Home Brasil Bolsonaro admits Pro-Agribusiness Ministry of the Environment

Bolsonaro admits Pro-Agribusiness Ministry of the Environment

Filipe Sousa

Jair Bolsonaro ended up assuming that his Environment Minister has adopted a stance that defends agribusiness instead of the environment. Alongside Ricardo Salles, he declared that the government he leads is no longer an obstacle for rural producers.

The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, said today that producers will no longer be affected by what he classified as “package of evils” and assured that his Ministry of the Environment “no longer disturbs the life” of the business people.

“Our Ministry of the Environment doesn’t really mess up your life anymore. Quite the contrary, it helps you a lot. Remember some time as ” environmental inspection agencies “treat you and how this treatment is currently dispensed”, said Bolsonaro during the inauguration of a biogas plant in the interior of São Paulo, having been applauded by the audience, according to local press.

Environment Minister Ricardo Salles was also present at the ceremony, accompanying Bolsonaro. Salles and the government he’s are part of are accused by several non-governmental organizations of “dismantling” organs that control possible crimes in Brazilian ecosystems.

Jair Bolsonaro believes that it is well seen “by the country people”. And he believes that his policy defends these Brazilians: “The time when a head of state would go to and come back here with a package of evils, where the man who paid the bill was usually the country man,” he said.

He reminded the G20 summit in Japan in 2019, when he rejected french President Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to increase indigenous reserves, with whom he exchanged accusations at the time, Bolsonaro said that “The President of a large country in Europe that is almost always at the forefront of criticizing us, he wanted us to increase from 12% to 20% the amount of demarcated areas as indigenous lands. No reservation has been demarcated so far and we are increasingly fighting … so that the Indian can, if that’s their will, explore their territory in the best way that is useful.”

Minister Ricardo Salles, whose management is heavily criticized by environmentalists, recently promoted the exclusion of environmental protection from mangroves and vegetation from part of Brazil’s beaches. A decision that was quickly suspended by the Brazilian courts.

Environmental organizations point the finger at Salles and point to the elimination of conservation standards as a way to meet the requests of the real estate sector, and the hospitality and agribusiness industry, interested in exploring areas whose occupation was prohibited.

“Since he is in charge, Salles seeks to change the rules of environmental protection and benefit those for who he truly governs – the agribusiness, real estate, tourism and industry sectors. He knew that, in order to approve regulations that are contrary to the public interest and harmful to the environment, an important and fundamental step would be to exclude civil society and the science of the debate,” the non-governmental organization (NGO) Greenpeace Brasil said in a statement earlier this month.

Greenpeace also accused the minister of mischaracterizing and emptying the National Environment Council (Conama), an advisory and deliberative body that played an important role in the construction of public policies and in the regulation of environmental laws in Brazil. In May 2019, the Council was reduced from approximately 100 members to just 23, 41% of which were linked and indicated by the Brazilian Government.

Under the management of the current executive, fires in the Amazon and pantanal, as well as deforestation, have broken records. Last month, the Brazilian Pantanal recorded 8,106 outbreaks of fire, a record number since 1998. Something that, for Salles, would be solved by the fireman-ox. This theory, shared by the Minister of Agriculture, argues that increasing the amount of cattle in the pantanal, it would prevent the amount of fires in the region. What seems to ignore is that, like the fires, also the amount of cattle in the pantanal has been increasing, which lays down the theory of Salles and Tereza Cristina.

The Brazilian Amazon recorded, between January and September this year, 76,030 fires, the highest number since 2010, when 102,409 outbreaks of fire were ruled in the same period, the National Institute of Space Research (INPE) reported last week.

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