Opinion: Google the Amazon!

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The current president used a prank to, once again, confuse public opinion and try to convince him that he is the best option among the candidates for the election. His strategy was to induce voters to analyze the absolute numbers of deforestation computed annually by Inpe (National Institute for Space Research), choosing a few years and disregarding their evolution trajectories.

Adding the years 2003 to 2006, the total deforested area is, in fact, greater than that verified in the current president’s term. But what he purposely omitted is that his government is responsible for much greater deforestation than that seen in Lula’s second term and those that followed until he took power in 2019.

Deforestation in the Amazon has been on the rise since 1997. From 2001 onwards, it acquired a dynamic of super-accelerated growth, breaking the threshold of 20 thousand kmtwo in 2002.

Lula took over the government with explosive deforestation, which reached 27,772 kmtwo in 2004. How did the president react to this disastrous event? Did he deny the numbers saying it was an NGO thing? Did you fire the director of Inpe?

No, the other way around. Since the beginning of 2003, when he was informed that deforestation was accelerating, Lula gave approval for Marina Silva to set up the PPCDAm (Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon), the largest and most ambitious set of public policies ever conceived in the country to face this problem, which has plagued us since the 1970s.

Politically coordinated by the Civil House and technically by the Ministry of the Environment, the PPCDAm implemented hundreds of actions through 13 ministries and more than a dozen linked agencies, in a true war against deforestation.

The numbers are impressive, “just Google” the numerous scientific publications, technical studies and even books written about this period. Just to give a taste to the (e)reader who doesn’t have time to research, here are some: 1,500 clandestine wood companies closed and more than 1 million cubic meters of wood seized; several criminal organizations that promoted illegal logging were dismantled, with 659 people arrested, including civil servants from the federal and state governments; around 66,000 illegal claims for land titles defrauded by squatters were canceled; and 40 conservation units were created, totaling 26 million hectares, to stop the expansion of the predatory frontier, expanding the territorial extension of these areas by more than 76%, compared to everything that had been done until then.

There is much more, such as the approval in record time of Law 11,482/06, which instituted the public forest management system, making the control of native wood circulation more rigid, and the creation of Deter (Detection System for Deforestation in the Amazon Legal in Real Time), by Inpe, in 2004.

The undeniable historical fact is that Lula received deforestation on the rise and dramatically reduced it. In 2006, at the end of his first term, he had already managed to decrease by 48.5% and continued to improve public policies.

Result: in 2010, when he left the government, he handed over the Amazon with the lowest rate of deforestation ever recorded by Inpe and, mainly, with a downward trend. The fall that followed until 2012, already in Dilma’s first term.

And, after all, what did the current president do? It dismantled the PPCDAm, dismantled public policies, demoralized and weakened the inspection and control bodies of deforestation and, above all, encouraged deforesters, land grabbers, miners to invade public lands, indigenous territories and conservation units.

The difference between the two candidates is obvious. One took the Amazon with explosive deforestation and reduced it to the lowest rates in history. The other did the opposite. He’s caught deforestation at a low and is delivering it at explosive rates.

Does it need Google to find out who is best for the future of the biggest rainforest on the planet?

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