countries, which came together and offered to host the Forum.

An area of illegal mining activity was raided by the Brazilian Federal Police in the eastern Amazon on Jan. 17, where their precarious installations and housing, as well as their equipment, were destroyed. The fight against illegal mining, especially in indigenous territories, intensified after a new tragedy of deaths of Yanomami indigenous people caused by encroaching garimpeiros or informal miners became headline news. CREDIT: Federal Police

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 29 2024 (IPS)

Artisanal mining, or “garimpo” as it is known in Brazil, has returned to the headlines as a factor in the deaths of Yanomami indigenous people, whose territory in the extreme north of Brazil suffers constant encroachment by miners, which has intensified in recent years.

In the first few days of the year, Yanomami spokespersons denounced new invasions of their land and the suspension of health services, in addition to the violence committed by miners or “garimpeiros”, which coincided with the fact that the military withdrew from areas they were protecting.

Furthermore, the media published new photos of extremely malnourished children. In response, the government promised to establish permanent posts of health care and protection in the indigenous territory.

“But what they are involved in there is not garimpo but illegal and inhumane mining practices,” said Gilson Camboim, president of the Peixoto River Valley Garimpeiros Cooperative (Coogavepe), which defends the activity as environmentally and socially sustainable when properly carried out.

“Garimpo is mining recognized by the Brazilian constitution, with its own legislation, which pays taxes, is practiced with an environmental license and respects the laws, employs many workers, strengthens the economy and distributes income,” he told IPS by telephone from the headquarters of his cooperative in Peixoto de Azevedo, a town of 33,000 people in the northern state of Mato Grosso.

Coogavepe was founded in 2008 with 23 members. Today it has 7,000 members and seeks to promote legal garimpo and environmental practices, such as the restoration of areas degraded by mining.

But it is difficult to salvage the reputation of this legal part of an activity whose damage is demonstrated by photos of emaciated children and families decimated by hunger and malaria, because the encroachment of miners pollutes rivers, kills fish and introduces diseases to which indigenous people are vulnerable because they have not developed immune defenses.

Garimpeiros and indigenous deaths

The humanitarian tragedy among the Yanomami people became big news in January 2023 when Sumaúma, an Amazonian online media outlet, denounced the deaths of 570 children under five years of age, due to malnutrition and preventable diseases, during the far-right government of former president Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022).

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who took office on Jan. 1, 2023, visited Yanomami territory and mobilized his government to care for the sick and expel illegal miners, destroying their equipment and camps. But a year later, the resumption of mining activity and a resurgence of hunger and deaths were reported.

Moreover, the entire extractivist sector has a terrible reputation due to tragedies caused by industrial mining. Two tailings dams broke in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais in 2015 and 2019, killing 289 people and muddying an 853-kilometer-long river and a 510-kilometer-long river.

Brazil is the world’s second largest producer of iron ore, following Australia. Iron ore is the main focus of industrial mining in the country.

Garimpo is mainly dedicated to gold, and accounts for 86 percent of its production. Garimpeiros also produce cassiterite (the mineral from which tin ore is extracted) and precious stones, such as emeralds and diamonds. Its major expansion, many decades ago, was along rivers in the Amazon jungle, to the detriment of indigenous peoples and tropical forests.

Indigenous people protest in the state of Roraima in northern Brazil against the invasion of Yanomami territory by garimpeiros or artisanal miners, who often practice illegally. CREDIT: Alberto César Araújo / Amazônia Real

Threat to the environment and health

Currently, 97.7 percent of the area occupied in Brazil by artisanal mining is in the Amazon rainforest, where it reaches 101,100 hectares, according to MapBiomas, a project launched by non-governmental organizations, universities and technology companies to monitor Brazilian biomes using satellite images and other data sources.

The production of gold uses mercury, which has contaminated many Amazonian rivers and a large part of their riverside population, including indigenous groups, such as the Munduruku people, who live in the basin of the Tapajós River, one of the great tributaries of the Amazon with an extension of 2,700 kilometers.

