The Battle of the Brazilian Government and the Amazon Deforestation
Right-ring President Jair Bolsonaro, known as “the Brazilian Trump,” is in charge of the world’s biggest tropical rainforest. However, his strong economic growth desire surpasses environmental policies to control wildfires that have escalated during his presidency term.
From the budget for the Ministry of the Environment being the lowest in 21 years to the decrease of fines imposed for illegal deforestation, Brazil and the world are in for a wild ride running at a fast pace towards climate change.
As political parties in the Brazilian government have, for years, neglected the increase of deforestation rate, the Amazon Rainforest is at risk of, instead of being a buffer against climate change, become the most significant driver of climate change by 2050.
Luciene Kaxinawá, 25, is an environmental reporter and indigenous woman from the Kunikuin/Kaxinawá community in Porto Velho-Rondônia who has been impacted by the incessant fires.
“Imagine yourself inside your home having difficulty breathing. Imagine if COVID-19 didn't exist, but you had a daily struggle to breathe and you couldn't, because the air is polluted, because it's too hot, because you can't quench your thirst," Kaxinawá said. “These are the consequences caused by the climate. Many people don't see it, but climate change is happening all the time, even now that I'm talking to you."
Her work experience includes CNN Brazil and Vogue Brazil, where she had an award-winning published work named “Guardians of the Forest” for telling the story of personalities that are of impact to the Amazon.
Kaxinawá said she has been threatened by land owners, miners, and cattle-ranchers for her environmental activism. She once went with lawyers from the Federal Public Ministry to do a story about land invasion in indigenous communities, whose camps were very close to the village.
They were trying to prevent her from reaching the community.
“We felt very intimidated by their looks. They would arrive and ask, ‘What you are doing? What you are saying? But this is not to be said, it is not to be done,’” Kaxinawá said. “We have suffered pressures from this public that was not interested in us arriving at the place and talking about the reality of the native people.”
According to an analysis made by the Climate Observatory, invasions of indigenous land grew 135% in 2019, with 256 cases being registered.
Kaxinawá said these invasions have a lot to do with the legislation that gave a “loophole” that hinted that it would be fine to invade lands because there would be no penalty, thus making people feel more secure to do so.
"If it was just the invasion, it would be a matter. But it's an invasion with violence. They [invaders] came with much more violence,” Kaxinawá said. “It’s been a year since an indigenous from the Irauruau community was murdered defending his indigenous land, and no one knows who it was, how it was. It’s just known that it was an invader. There is no punishment, no investigation, and nobody says anything."
The Climate Observatory analysis shows that the total number of fines imposed by IBAMA (Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources) for illegal deforestation in 2020 was the lowest since 2004. This year, there were 9.516 fines emitted, which is a drop of 20% in comparison with 2019 (11,914) and 35% in comparison to 2018 (14,641).
There is also a 27,4% reduction in the budget for environmental inspection to fight wildfires. In 2021, the Bolsonaro government expects to use 22 million dollars, whereas in 2020, about 30 million dollars was authorized to monitorate forest fires. In 2019, the budget was about 34 million dollars, and that is a 34.5% decrease compared to 2021.
"It was very sad to see everything that happened and really not being able to do anything,” Kaxinawá said. “There is no one to blame, I don’t know how it happened, I don’t know who did it. This is very sad, really, to see it all end and turn to dust, gray. There are no words to describe it except sadness.”
Kaxinawá said she knows 11 indigenous leaders who were killed defending their territory since 2019. She says no one was arrested or held responsible.
Since Bolsonaro’s election in 2018, Brazil has seen a considerable increase of wildfires in 2019 and 2020, especially with the spike of COVID-19 cases when citizens are too preoccupied with the virus to pay attention to the forest fires.
However, Communications Manager at Amazon Watch Organization Ada Recinos said there were policies that the Bolsonaro government could have made, related to the pandemic, to simultaneously control deforestation and protect the public health.
