Sixteen days before the end of the Jair Bolsonaro (PL) government, Vice President Hamilton Mourão (Republicans) launched a plan for the Amazon that includes measures that the government itself dismantled over the course of four years in office.
The so-called Nossa Amazônia Plan was presented by Mourão at the tenth and last meeting of the CNAL (National Council for the Legal Amazon), chaired by the vice-president.
The meeting was held this Thursday (15). On the same day, the proposal was published in the Federal Official Gazette.
The action of CNAL, with the militarization of the fight against environmental crimes and the emptying of the environmental inspection bodies, proved to be a failure.
The flagship of this action was the decree of military intervention in the fight against environmental crimes in the Amazon, through the action of the Armed Forces in the so-called GLOs (guarantees of law and order).
Three Bolsonaro decrees authorized GLOs in the Amazon, for a total period of 16 months. Operations Verde Brasil 1 and 2 and Samaúma consumed R$ 550 million in public money.
After the operations, data from Prodes (Project for Monitoring Deforestation in the Legal Amazon by Satellite) pointed to a record deforestation in the biome in 15 years, 13,038 kmtwo devastated in 2021, the highest rate in 15 years. Inpe (National Institute for Space Research) satellites detected deforestation of 45,586 kmtwo in four years of Bolsonaro.
Even so, Mourão’s Nossa Amazônia Plan mentions “good results achieved” with the intervention of the military through GLOs.
“The use of the Armed Forces was carried out in a timely manner, located regionally and temporally, not being, therefore, a definitive solution to the issue in which the good results achieved are considered”, states the plan.
The Vice-Presidency did not respond to questions in the report.
Nossa Amazônia is a collection of phrases and generic ideas, with proposals that represent the opposite of what the Bolsonaro government did over four years.
The plan proposes an increase in the allocation of resources, personnel and improvements to the installations of the environmental inspection bodies.
In the Bolsonaro administration, there was an intentional emptying of these bodies, especially Ibama (Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources), ICMBio (Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation) and Funai (National Indian Foundation).
Bolsonaro is contrary to the environmental inspection undertaken by Ibama and the framework for repressing environmental offenses through the imposition of fines. The president is also opposed to new conservation units and demarcations of indigenous lands, being a supporter of mining in traditional territories.
The Nossa Amazônia Plan proposes an expansion of INPE satellites, an agency discredited by the president due to official data that point to a significant increase in deforestation in the Amazon.
Another proposal is the establishment of an action plan to control deforestation in the biome. Ricardo Salles’ tenure at the Ministry of the Environment paralyzed the PPCDAm (Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon), responsible for the significant reduction in deforestation rates.
Mourão’s Nossa Amazônia also proposes the reestablishment of the governance of the Amazon Fund, paralyzed after the Bolsonaro government extinguished the committees that guided the allocation of resources.
The fund finances preservation projects in the Amazon and is even used to fund government inspection actions. According to an audit by the CGU (Controladoria-Geral da União), R$ 3.2 billion are stuck in the fund.
Norway and Germany are the main financiers of the Amazon Fund, and there have already been signs from countries to resume projects in the face of Bolsonaro’s defeat at the polls and the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT).
In October, the STF (Federal Supreme Court) decided that the fund must be reactivated within 60 days.
In the government transition group, the plan of the vice president, elected senator for Rio Grande do Sul, is not taken into account.
The environment group proposes a series of repeals of acts, as of January 1, 2023, to reverse the dismantling of environmental policies undertaken over the four years of Bolsonaro’s mandate.
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