Brazil in Focus

Brazil sacrifices the enviroment on the altar of growth

A year ago presidential hopeful Dilma Rousseff went on record as a strong defender of the environment. On the campaign trail, she said she opposed the pardoning of scofflaws for past crimes against the environment. At the same time she spoke forcefully about the need to conciliate preservation with the imperative of feeding a hungry nation. But what has been the Rousseff government's track record? Sergio Abranches weighs in.

by Sergio Abranches
The Brazilian government facilitates economic activity with scant regard for the environment. Brasília's decisions on energy and on managing conservation areas, plus its negligence in discussions of the Forest Code, demonstrate that public policy flouts global concerns over climate change and irremediable environmental damage.

Consider the recent ruling on mining. Brasília recently inked a provisional measure allowing mining in the Serra da Canastra even though the government-run Chico Mendes Institute of Conservation and Biodiversity (ICMBI) has neither the structure nor the resources to safeguard protected areas it oversees. Hence, the government encourages economic activity but ignores the frailty of environmental oversight and governance. This is an abuse of authority. The Constitution clearly states that provisional measures may be issued only to address matters of urgency and in the broad public interest.

Rewriting the rules for a conservation area in order to accommodate the mining lobby is neither. This is part of a long pattern of institutional and juridical disorder, reflecting a flagrant disrespect for the highest law of the land. The Brazilian courts need to step in to reinstate constitutional limits on provisional measures.

Brazil's energy policy is not much better. Government planners are busily ramping up power plants but ignoring the risk of greenhouse gas emissions. Warning that Brazil is running short of natural gas, Petrobras, the state run oil major, has announced it will be signing new supply contracts through 2016. Yet the Rousseff government is ill prepared for the gas crunch. It has approved construction of new thermal gas-fired power stations that may not have a guaranteed supply of fuel. Are they to be converted to coal, which Brazil will have to import? Or oil? In either case, Brazil's power grid will get dirtier.

And what will be the fate of expanding industries that converted to cleaner burning gas-run generators and boilers, a measure which greatly improved the quality of the air over São Paulo? A return to fuel oil would be a tragic setback with high costs to public health and the environment. Hasty decisions regarding long-term policies, taken without adequate planning, information, or foresight could bring high economic, social and environmental costs.

The spill from the Chevron well in the Campos basin has exposed one of Brazil's most troubling weaknesses: the absence of both a contingency plan and a viable remediation strategy in the face of accidents in ultra deep drilling and prospecting. Nearly all of Brazil's oil reserves lie in ocean reserves, some of them deeper and farther from shore than any in the global oil industry. It is inconceivable that even as Brazil gears up to tap this extreme oil the country is still unprepared for errors and accidents, never mind the potential hazard to the environment they pose.

Fortunately, the Chevron spill turned out to be a relatively small one. But it highlighted the deeper problem of regulatory failure and the collapse of governance. Brazil's National Petroleum Agency, the industry watchdog, took too long to act and failed to enact precautionary measures. At the same time, the national environmental authority - the Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources - seemed hesitant and sluggish.

The run up to the new Forest Code, which the Brazilian Senate passed on Dec. 6 and will send back to the House for a final vote before Rousseff signs it into law, is following a similar path. Brazilians ought to be weighing long-term concerns such as food security and environmental safety, the touchstones of reliable food production in a world of finite resources. We should be studying how to make farmers tread lighter on the land as they increase their harvests, and how to expand forests instead of razing them. And yet the politicians in their haste to accommodate powerful lobbies have short circuited public discussion and now risk signing into law a bill shaped entirely by short-term interests.

We live in a society at risk, and one of the biggest risks is that of a regulatory and governmental breakdown. Too often, policy makers take decisions without calculating the environmental hazards involved, and end up green lighting projects with little thought to planning, management, risk prevention, and remediation. For a country as big and important as Brazil, it's time to stop improvising.

Sergio Abranches writes about the environment at www.ecopolitica.com.br
Translation by Roman Gautam.