Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva: Deforestation is the key for Latin giant

When the left-wing Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva became president of Brazil in 2003, many in the country’s environmental movement felt their time had come. Their hopes were raised further by the appointment as environment minister of Marina Silva, a champion of environmental issues.

But Ms Silva stepped down in May 2008, frustrated by her failure to have environmental issues taken seriously. During five years in the job she did much to advance the environmental cause. But the Lula government’s record is a mixed one.

On the positive side, to have kept Ms Silva in the job for so long was a step forward, says David Cleary, director of conservation strategies in South America for The Nature Conservancy: “She was completely committed to all the cutting-edge anti-deforestation tools,” he says. Under Ms Silva, the government adopted more sophisticated satellite monitoring of the Amazon region, locating where deforestation was taking place and identifying those responsible. Each year the ministry published a blacklist of municipalities with the highest rates of deforestation and withheld public-sector finance from offending areas.

Not everyone supported Ms Silva’s policies. After her resignation, satellite images appeared to show that deforestation – which had fallen from 27,000 square kilometres in the year to July 2004 to 11,200 square kilometres in the year to July 2007 – was on the rise and would reach 13,300 square kilometres a year by July 2008.

Blairo Maggi, a big soya producer and governor of the state of Mato Grosso, where most of the deforestation was taking place, says the images were detecting deforestation in areas long cleared for farming. Daniel Nepstad, a scientist who has spent 20 years studying the Amazon, says the level of definition of the images was too imprecise. “Defining government actions based on very uncertain data is just wrong,” he says.

But Ms Silva was determined to take a hard line. During her time in office some 1,500 illegal logging and ranching operations were closed down and about 600 people sent to prison, including corrupt officials. She resisted the idea that ranchers and other landowners should receive public support for keeping their forested areas intact, preferring to impose fines and other punishments.

Since her departure, the tide has turned somewhat. Efforts to encourage rather than force landowners to adopt better practices have gained ground. Mr Maggi, once demonised by environmentalists – Greenpeace gave him its “golden chainsaw” award as the country’s biggest deforester – has become almost an environmental champion. He helped set up a soya moratorium under which big traders have refused to buy soya grown on deforested land since 2006. A similar scheme is being prepared for beef.

Such moves have given environmentalists grounds for greater hope. But Ms Silva’s frustration at the difficulty of getting environmental issues taken seriously by the more “developmentalist” wing of the Lula government was not without basis. When government agencies delayed the start of work on two controversial hydro-electric projects on the Madeira river in the Amazon, Mr Lula da Silva famously complained that Brazil’s development should not be held up “for the sake of a few fish”.

Nevertheless, the government’s ambitious infrastructure investment programme, known as the PAC, has caused relatively little damage. This has more to do with the fact that it has been slow to get off the ground than with any great concern for the environment. But the result of building two relatively low-impact hydro-electric dams is a lot less bad than if, for example, plans to pave a trans-Amazonian highway had gone ahead.

Brazil has traditionally resisted targets for reducing carbon emissions. As the government prepares its position for the conference in Copenhagen in December, it appears willing to discuss the idea. This is a big change from the past, when Brazil was reluctant even to talk about its environmental record with foreign organisations, fearing that its sovereignty over the Amazon region might somehow be diminished. That it is now willing to take a role in international discussions of the environment is perhaps the greatest advance of the Lula administration.