Despite a collection of negative data, President Jair Bolsonaro delivered this Wednesday (2) a message to the National Congress in which he affirms that the fight against illegal deforestation and fires is a priority agenda for his government. There is no mention in the document of the record devastation of the Amazon rainforest in 2021, the largest in the last 15 years.
“Fighting illegal deforestation and preventing and fighting fires are priority guidelines for the federal government. The agenda to combat illegal deforestation is thought out and approached in a structuring way, with the prospect of generating lasting and sustainable effects, taking into account people and its relations with the territory”, says the document.
Clear-cut deforestation in the Legal Amazon was 13,235 kmtwo between August 2020 and July 2021 (due to the rainy and dry season, deforestation is always measured in the 12 months from August of one year to July of the following year), the highest rate since 2006 and 22% higher in relation to the period previous.
In the presidential message, several initiatives are mentioned, including the Technical Cooperation Agreement with the Ministry of Justice and Public Security for the National Force in the Amazon.
The militarization of the fight against environmental illicit lasted 16 of the 34 months of the Bolsonaro government, costing the public coffers R$550 million and did not bring down deforestation rates in the Amazon, such as the leaf showed in an article published in October last year.
In all, there were three GLOs, whose presidential decrees gave legal support to three military intervention operations: Verde Brasil, Verde Brasil 2 and Samaúma.
According to the presidential message, the National Plan for the Control of Illegal Deforestation and the Recovery of Native Vegetation has five axes: zero tolerance for illegal deforestation, land tenure regularization, territorial planning, payments for environmental services and bioeconomy.
“It is worth highlighting the new goal of reducing illegal deforestation, which must be zeroed by 2028”, says the document.
according to leaf showed, the government only used 41% of funds for environmental inspection in 2021. Despite these data, the presidential message says that the government has doubled the resources for environmental inspection agencies and authorized the opening of tender for the hiring of 739 new agents environmental protection, “an 18% increase over the current workforce”.
In November, the government withheld the release of record deforestation data and only released this data after COP26 (in Glasgow, UK), hiding the negative data from the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
About fires, the government says that in the most critical months of the year the number of hotspots was below the historical average.
The fires, however, grew in the cerrado in 2021 and reached high levels for the last decade. Considering the first eight months of last year, the biome had its highest number of fires since 2012, according to data from the Queimadas Program, from Inpe (National Institute for Space Research).
August 2021 was also the month with the highest number of fires ever recorded in the state of Amazonas. With 8,588 hotspots, it surpassed the previous record, August 2020, which, in turn, had surpassed August 2019.
In the message, the government also highlights investments for studies related to graphene and niobium, substances that Bolsonaro has usually defended since before he took over as head of the Executive.
“Brazilian environmental policy is experiencing its worst moment. We are an international shame with constant threats of embargo because the Bolsonaro administration promoted a real dismantling, with opening for illegal mining, land grabbing, contamination of soil and rivers, pesticide spree and the largest deforestation in the Amazon the last 15 years”, said the leader of the PSB, Bira do Pindaré (MA).
Bolsonaro has a long speech and history contrary to practically all pillars of environmental preservation. In particular, against the inspection that seeks to contain the devastation. His speeches against what he classifies as the environmental “fine industry” were and are recurrent.
Its first Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles, had several clashes with environmental defense entities. A manifestation that marked his administration was the speech at a ministerial meeting in 2020 in which he stated that it was necessary to take advantage of the focus of the press on Covid issues to pass the herd of loosening environmental rules.
Source: Folha