“It would have been the government’s call to shut down indigenous territories and say, ‘Any companies operating near indigenous lands or territories… you have to pull back now, because there’s a potential for a spread,’” Recinos said. “But that wasn’t done.”
Meanwhile, Kaxinawá and civilians living in the Amazon have to deal with the pandemic and the fires now. Kaxinawá had cancelled the interview one time because she was feeling sick. At the time of the interview, she mentioned she was ill from respiratory allergies and asthma attacks that are aggravated by smoke in the air.
"Are we going to need to wear a mask because of Covid or because of pollution?" she said. “I suffer in my skin, really, the climate change [effects], the climate variation.”
INPE (Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research) also had a cut of 10% for the budget in the satellite monitoring of the fires. In 2019, INPE had 528,000 dollars. Now, it has 476,000 dollars.
"People have a very ugly habit of burning and thinking that it will not affect other areas,” Kaxinawá said. “When you start a fire that you think is controlled, you do not know the dimension of the wind, you do not know where it’s going to blow, where it will take. The fire can drag for kilometers and kilometers away, and along with the forest, animals and birds go extinct, besides our fauna and flora.”
The Climate Observatory also notes that the overall budget proposal for the Ministry of the Environment in 2021 is 302 million dollars. Since 2000, that number has never been lower than 510 million dollars.
The Chico Mendes Institute is an agency within the Ministry of the Environment that, compared to the 2018 budget, had a cut of 61.5% of the resources planned to support the creation and implementation of conservation units in the Amazon. The Chico Mendes Institute, responsible for conservation units, has been discussed by Salles to be merged with IBAMA, another agency within the Ministry. Environmentalists and organizations, such as the Amazon Watch, are strongly opponents of the immersion.
“This consolidation is very much reminiscent of any power grab by a government official to try to weaken its institutions that are responsible for the protection of the environment,” Recidos said. “It’s intentional.”
The number one broadcast television network in Brazil called Jornal Nacional also reported that the Ministry of Environment spent less than 1% of its budget for preservation. In the first eight months of 2020, the ministry had over 4.6 million dollars free in cash to invest in the control of human-caused and natural disasters — from wildfires and deforestation (in the Brazilian Amazon and Pantanal biomes), to trash in the sea and climate change mitigation and adaptation. The ministry, however, used only over 18,000 dollars — 0.4% of what was allowed.
There are cases where the money was not even used. By the end of August 2020, over one million dollars were available for the promotion of studies related to climate change. None was used.
Recinos said the Bolsonaro government has also made significant defunding on IBAMA, FUNAI (the National Indian Foundation), and turnover of the staff who would do the enforcement of fires.
“This was a systemic dismentally of so many institutions, that made it very difficult to do enforcement,” Recinos said.
The Executive Secretary of the Climate Observatory Marcio Astrini said that the federal government, which is the one who could work out solutions for the environment and climate agenda, has become, today, the focus of the problem.
“We need to take care, we need to preserve [the forest]. It is not foolishness, it is not silliness,” Kaxinawá said. “Because if we do not take care, we will die of thirst, we will die of hunger, and we will die with high temperatures, as it happens in many countries in the high season that have already reached more than 40, 50 degrees Celsius. Now imagine yourself living it constantly. It is suffocating, it is dreadful.”
The OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) is an intergovernmental economic organization with 37 member countries founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade — according to their website, “to build better policies for better lives.” The goal is to shape policies that foster prosperity, equality, opportunity and well-being for all. They forbade Brazil to enter the organization due to its incessant rates of deforestation. Rich countries that don’t have environmental issues have fierce environmental policies, and they are demanding the same from Brazil as a condition to enter the OECD.
In April, 199 civil society entities from Brazil sent a letter to the government of the United States asking President Joe Biden not to negotiate with President Bolsonaro. Residos supported their action.