Garimpo dumps about 150 tons of mercury in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest every year, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimates. The fear is that the tragedy of Minamata, the Japanese city where mercury dumped by a chemical industry in the mid-20th century killed about 900 people and caused neurological damage in tens of thousands, may be repeated here.

Brazil produced 94.6 tons of gold in 2022, according to the National Mining Agency. But the way it is extracted varies greatly, based mainly on informal mining, of which illegal mining makes up an unknown percentage.

Three prices govern this production, according to Armin Mathis, a professor at the Núcleo de Altos Estudos Amazónicos of the Federal University of Pará, who lives in Belém, the capital of this Amazonian state, with 1.3 million inhabitants.

The price of gold in Brazil; the price of diesel, which represents a third of the cost of gold mining; and the cost of labor are the three elements that determine whether the garimpo business is profitable, the German-born PhD in political science, who has been studying this activity since he arrived in Brazil in 1987, explained to IPS from Belém.

This mining was in fact artisanal, but it began to use machines, especially the backhoe, in the 1980s, which is why diesel increased its costs. And unemployment and periods of economic recession, in the 1980s and in 2015-2016, made garimpo more attractive.

In those periods and the following years, invasions of Yanomami territory, which also extends through the state of Amazonas in southwestern Venezuela, became more massive and aggressive. But the consequences for the native people living in vast areas of the rainforest only become news on some occasions, like now.

Small airplanes seized by police and environmental authorities were at the service of illegal miners in Roraima, an Amazonian state in the extreme north of Brazil. This is where most of the Yanomami Indians live, currently the main victims of illegal, mechanized mining. CREDIT: Federal Police

From artisanal to mechanization

Mechanization has restructured the activity. Machines are expensive and require financiers. Entrepreneurs have emerged to manage the now more complex operations, as well as others who only own and rent out the equipment.

In addition, the owners of small airplanes that supply the mining areas and facilitate the trade of the extracted gold became more powerful. The hierarchy of the business has expanded.

“We must differentiate between garimpo and the garimpeiros. This is not a rhetorical distinction. The garimpeiro, who works directly in the extraction of gold, is more a victim than a perpetrator of illegal, predatory and criminal mining. The person responsible lives far away and gets rich by exploiting workers in slavery-like labor relations,” observed Mauricio Torres, a geographer and professor at the Federal University of Pará.

“The garimpeiro, depicted as a criminal by the media, pays for the damage,” he told IPS by telephone from Belém.

The workers recognize that they are exploited, but feel that they are a partner of the garimpo owner, as they earn a percentage of the gold obtained. They work hard because the more they work, the more they earn.

A large part of the garimpeiros along the Tapajós River, where this kind of mining has been practiced since the middle of the last century, are actually landless peasant farmers who supplement their income in the garimpo business, when agriculture or fishing does not provide what they need to support their families, Torres explained.

Therefore, agrarian reform and other government initiatives that offer sufficient income to this population could reduce the pressure of the garimpo on the environment in the Amazon rainforest, which affects the region’s indigenous and traditional peoples, he said.

The situation of the garimpeiros also differs according to the areas where they work in the Amazon jungle, Mathis pointed out. In the Tapajós River, where the activity has been taking place for a longer period of time and is already legal in large part, coexistence is better with the indigenous Munduruku people, some of whom also became garimpeiros.

In Roraima, a state in the extreme north on the border with Venezuela and Guyana, where a large part of the territory is made up of indigenous reserves, illegal mining is widespread and includes the more or less violent invasion of Yanomami lands.

On the other hand, as the local economy depends on gold, the population’s support for garimpo, even illegal and more invasive practices, is broader than elsewhere. There, former president Bolsonaro, a supporter of garimpo, won 76 percent of the votes in the 2022 runoff election in which he was defeated by Lula.

Another component that aggravates the violence surrounding garimpo and, therefore, the crackdown on the activity, is the expansion of drug trafficking in the Amazon rainforest. The informality of the mining industry has facilitated its relationship with organized crime, whether in the drug trade or money laundering, said Mathis from Belém.

