Can Brazil lead on climate commitments?

If Brazil can both exploit, and protect, its vast resources, it could be a powerhouse of the 21st century. Conor Foley and Jonathon Porritt sift the possibilities.

Brazilians often joke that their country has a bright future ahead of it – “and always will have”. More recently, however, there is a genuine sense of optimism that they could again be assuming what they see as their rightful place on the planet.

For over a century, up until 1980, Brazil had one of the highest economic growth rates of any major country in the world. It transformed itself from a predominantly rural to a mainly urban society in the space of a few decades with one of the fastest and largest population movements ever seen in peacetime. By the 1950s, the country was on a trajectory to overtake the US, and it was Brazil, rather than China, which fascinated Western policy-makers. President Juscelino Kubitschek pledged his nation would achieve “50 years in five”, and created a brand new capital city, Brasilia, in the heart of the country. The land of bossa nova, samba, carnival and football genius also became the favourite destination for holidaying film stars like Ginger Rodgers and Fred Astaire.

It wasn’t to last. A military coup, appalling economic mismanagement and the oil and debt crises of the 1970s hit Brazil hard, leading to what is often referred to as the ‘lost decade’. Economic growth went into reverse, and crime and poverty spiralled out of control. Democracy returned falteringly, but, by the mid-1990s, Brazil was a byword for urban violence and rural destruction. Police death-squads murdered street children in the cities while pistoleiros, assassins paid by cattle barons, despatched environmental activists and landless workers to the same fate in the countryside. Brazil had become one of the world’s most violent and unequal societies, while corruption wore away at its governing institutions.

But eventually the nightmare came to an end. The military were forced back into their barracks, and a vibrant democracy took hold. Today, Brazil’s stock-market is booming, inflation is low, and its currency, the real, is strong. Millions have been lifted out of poverty by a combination of economic growth, the creation of eight million new jobs, and innovative social programmes, like the Bolsa Família minimum income benefit, which goes to 11 million families.  

“There is much we can learn from Brazil”

Brazil has shrugged off the worldwide financial crisis – which its popular President Lula famously blamed on ‘blue-eyed bankers’ – and Finance Minister Guido Mantega recently predicted that its economy will be the fifth largest in the world by 2026. It has a highly profitable agricultural industry, in sharp contrast to the subsidised farmers of much of the rich world, and has benefited from the recent rise in commodity prices. And when Rio de Janeiro was chosen, in October 2009, to host the Olympics, President Lula triumphantly declared: “We have left behind being a second-rate country to become a first-rate one”.

Brazil is also becoming an increasingly significant player on the international stage, at the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the G20. Brazilian leaders in government, business and communities are coming together to build a brighter and more sustainable future in a variety of ways. The Green Futures special publication Sol e Sombra (‘Sun and Shade’) illustrates Brazil’s potential to be a leader in sustainability and highlights some exciting work already underway – while recognising the obstacles on the road.

Brazil is now the world’s leading producer of biofuels, and the largest exporter of ethanol from sugarcane – one of the most competitive biofuels in the world. But, more than 30 years after the country first hit upon ethanol as the means to decrease dependence on oil imports, and just as the rest of world is getting excited about the next generation of more sustainable lignocellulosic biofuels, Brazil has discovered the pre-salt reserves. These huge light crude oil fields just off the coast of São Paulo are expected to put Brazil among the world’s biggest fossil fuel players, causing President Lula to quip that “God must be Brazilian”.

Financial success such as this has propelled Brazil to the forefront of the debate as to how economic development can be made compatible with both preservation of the environment and the reduction of poverty. At the heart of this debate lies the Amazon rainforest.

The search for solutions that last

Back in 1989, Al Gore enraged the nation with his comment that: “Contrary to what Brazilians think, the Amazon is not their property, it belongs to all of us”. For many, this clumsy statement endorsed suspicions that eco-colonialism was on the rise - but it also expressed frustration at the Brazilian Government’s apparent unwillingness to tackle a mounting catastrophe of truly global consequences.

Amazonia is one of Brazil’s poorest regions, and no one who knows it can doubt the need for sustained investment in its transport infrastructure. But there is a direct connection between deforestation and new roads, with the access they provide to previously undisturbed places for loggers, miners and plantation companies. A glance at the ‘herringbone’ pattern of roads that are already branching out from the main routes into the forest provides a frightening vision of the future.

Like many of Brazil’s social and environmental problems, deforestation is partly a legacy of the dictatorship. Colonising the Amazon was deemed a strategic necessity by the military, whose rule also exacerbated Brazil’s already starkly unequal patterns of land ownership. Almost 50% of the country’s land is controlled by a mere 1% of the population, and the concentration of ownership in Amazonia is even higher, with 82% of Brazil’s largest landowners holding estates there. By contrast, most of the poor people who were encouraged to settle in the forest have no land rights, or at best, well-faked property deeds.

