The Brazilian government is considering creating its own fund to replace the Amazon Fund, which has been paralyzed since the beginning of the term of President Jair Bolsonaro (no party). According to the vice president and coordinator of CNAL (National Council for the Legal Amazon), Hamilton Mourão, the idea is to use resources from public and private banks to finance projects at the meeting.
Backed by Norway and Germany, the Amazon Fund has about BRL 2.9 billion idle due to the changes made by Bolsonaro in the management of resources in early 2019. The board responsible for managing the amount was dissolved, and the changes were displeasing to the two countries.
In an audience at the Chamber of Deputies this Wednesday (24), Mourão stated that he is trying to find a solution to release the values, but he defended that the country should create a fund with its own resources with the objective of carrying out actions in the Legal Amazon.
“There really was a dismantling of the fund’s governance and since then I’ve been trying to rebuild that governance in constant conversation with the representatives of Norway and Germany, which are the two biggest donors,” he said.
“I’m also thinking about having a fund with resources from us, from private banks, from public banks, with governance established in common agreement with everyone so that we can have resources to finance development projects that take place there in the Amazon”, said yet.
The vice president defended that the country be paid for preserving the environment and that the money can be used without external interventions.
“We have to keep almost half of the Brazilian territory preserved, we have to get paid for that. It’s not alms, it’s not the guy who’s going to come here and say ‘I’ll give you the money here from the Amazon Fund, but I control how are you going to distribute it from there? This is a loss of sovereignty,” he added.
Mourão once again recognized that military operations in the region to combat deforestation did not have the expected results and attributed the poor performance to the lack of integration between the bodies that acted in the actions of the GLOs (Guarantee of Law and Order).
“At first, these operations were not successful due to a lack of conversation between elements of the Armed Forces and elements of environmental agencies, Ibama, ICMBio, Funai”, he justified.
He also said that he agrees that the use of forces is not the most adequate mechanism to combat illegalities in the Amazon, but that this was necessary because the environmental agencies are “with their forces extremely inferior to the needs”.
In all, there were three GLOs, whose presidential decrees gave legal support to three military intervention operations: Verde Brasil, Verde Brasil 2 and Samaúma.
Even with the operations, the devastation in the region continues to break records. Data from Prodes (Project for Monitoring Deforestation in the Legal Amazon by Satellite), from Inpe (National Institute for Space Research), showed a new record of deforestation for the month of October.
The data is the worst in 15 years, with a devastation of 13,235 km2 between August 2020 and July 2021 — an increase of 22% over the previous period.
Mourão attributed the result to the lack of financial resources to fight illegalities and said he considered that there was a “slowdown” in deforestation and that the result could be “much worse” without the GLOs.
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