Brazilian women demonstrated in São Paulo on Sept. 28, International Safe Abortion Day, which began to be celebrated in Latin America. The activists are promoting the campaign "Neither imprisoned, nor dead" against the repression of women's right to abortion, which affects even young girls who are entitled to this right by law. CREDIT: Rovena Rosa / Agência Brasil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 31 2023 (IPS)

A total of 17,456 babies were born to girls aged 10 to 14 in Brazil in 2021. The annual figures are falling, but still reflect the plight of ruined childhoods and the failures of judges and doctors when it comes to the issue of abortion rights.

Data from the Information System on Live Births (Sinasc) of the Ministry of Health put the number of births to girls in this age group at 252,786 in the decade 2010-2019, compiled by the Feminist Health Network. That is an annual average of 25,278."This country does not take care of women. While cardiology has advanced a lot in Brazil, medicine dedicated to women, such as obstetrics and gynecology, remains stuck in the last century and resists updating. An example is the persistence of curettage, a practice abolished by the World Health Organization (WHO) more than 20 years ago." -- Helena Paro

This phenomenon has ceased to be invisible since 2020, when a string of scandals erupted involving girls prevented from having abortions by judges, hospitals and even authorities such as the then Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights, Damares Alves, during the government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022).

In Brazil, abortion is legal in cases of rape, risk of death of the pregnant woman and anencephalic fetuses. It is also an unquestionable right of girls up to 14 years of age, since all of them are legally victims of rape and their abusers face sentences of eight to 15 years in prison.

But there were judges, even in the appeals courts, who ruled against the termination of pregnancy in girls as young as 10 or 11 years old.

At the base of this iniquity is the social criminalization of abortion, to which many religious people who identify “abortion as murder, as a repulsive crime” contribute, lamented Clara Wardi, technical advisor of the Feminist Studies and Advisory Center (Cfemea), based in Brasilia.

Religious morality infiltrates the State

“The stigma is strong, in the culture, in the family, even in schools. That is why girls are reluctant to choose abortion, even if it is legal. And to do it clandestinely is expensive and risky,” she told IPS from Petrópolis, the city near Rio de Janeiro where she lives.

Many doctors argue that they are “conscientious objectors” and refuse to carry out abortions, which forces the girls to go on a “pilgrimage” in search of respect for their rights in other hospitals and even in the courts.

In spite of everything, a Cfemea survey conducted since 2018 found a growing public opinion against the criminalization of abortion. To the question “Are you for or against the imprisonment of women who terminate their pregnancy?”, 59.3 percent said “against” in 2023, up from 51.8 percent in 2018.

Those in favor of imprisonment also increased, but less, from 26.7 percent to 28.1 percent, reflecting the ideological polarization during Bolsonaro’s administration, which caused the proportion of “undecideds”, those who answered “it depends on the circumstances”, to fall from 16.1 percent to 7.6 percent.

There are “institutional barriers” to legal abortion, an issue in which the State ceases to be secular by subordinating its services to religious morality. The most emblematic case is that of an 11-year-old girl pregnant for the second time in the northeastern state of Piauí, who in late 2022 was denied an abortion by a public hospital and by the justice system.

Taken to a public shelter, she gave birth to her second child in March 2023. In other words, the State acted to remove her from her family, deny her the legal abortion she demanded and force her to give birth, Wardi said.

Damares Alves, a radical evangelical Christian who was Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights (2019-2022) during the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro, mobilized her officials to pressure young pregnant girls to desist from getting an abortion, which was legal in their case because they are recognized as victims of rape. CREDIT: Fabio Rodrigues-Pozzebom / Agência Brasil

Ignorance

All this occurs in the midst of “collective failures” of society itself, such as insufficient information on reproductive rights and the possibility of choice for women, especially girls. There is no choice without access to health services, she argued.

“The criminalization of abortion invalidates the legality of the three situations. It is necessary to get out the information that abortion is legal in Brazil and to train qualified personnel to offer the service, without the need for legal action to obtain access,” said Denise Mascarenha, executive coordinator of the group Catholics for Choice in Brazil.

