Reducing Brazil's Environmental Agency

While Lula's social record has been outstanding, his environmental legacy is increasingly in doubt. First, there was his new Amazon policy (which, while I was at first intrigued and thought it may work, I've since begun to think and become convinced it is more dangerous than useful). Now, there is the breaking up of IBAMA, Brazil's environmental organization. Lula is taking away from it its conservation efforts and turning it into a mainly-administrative arm of the government, which is a shame, given how successful and efficient IBAMA has been up to this point.

Randy has a lot more good insight, and is really worth checking out, but I'd just like to add a few comments. It's rather unfortunate to me that it seems in some ways Lula is falling into the "Order and Progress" trap here. Certainly, Brazil's energy needs are growing far more rapidly than its production. However, the Brazilian state has continuously tried to address this need with policies that put at danger the most fragile parts of the country, in this case, dams and pipelines. As Randy said, wind power is a totally viable option here (much like the U.S., yet strangely, both countries generally fail to use wind, though the U.S. does have more than one windmill). This effort to "modernize" by increasing state presence and technological capability on the fragile areas of Brazil most certainly is not a recent development. In the 1960s, building the Trans-Amazonian highway was one of Gen. Emílio Garrastazu Médici's pet projects to show Brazil was "developed". (Médici was the most repressive of the Brazilian general-presidents during the 21-year dictatorship). In the 1970s, Gen. Ernesto Geisel pushed for nuclear development, placing the testing areas in the Northeast near the Amazon basin, where they remained until the corrupt Collor administration (1990-92). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the efforts to minimalize or prevent illegal deforestation were minimal, reaching perhaps their darkest period during the privatization-rush of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1994-2002). And now there's the reduction of IBAMA.

This isn't to say that Brazil is screwed, nor that there are people here who are still successfully fighting for conservation. As the article points out, the reduction of IBAMA still leaves several other points where governmental and environmental groups, ethnic indigenous groups, and NGOs can try to stop development projects that are of great harm to the forest. These groups are also rather efficient, and experienced at what they do. It is simply unfortunate to me that the office of the President of Brazil throughout the years has not tried to find more environmentally sound ways to carry out their development projects over the last 40+ years. Maybe Lula's decisions will not be as damaging as they seem to have the potential to be right now, but there's that ever present fear that we're not doing enough.