Amazon: without social there is no environmental – 10/31/2023 – Inequalities

The Tucuruí plant, in Pará, was opened in the 1980s to generate energy for the country and the aluminum industry. The impacted communities in the surrounding area only had access to electricity almost three decades later. People from Pará continue to pay the highest tariff in the federation, despite the state being the second largest energy producer in Brazil. And we continue exporting aluminum to import aluminum bicycles.

The national vision of development still leads us to large infrastructure projects in the Amazon, but not necessarily for the Amazon. Planned to serve the rest of the country, they do not always translate into benefits for its 28 million inhabitants. Compared to other regions, there is a gap in Amazonians’ access to social policies and basic health, education, energy, transport, communications and sanitation services.

Electric light has already reached almost 99% of Brazilian homes, but it is in the Amazon where the majority of those excluded are found (IEMA). While more than 80% of the population in the Southeast has access to sewage collection, this number does not reach 15% in the North region (Treat Brazil/2023). With Covid-19, the lack of assistance structure became even more obvious, with its municipalities being among the first to collapse, without respirators or oxygen cylinders to supply them.

As basic policies are the responsibility of local governments, exclusion becomes even more acute in an Amazon where municipalities are the size of nations, have dispersed populations, are difficult to access, and have high logistical costs. The compensation mechanisms are insufficient compared to a collection system designed for the reality in the south of the country. The challenges for a city council like Altamira (PA) to distribute school meals following the cost-per-student standard or to implement basic care via the SUS table among its citizens spread over an area larger than Greece, Portugal or Ceará are not easy. The account will never be closed without alliances and differentiated strategies that duly compensate for costly logistics and meet the Amazonian contexts.

Undertaking in isolated and distant centers demands solutions that have local resolution, guarantees of maintenance and community autonomy. If things take longer to reach the Amazon, when they arrive they must be the most advanced. However, for them to become cutting-edge technologies, at the cutting edge, they need to be co-created by communities and their governance cultures for good management. Otherwise, there is a risk of increasing the scrap heap of abandoned businesses in the middle of the woods.

From hospital boats to multipurpose photovoltaic systems, there are already many successful demonstration initiatives ready to scale up via governments through the combined efforts of communities, NGOs, extension projects and corporate responsibility programs.

Indigenous movements, quilombolas, extractivists and partner organizations have just proposed a set of integrated, low-cost and high-impact social policies and technologies to bring drinking water, energy and internet by 2025 to the almost one million excluded Amazonians, people of the forest of remote villages and communities.

These are investments that save lives and pay for themselves by reducing the cost of assistance services based on renewable energy, digital inclusion, water treatment, telemedicine, vaccine conservation, food processing and adding value to socio-biodiversity products.

However, instead of good living measures, we let our forest people who provide voluntary service as guardians of the natural assets that keep us alive receive in return land grabbers, bullets, outside diseases and mercury.

Without a sufficient State, we will continue to see situations, for example, in which an indigenous leader has to turn to a nearby illegal miner to save his sick son with some medicine or fuel for removal. Then the favors normalize relations and their presence in the territory, the movement for disintrusion is divided, weakens and the gate is opened for the entry of new waves of miners, from the ground, who are not the rich, those out there who actually stay with the shine of gold. A perverse cycle of poverty, monetary and non-monetary…

Without social, there is no environmental.

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