New book by Míriam Leitão explains the Amazon – 10/17/2023 – Environment

The transformations that the Amazon region has undergone in recent decades have been so accelerated and brutal that it takes an unusual effort to understand how they fit together. “Amazônia na Encruzilhada”, a new book by journalist Míriam Leitão, manages to put together most of this puzzle, seeing through Ibama’s daily operations, bad climate news and the growing power of agribusiness to create an overall vision.

Given the complexity of the Amazon and the problems it faces, it is inevitable that the result of such an effort will be a massive book, but the almost 500 pages fly by. The author’s narrative has an agile reporting rhythm, careful didacticism and mastery of the topic.

These virtues derive, firstly, from the fact that Leitão combines his experience in covering economic topics with detailed knowledge of the region’s environmental dilemmas — a somewhat rare combination in Brazilian television journalism.

Despite the region’s gigantism and diversity, much of the story narrated by the author follows an easy-to-understand trajectory: triumph, fall and possible redemption. Said this way, it sounds like Manichaeism, but there is no other way to describe what happened with Amazon deforestation during Brazilian governments after redemocratization.

In short, after frustrated attempts to control the assault on the forest in the 1980s and 1990s, the first Lula government, through Minister Marina Silva’s team, was the first to significantly reduce deforestation, thanks to a combination of technology cutting-edge monitoring, strict legislation (both bequeathed, in part, by previous governments) and a willingness to enforce the law.

The developmentalism of the Dilma and Temer governments and, mainly, the rise of Bolsonarism put this victory at risk. In Bolsonaro’s case, the motives were the most delusional possible — an obsession with supposed mineral fortunes and conspiracies against national sovereignty that have no support in reality.

For example, reports about former Environment Minister Ricardo Salles calling European and American investors “communists” for criticizing Bolsonaro’s Amazon policy are revealing.

The delusion, however, had a method, as the author shows: in short, it gave power to local political chiefs who benefited from mining, land grabbing, and predatory logging and farming.

The worst thing is that, both from an economic and a social point of view, this strategy only favors a small group of smart people: several studies, analyzed by Leitão, show that the most deforesting municipalities in the Amazon have worse economic performance and social indices than those of your neighbors who don’t idolize the chainsaw.

Furthermore, they end up reducing the region’s chances of winning investments from a global market that is increasingly less tolerant of deforestation (even though this is also used cynically by developed markets).

If even from an economic point of view putting the forest down is stupid, at least for most people and in the long term, how has the biome already lost around a fifth of its extension?

The book analyzes this paradox by explaining, for example, the perverse incentives that loopholes in legislation and problems with Amazon logistics end up bringing. Gold mining is perhaps the most glaring case: little taxed and with invoices still made by hand (even on “bread paper”), the activity is a swindler’s paradise.

The return of Lula and Marina Silva to the federal government, from this point of view, is undeniably the return of rationality to the way of thinking about the Amazon, but it is still too early to know whether it will be enough to turn the tide.

Leitão is betting on valuing the knowledge of indigenous peoples and the ability to transform the forest’s wealth into products with high added value to overcome the impasse. It won’t be easy, but the alternative would be disastrous for Brazil and the world.