Lack of secure tenure renders it nearly impossible for poor farmers to invest in modern techniques. Instead, they simply clear land by slashing and burning the forest. Loggers and farmers work in tandem, with the former taking the best wood – often illegally – and the latter sowing grass to raise cattle. The planted pasture soon becomes overrun with native grass, which is unsuitable for grazing, and so farmers move on, knocking down adjoining forests, leaving swathes of wilderness in their wake.

President Lula promised to tackle deforestation when he came to office in 2003. An estimated 20% of the Amazon had already been lost by then, and about 10,000 square miles had disappeared in the previous two years alone. The President appointed a strong advocate for conservation, Marina Silva, as Minister for the Environment and, by August 2007, euphorically announced that the rate of destruction had fallen by nearly a third – a success attributed to a crackdown on illegal logging. The Government has jailed 600 people for environmental crimes and also prosecuted the killers of Sister Dorothy Stang, an American environmentalist, assassinated in 2005. President Lula’s Government increased the protection given to indigenous people’s land rights and faced down protests from some ranchers and farmers.

But Silva resigned in 2008, saying she had “lost the strength to carry on”. During her tenure, she clashed repeatedly with other ministers, including President Lula’s Chief of Staff and chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff. The agri-business block, bancada ruralista, accounts for nearly a quarter of the Brazilian Congress, and President Lula is courting its support for Rousseff in the forthcoming presidential elections. Their attitudes were best summed up by Blairo Maggi, Governor of the state of Mato Grosso and one of the world's largest soybean farmers who, six years ago, said that “a 40% increase in deforestation doesn't mean anything at all... there is nothing to get worried about”. Since winning Greenpeace’s ‘golden chainsaw’ award in 2006 for his contribution to environmental destruction, Maggi has led Mato Grosso in developing strategies to combat deforestation and in creating zoning plans for agricultural production.

There is a growing recognition that the best way to halt deforestation is to make it more valuable to preserve trees than to cut them down. Last year, Brazil launched a $20 billion Amazon fund to do just that. It’s intended to fund everything from monitoring illegal logging to developing alternative livelihoods for Amazon farmers and ranchers. Norway has already pledged $1.1 billion over ten years for the fund, contingent on government performance, and has called on other countries to follow. Announcing the scheme, President Lula declared: “Brazil has policies aimed at conserving the Amazon forest and its priceless natural heritage. But the forest is also home to a culturally diverse population of 25 million, including some 170 indigenous peoples, along with hundreds of communities of rubber tappers, hunters and gatherers, and riverbank dwellers. Preservationist approaches alone are ineffective in tackling deforestation – a cause of global warming. We need to find enduring solutions. This is why we are investing in sustainable management of the forest that will provide a decent living for its inhabitants”.

President Lula argues that Brazil’s experience shows how developing countries can contribute to combating climate change globally. Indeed, since poorer countries stand to suffer more harshly from the climatic disruptions than the rich world, they have a strong incentive to do so. He rightly notes that it was the unsustainable consumption patterns of the richer countries which largely caused the problem and so these cannot shirk their core responsibilities for dealing with it.

But when it comes to contrasting lifestyles, few countries showcase such extremes of consumerism and wealth. São Paulo, one of the world’s biggest metropolises, is also the helicopter capital of the world, ahead of both New York and Tokyo. For São Paulo’s super-rich, the helicopter is the vehicle of choice for the daily commute. Brazil is also home to the world’s largest fleet of privately owned jets, but there are places in the Amazon where tribes of indigenous people have never previously had any contact with outsiders. The small towns in the interior, meanwhile, with their rodeos, cowboy hats and country-and-western music, have an atmosphere that resembles nothing more than the mid-west of the United States.

Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world, both in terms of land mass and population size. It is also one of the world’s most diverse, and can best be described as a country of different continents, where Europe and Africa come together in America. About half of its population have some African blood in their veins, and Salvador, its first capital city, is 80% black. Most of the light-skinned population of Curitiba and Porto Alegre, in the south, by contrast, come from Germany, Italy and Poland. Parts of São Paulo have a ‘Little Italy’ feel to them. There are more Japanese people in Brazil than anywhere outside Japan and more Arabs than anywhere outside the Middle East.

With such a complex and diverse country as its subject, this supplement is only able to look into a key sample of the environmental challenges facing Brazil, and give a flavour of the creativity, ingenuity and determination of the responses. Brazil contains within its own borders examples of virtually all the major issues confronting global policy makers concerned with sustainable development. How it deals with these will have huge implications for all of us, and for the world in which we all live.

Conor Foley is a consultant on human rights and development who has lived in Brazil for the last six years.
Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future.

22 February 2010

Jonathon Porritt