Brazil’s Political Chaos Paves the Way for Environmental Plunder | Amazon Watch
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Brazil’s Political Chaos Paves the Way for Environmental Plunder

May 25, 2017 | Eye on the Amazon

Photo credit: Amazon Watch

As Brazil’s President Michel Temer weathers a new storm of corruption allegations that threaten to topple his administration, the rightwing ruralista (elite agribusiness) congressional bloc is cynically leveraging this political chaos to ram through its regressive and malicious agenda. From slashing forest protections to dismantling Brazil’s indigenous agency to undoing the country’s environmental licensing standards, ruralista lawmakers and their industry backers are waging an all-out war on hard-fought and fundamental environmental and human rights safeguards enshrined in Brazil’s Constitution and legislation.

While an illegitimate president with a 4% approval rating battles for political survival before a population weathering economic recession and weary with rampant and ingrained corruption, powerful political actors and their big-business backers are brazenly attempting to rewrite Brazil’s social and environmental contract. And the stakes couldn’t be higher for the Amazon and its peoples, where the impacts of these changes would disproportionately fall.

Undoing environmental licensing standards and collateral damage

President Temer has moved to sacrifice socio-environmental protections in a last ditch efforts to keep his job or ensure a satisfactory successor. Meeting with ruralista leaders in the aftermath of last week’s incendiary corruptions charges, he indicated that he will guarantee the most controversial and regressive elements of their agenda safe passage through Congress and to his desk for signature.

One political battlefield centers on the country’s environmental licensing process. Citing needless bureaucracy and economic losses stemming from unnecessarily rigorous licensing standards, ruralista leadership put forward simpler, so-called “flex,” licensing that would eliminate licensing standards for a variety of environmentally and socially destructive projects such as massive monocultures and ranching, industrial mining in protected areas, dams on Amazonian rivers, and road building – a principal cause of deforestation.

While opposed by Environmental Minister Sarney Filho, who put forward alternative licensing legislation that previously enjoyed the President’s support, the ruralistas aim to put their original proposal to a vote this week, benefitting from Temer’s weakness. Indeed, the demise of Brazil’s current environmental licensing process – established to avoid or mitigate the worst impacts of development projects – could be seen as collateral damage of the worst crisis of Michel Temer’s presidency. It also joins a litany of other regressions currently underway in a Congress dominated by the ruralista bloc.

Slashing protected areas

In the last two weeks both houses of Brazil’s Congress passed bills put forward by beleaguered President Temer – known as Provisional Measures 756 and 758 – that removed the protected status of immense areas in the Jamanxim National Forest and National Park, respectively. Together, these measures open up nearly 600,000 hectares (2,300 square miles) of primary forests to rampant land grabbing and subsequent deforestation and rural violence. While ingeniously justified by its proponents as a way to spur regional development and regularize contentious land tenure issues for small farmers, in reality this move is designed to serve the interests of the agroindustrial sector, driving the soy farming and ranching frontier deeper into the Amazon.

Provisional Measures 756 and 758 represent only a beginning of the ruralista campaign to rewrite the country’s map of protected areas. Over 10% of Brazil’s conservation areas are threatened, totalling more than 80,000 km2 (31,000 square miles), or an area the size of Austria. Called “grave crimes against the country’s environment” by progressive Senator Randolfe Rodrigues as he unsuccessfully tried to block this week’s vote, the measure not only jeopardizes the protected areas in question, but the future of Brazilian Amazon as a whole.

Meanwhile, Jamanxim’s soon-to-be razed forests will open access to the planned “Ferrogrão,” or “grain railroad” designed to move 42 million tons of soybeans to port annually. Such mega-projects are at the crux of the current assault on the environment and human rights: proposed gutting of environmental licensing is meant to bestow rubber stamp approval to projects like the ferrogrão, which are of vital strategic interest to the same actors providing state-sanctioned access to carve vast soy monocultures and cattle pastures into the Amazon’s protected forests.

Resisting a perfect storm

The combination of the ruralista‘s power and the political opportunities laid bare by Brazil’s political crisis creates a perfect storm that is exceedingly challenging to counter. For this reason, more than 140 organizations from Brazil and around the world united to launch the #Resista campaign this month. Acting regionally, nationally and globally, the coalition is targeting the legislative, legal, and public spheres, sparing no effort to prevent the Temer government and the ruralistas from taking Brazil back decades in terms of environmental protection and human rights.

Whether or not President Temer’s administration falls in the face of this latest scandal and the sweeping public rejection it has engendered will, unfortunately, do little to reduce current threats to the Amazon’s irreplaceable ecosystems and communities. It’s not hard to see parallels here in the U.S. – we too have a president who also appears more concerned with his own power than with protecting the environment and basic rights. Just as we’re mounting resistance here, Brazilians are strengthening their resistance, and we need to support each other in order to safeguard our collective dignity and future.

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