“The Global North is very much resource-dependent on the extraction of commodities in the Global South,” Recidos said. “That results in candidates and presidents that are often willing to sacrifice the environment and indigenous people in order to have an economy or be at the table with the U.S.”
However, Recidos said President Biden shouldn’t exclude civil society, environmental organizations, and indigenous people from the table.
"Where there is indigenous people, there is no deforestation, there is no pollution — because this is our home,” Kaxinawá said. “If we pollute our river, we don’t have water to drink. If we deforest, there is no home. The most preserved areas are the areas where the indigenous people live. The forest, the Amazon region, is our home. And it’s considered the lungs of the world, if we don't take care, who is going to take care?"
Kaxinawá said Brazil should only receive investment from the United States if there is a setback in the Amazon burning, since “it is useless to send investments and nothing to be done."
Salles said in the Jovem Pan interview that it is necessary to have a private sector in the Amazon, since the public sector is more difficult to control compared to private sectors due to the constraints of legislation.
The new-implemented “Adopt a Park” is one of the private sector programs created by the Ministry of the Environment to lessen fires in the Amazon. “Adopt a Park” is a government initiative that allows national or foreign companies to adopt one of the 132 federal conservation units in the Amazon, that together represent 15% of the Amazon biome.
Salles said one park will already be adopted by Carrefour, a French company. He said this is “a demonstration that the private sector transcends political discussions and acts in a concrete way.”
However, that is not what Recinos thinks.
“The market is not going to fix what the market broke,” she said. “The land is already owned, the land is indigneous land. If they’re planning on selling it to anyone, they’re taking it from indigenous people.”
Recinos said “Adopt a Park” is a false solution to pretend big companies can buy the way out the issue instead of putting the funding and resources in the hands of indigenous people, who, as she said, are the best stewards of the land.
Ricardo Salles, Brazil’s Minister of the Environment, has had a negligent position towards science in a Jovem Pan interview. His positive mindset contradicts what Kaxinawá describes her everyday life to be.
Salles criticized Brazilian scientist and meteorologist Carlos Nobre, whose studies forecast the Amazon’s tipping point of self-destruction, where the probability of the savanization of the Amazon is factual.
“I find this theory, I am not a scientist, but I find this theory by Carlos Nobre, the tipping point, the savanization of the Amazon, a great degree of fluidity and intangibility,” Salles said in the interview. “But that's okay, it's his opinion.”
“It's not an opinion, it's a study,” the journalist interviewing Salles said.
“No, it’s a study that he produced with his data in his view, so he wants to support his own vision with the study that he produced,” Salles said. “The other day I saw a report from a 1985 newspaper saying that, in 2010, we would no longer have the Amazon. In 2020, we have the Amazon with 84% preserved. It’s necessary to take a grain of salt from this excess of alarmism by some scientists, who live off of alarmism.”
It happens that Kaxinawá had already interviewed Carlos Nobre about the sustainable development of the Amazon. Her input is different from that of the Minister of the Environment.
"I fell in love with him. What a man full of content, rich and in love with the Amazon. I was delighted with his wisdom and humility to pass on and share [his knowledge], and his passion for presenting alternatives that are truly sustainable for our region. I was really happy to interview him."
But if people talk negatively about the Bolsonaro’s government, Salles refers to those people as conducting “militancy action.”
“I read newspaper articles, I read reports, I watch the news, and what do I see there?” Salles said. “Militancy, disguised, surreptitiously, from journalism.”
But Kaxinawá is hopeful for the future.
"If nothing is done, I see a very sad future where [the forest] will stay in our memory, the memory of people today. We will be elders with memories of what used to be, of what we saw one day. We could hunt, we could fish. And if things get better, if there are really effective measures to change all of our reality that we live in today, I have hope for a very beautiful future, where many people can learn more about indigenous people and live in a more harmonious house, in a greener house, in a house full of animals, in a rich and abundant house — as it once was."