The basic flaw is in the training of health workers, whether doctors, nurses or psychologists, who “do not recognize the violence involved in a pregnancy in girls under 14 years of age,” which has been present in the Penal Code all the way back to 1940, said Helena Paro, professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the Faculty of Medicine of the Federal University of Uberlândia.

Universities, she said, do not train doctors to take care of rape victims, but good teaching would not be enough, anyway, she added. There is a lack of experience in practical assistance to patients, with a focus on women’s human rights, said the physician specialized in gynecology and obstetrics.

In Brazil there are just over 60 medical centers offering legal abortion services – virtually nothing for a population of 203 million inhabitants in which women constitute a majority of 51.7 percent, she told IPS from Uberlândia, a city in the southern state of Minas Gerais.

Only about 2,000 legal abortions are performed each year in Brazil, where it is estimated that more than 400,000 illegal abortions are performed annually, resulting in many deaths as well as complications that overload hospitals.

Judge Rosa Weber seen passing her vote in defense of the decriminalization of abortion up to 12 weeks of gestation, in her last sessions as president of the Supreme Federal Court, before retiring on Oct. 2. CREDIT: Antonio Cruz / Agência Brasil

Medical care that discriminates against women

“This country does not take care of women. While cardiology has advanced a lot in Brazil, medicine dedicated to women, such as obstetrics and gynecology, remains stuck in the last century and resists updating. An example is the persistence of curettage, a practice abolished by the World Health Organization (WHO) more than 20 years ago,” Paro commented.

She coordinates the Uberlândia Comprehensive Care Center for Victims of Sexual Assault (Nuavidas), opened in 2017 at her university hospital. Since 2021, the center has been offering abortion-related services via telemedicine, following an initial face-to-face consultation.

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted the online assistance, also facilitated by the efficacy of the abortion drug misoprostol, approved by the WHO and Brazilian health authorities.

Paro’s activities led to an attempt to disqualify her by the Regional Council of Medicine of Minas Gerais, which accuses her of using her knowledge “to commit crimes” and not for the well-being of patients.

“It’s all upside down,” the physician replied, arguing that she cares for the health of patients “based on scientific evidence” that the Council denies.

The councils, one national and 27 regional (in each of the states), regulate medical practice in the country and several of them acted unscientifically during the COVID-19 pandemic, by approving, for example, the use of ineffective drugs such as chloroquine.

A conservative offensive in Congress threatens to further restrict the right to abortion in Brazil, contrary to what is happening in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay, which have decriminalized abortion up to 12 weeks of pregnancy.

A 2007 bill, called the Statute of the Fetus, gained renewed momentum last year in the lower house of Congress, at the initiative of ultra-conservative lawmakers. Its approval would prohibit any abortion, guaranteeing the fetus all the rights of a human being, especially the right to life, from the moment of conception.

Other measures to criminalize abortions even in the restricted circumstances currently permitted are under parliamentary discussion.

To counteract this conservative offensive, Brazilian women’s rights movements launched the campaigns for decriminalization “Neither imprisoned nor dead” and “Girls, not mothers”, the latter of which is being carried out throughout Latin America.

Feminists are also celebrating the ruling of Judge Rosa Weber, who recorded her vote in favor of decriminalizing abortion up to the 12th week of pregnancy on Sept. 22, before leaving the presidency of the Supreme Federal Court and retiring 10 days later.

The highest court in the country, which has acted as a counterweight to the ultraconservative initiatives of the legislature and of the Bolsonaro administration, will ultimately decide whether to rule in favor of or against the legalization of abortion on any grounds up to 12 weeks.

Weber’s vote is in line with the demands of the feminist movement, especially with the strong, early contribution of black women, in advocating “reproductive justice as a tool for social transformations,” Wardi said.

“It is an important milestone in the fight for abortion rights in Brazil” and affirms “the legitimacy of the judiciary in ensuring women’s human rights,” Mascarenha said from São Paulo.

But the current circumstances are not very favorable to her argument, with a Congress dominated by conservative and ultra-conservative groups.

