Breakthrough: brazil Archives

When Brazil's Environment Minister Marina Silva quit her office last month to protest President Lula's decision to move forward with dam and road building in the Amazon, environmentalists in Brazil and the U.S. rightly worried that her departure was a harbinger of accelerated deforestation to come. But the episode also revealed the failure of the small-is-beautiful vision of sustainable development for the Amazon, represented by "extractive reserves," which have been championed by conservationists, Silva, and her late mentor, Chico Mendes, since the late 1980s.

Mendes came to worldwide fame in the late 1980s as a rubber tapper who had created a political alliance with indigenous groups and American environmentalists. He organized forest communities to engage in civil disobedience to block logging operations. He lobbied international banks to stop financing deforestation. And he proposed that extractive reserves be created throughout the Amazon where rubber tappers, peasants and Indians could sustainably harvest nuts, oils and other products from the forest.

Mendes was killed by landlords in 1988 but his vision took off in 1992, the year the United Nations held an environment meeting in Rio de Janeiro. Foreign governments subsidized the reserves and sympathetic foreign companies like Ben and Jerry's and the Body Shop announced deals to purchase their nuts and oils. Many foreign observers saw in the extractive reserves the seed of a new kind of development, one that could leave most of the forest standing while also creating jobs for poor Brazilians.

But extractive reserves never became self-sustaining, much less capable of generating the billions Brazil needed to service its gargantuan $500 billion debt. By 2005, Leonardo Coutinho, an intrepid reporter for Brazil's largest newsweekly, Veja, reported that many if not most of the residents of the reserves turned to cattle ranching to survive. Even Mendes' widow was raising cattle within a reserve named after her husband. In many cases poor migrants gravitated to extractive reserves for work, but with no work available, turned to logging and cattle ranching. Poor Brazilians -- and Amazon ecosystems -- would have been better off had foreign investments been made to create jobs in cities, not the forest. In short, the problem with the small-is-beautiful approach is that it too often loses sight of the big picture.

Continue reading "When Small Isn't Beautiful" »

Brazil is a country of stark contrasts. It is the land of the Amazon and the favelas. Of breathtaking natural beauty and rampant violence. Its forests hold what some have called "the lungs of the earth," but the desire for a better life is driving their destruction. Environmentalist efforts to save the rain forest tend to brush over the plight of the Brazilian people, but until the country's widespread poverty is addressed, Brazilians will keep hacking down trees to eke out a living.

Continue reading "Brazil: "Lungs" -- or Bowels -- of the Earth?" »