The new president of Brazil wants to step up agribusiness and mining exploitation of the Amazon – the biggest lung of the world. How will other presidents, governments, environmental organizations and normal people on the planet react to that?
Agriculture by Big Farma in the Amazon not only is destroying vital parts of the lungs of the planet, it’s also poisoning the soil with chemicals, syntethic fertilizers and GMOs. In the not so long run, this means transforming rainforests into desert.
Still another ugly unfalse fact: an important part of foreign investments to the soy and beef sector in the Brazilian Amazon are paid from tax havens, possibly with money from tax evasion and money laundering. This was pointed out out to me by a friend of mine, a scientist at the Resilience Centre of Stockholm University. With some colleagues in Stockholm and Amsterdam, he revealed the dirty connection using data from Brazil’s central bank. In Europe their findings got a great deal of publicity, also some in Brazil, but I have not found this scandal reported in US mainstream media.
Bolsonaro wants to take Brazil off the Paris climate accord. Will other governments punish him for this? Will they compensate or try to compensate by speeding up their own efforts to save the planet as a home for plants, animals and people?
Brazil, like the US, has a federal governing system. I don’t know if there is something like California in Brazil, some states that might be able to work against these Drumpf-like plans.
Bolsonaro won, according to news reports, with a rhetoric against rampant corruption in Brazil, which seems to include the charismatic former trade union leader and president Lula (now in prison) and his almost as charismatic successor Dilma Rousseff. What kind of action Bolsonaro will take remains to be seen. One might guess that he will find corrupt people only using his partisan eyes. He himself has a record of corruption: according to Wikipedia he hired his present wife Michelle as a secretary for his work as a congressman and paid her an enormous salary with taxpayers money, so big that the Supreme Court forced him to fire her.
Bolsonaro doesn’t worry about the future of his planet. Evidently, he’s planning to die before it turns into deserts. But he has five children from three marriages – does he ever think of them, and their children?
You don’t have to stretch Bolsonaro’s name a lot to make it translate as The Man With Big Pockets (in Spanish – it doesn’t work in Brazilian Portuguese, I think). Maybe he has drawn the plans for extreme exploitation of the Amazon on his own, and without being paid for them, but I don’t think he is stupid in that way. Anyhow, agribusiness and mining investors are rejoicing.
Bolsonaro is an almost perfect Brazilian copy of the WH occupant (except for very dissimilar military merits) – racist, misogynic, provocative, admirer of rightwing dictators, and so on. But the most important thing about him is his standpoint on ecology. What use do we have of equal rights, fair opportunities, free university, minimum wages, decent housing, voting rights and possibilities, if the planet is inhabitable?
There should be a new protest movement against Bolsonaro and Big Farma, to protect the Amazon, or what’s left of it – even before The Man With Big Pockets won the presidential race, the rainforests were aggressively exploited during decades.
A few weeks before the Brazilian elections made headlines here, I happened to read a book about Brazil’s ecology, ”Ett hem på jorden” (A Home On Earth, 1981), by the Swedish author and movie director Arne Sucksdorff (the first Swede to win an Oscar). For several years he lived in the savannas of Pantanal, an area neighboring the Amazon, with his Brazilian wife Maria, an ecologist. They documented the nature and the wildlife, also their encounters with illegal small-scale hunting and agriculture. In 1972, Swedish television broadcast a series of four short films about Pantanal made by Sucksdorff. Last year, they were included in a DVD collection.
With his book, Sucksdorff reminded me of an international environmental conference in Stockholm, in 1972. The rainforests in Brazil were a hot topic there, too, and the mishandling of this universally important natural resource was criticized. The Brazilian delegation was offended. ”Go fu*k yourselves”, they said, perhaps in a somewhat more polite language, and ”In Brazil, Brazilians make the decisions.”
Those days, Brazil was officially and in practice a military dictatorship, hurting both nature and people. Nowadays, the new president with his military background and dictatorial ambitions is hiding behind a façade of democracy. When we protest, he will tell us, ”What’s the big fuss? We told you so – 46 years ago.”
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Update: I wrote my posting in a hurry (but had it checked by some friends). Now I can answer one of my questions: yes, there is a “California” in Brazil. The northeastern province Rio Grande do Norte voted against Bolsonaro, even electing a woman for governor, Fátima Bezerra from Lula’s party. She promises resistance to Bolsonaro.
Also, my referring to Lula and Rousseff in a corruption context might have been hasty. The judge who sent Lula to jail is rewarded by Bolsonaro, who made him his minister of justice. Not exactly a proof of political indepence.