Also because the process within the Supreme Federal Court on the right to abortion is facing indefinite postponement since its new president, Luis Roberto Barroso, replaced Weber.

An aerial view of Hacendita Cafubá, on the north shore of Piratininga, a lagoon in southeastern Brazil, when ponds that serve as a spillway and to collect sedimentation of polluted water were being built and filter gardens that clean the water of the Cafubá River before discharging its waters into the lagoon were being planted. CREDIT: Alex Ramos / Niterói City Government

By Mario Osava
NITERÓI, Brazil , Oct 20 2023 (IPS)

Houses with balconies facing the street or the surrounding hills, when they are not hidden behind high walls, reflect a neighborhood where people live on the shore of a lagoon but reject the landscape it offers.

Piratininga, a 2.87 square kilometer coastal lagoon in the southern part of the Brazilian city of Niterói, began to change after several decades of uncontrolled urban growth with no care for the natural surroundings, in what has become a neighborhood of 16,000 inhabitants."I saw fish where there was nothing living before, I saw flowers where there was only mud, I saw life where nature was already dead without any hope." -- Local beneficiary of the PRO project

Garbage, polluted water, construction debris and bad odors hurt the landscape and the quality of life that is sought when choosing a lagoon and green hills as a place to build a year-round or weekend residence.

The accumulated sludge at the bottom of the lagoon is 1.6 meters thick, on average, resulting from both pollution and natural sedimentation.

“That’s what explains those houses that turn their backs to the lagoon,” explained Dionê Castro, coordinator of the Sustainable Oceanic Region Program (PRO Sostenible) of the city government of Niterói, a municipality of 482,000 people separated from the city of Rio de Janeiro only by Guanabara Bay.

Oceânica is one of the five administrative zones of the municipality, locally called regions, which includes 11 neighborhoods in the southern part, on the open sea coast, in contrast to others on the shore of the bay or inland areas without beaches. With two lagoons and a good part of the Atlantic Forest still preserved, the area stands out for its nature.

PRO Sostenible, which was founded in 2014, seeks to restore environmental systems and to ensure better and more sustainable urbanization in the area. Its actions are based on a systemic approach and nature-based solutions.

Dionê Castro is head of the Sustainable Oceanic Region Program of the municipality of Niterói, on the edge of the Piratininga Lagoon in southeastern Brazil. Gardens and piers jutting into the lagoon have replaced the garbage dumps, polluted water and construction debris that had led local residents to reject the landscape, leading houses to be built with their “backs to the lagoon.” CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Natural clean-up of the water

The program’s flagship project is the Orla Piratininga Alfredo Sirkis Park, which pays homage to a leader of the environmental movement, former national lawmaker and former president of the Green Party, as well as journalist and writer, who died in 2020.

The park, known by its acronym POP, has the mission of recovering and protecting the ecosystems associated with the Piratininga Lagoon, in addition to fostering a sense of belonging to the environment and its surroundings. For this reason, the participation of the local residents in all stages of the project has been and continues to be a basic principle.

It comprises an area of 680,000 square meters, the largest in Brazil in nature-based solutions projects, with 10.6 kilometers of bicycle paths, 17 recreational areas and a 2,800 square meter Ecocultural Center.

To bring residents and visitors closer to the local environment, the plan is to complete three three-story lookout points – two of which have already been built – and piers reaching into the lagoon, part of which can be used for fishing, as fish still inhabit the lagoon despite the pollution of recent decades.

The first section, known as Haciendita Cafubá, was inaugurated on Jun. 17, with a water filtration system for the Cafubá River, one of the three that flow into the lagoon, a lookout point, piers, a bicycle path and even a nursery for newborn crocodiles in a special fenced-in area.

A view of ponds and, in the background, filtering gardens after their inauguration in June 2023. Hills covered by native vegetation surround the Piratininga lagoon and the neighborhood that grew up over half a century around it and now has 16,000 inhabitants, in Niterói, a neighboring city of Rio de Janeiro in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

“I went to see if I could find the crocodiles, my son made me walk down the street, he loves animals… I never thought I would see what I saw… I went to the beginning of the Haciendita, I saw fish where there was nothing living before, I saw flowers where there was only mud, I saw life where nature was already dead without any hope. Congratulations for tolerating us, that community is tough.”

This is the testimony of a resident, addressed to the head of PRO Sostenible. The park has had a large number of visitors since before its inauguration, attracted by flora and fauna that had long since disappeared from the shores of the lagoon.

The technology used to clean the waters is known around the world but has not been widely used in Brazil. It is based on filter gardens, in which layers of gravel and permeable substrates serve as a base for macrophytes, aquatic plants that live in flooded areas and are visible on the surface.

The plants filter the water in a process that does not require chemical inputs.

A special spillway receives the waters of the Cafubá, which conducts and controls them to give greater efficiency to the next pond, the sedimentation pond, the first step in cleaning the polluted waters by reducing the solid material produced by erosion and garbage thrown into the riverbed.

After the sedimentation basins, the water passes through three filtering gardens before flowing into the lagoon.

Biologists and environmental managers Heloisa Osanai and Andrea Maia are photographed at the Tibau Island lookout point at the western end of the Piratininga Lagoon in southeastern Brazil. The vegetation, dominated by the exotic and invasive white lead tree, is gradually being replaced by local species as part of the restoration and clean-up process. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Plant filters

Twelve species of macrophytes are used in the filtration process, but the variety has been reduced due to maintenance difficulties. “We use only Brazilian species, and no exogenous species,” said Heloisa Osanai, a biologist specialized in environmental management and one of the 17 employees of PRO Sostenible.

Examples include water lettuce and water lilies with orange flowers.

“One of the effects of the water treatment is the reduction of mosquitoes, which is important to local residents, who used to burn dry vegetation in an attempt to drive away the insects. People no longer build bonfires in the evenings. The filter gardens attract dragonflies that eat the mosquitoes,” said Osanai.

In the larger Jacaré River, 11 filtering gardens were created, which operate in sequence and whose size was designed for greater efficiency, said Andrea Maia, another biologist and environmental manager of the team.

Filter gardens beautify the environment and expel mosquitoes, with macrophyte aquatic plant species that clean the water, in addition to decontaminating the Piratininga lagoon, restoring fishing and local tourism in a long-neglected ecosystem of Niteroi, in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

Awards and results

PRO Sostenible has already won several national and international awards. It was named one of the three best environmental sustainability programs in Latin America and the Caribbean in the Smart Cities 2022 award.

This year it won another award from Smart Cities Latin America, as the best in Sustainable Urban Development and Mobility. The Park also won awards for valuing biodiversity, from the Federation of Industries of Rio de Janeiro, and another as an environmental project, from the São Paulo city government, for contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda.

In addition to the Park, the program has inaugurated a Sports and Leisure Center on the island of Tibau, on the other side of the Piratininga Lagoon, closer to the sea.

As part of this project, sports fields, a playground and a lookout point have been built, while an invasive tree, the white lead tree (Leucaena leucocephala), native to Mexico and Central America, which dominated the island’s vegetation, has been gradually replaced with local species.

The systemic thinking that guides PRO Sostenible is based on three pillars, explained Dionê Castro.

First is the complexity of local ecosystems and of the projects being implemented, focusing on the environmental, natural, social and cultural dimensions.

In second place is what is called “intersubjectivity”, which takes into account new paradigms of science, leaving behind “simplistic and Cartesian views…The changes do not come from outside, but from local residents, with public input from the conception of the project to its execution,” said the geographer who holds a doctorate in environmental management.

The third pillar is irreversibility. The lagoon and its ecosystems will not return to their original state, “to zero,” but will be cleaned up as much as possible to reach a “new equilibrium,” she said.

Local support for the environmental project led to solutions in different areas, such as the regularization of real estate in the favelas or shantytowns, the improvement of health, the revitalization of fishing, and even the creation of a fishermen’s association.

“It’s environmental justice on the march,” Castro summed up.