Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva came out angrily on Thursday against foreign “meddlers” questioning his government’s environmental protection policies for the Amazon rainforest.
“There are meddlers who have no political authority, who emit carbon dioxide like nobody else, who destroy everything they have and who put forth opinions about what we should do,” Lula said in a speech marking World Environment Day.
“We can’t allow people to dictate rules to us about what we should do in the Amazon,” he said.
PHOTO: AP
The Brazilian government has been embarrassed by official statistics suggesting deforestation of the vast Amazon jungle has picked up since the middle of last year despite many efforts to slow it.
An internal struggle within the government between those wanting to develop the Amazon and those wanting to protect it has already resulted in the resignation of environment minister Marina Silva, who was replaced this month.
Lula, who has pushed back against critics by insisting that the future of the Brazilian Amazon was only for the Brazilian people to decide, unveiled a number of new measures on Thursday meant to reinforce forest conservation.
Among them was a decree creating a new 1.6 million-hectare national park and four Amazon areas in northern Brazil set aside for indigenous peoples’ use only.
Lula said he was able to gauge the extent of the foreign criticisms against his government’s Amazon policies at a Food and Agriculture Organization summit in Rome this week.
“When we get spoken to in a loud voice about what we should and shouldn’t do in the Amazon, we don’t respond in the same tone, because we’re polite. But we must make it clear that we don’t need so many meddlers’ opinions,” he said.
The ranks of the critics include environmental groups such as Greenpeace, as well as a number of politicians in Britain and elsewhere.
They have voiced concerns that Brazil’s push towards more extensive sugarcane fields to meet growing demand for biofuel and bigger cattle ranches and soya farms are all threatening the Amazon, seen by scientists as the “lungs of the Earth” for its important role in absorbing carbon dioxide.
The suggestion being floated is that the Amazon, which also stretches into Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela and other countries, is too important to humankind to be left to national governments such as Brazil’s.
Lula, hitting back, said that the Brazilian Amazon still has “69 percent of its native flora standing, while Europe has only 3 percent.”
“The Amazon region reminds me of those basins filled with holy water in churches, where everybody comes and wants to stick their fingers in,” he said.
The president said one of his protection measures would be to create a working group that would within a month set out the guidelines for an Amazon Protection Fund to which foreign countries could contribute.
Brazilian Environment Minister Carlos Minc said the government hoped the fund could raise US$1 billion within a year.
“Norway has already offered five annual donations of US$100 million each,” he said.
But Minc emphasized that those giving money would have no say in how it was spent, stating that donors would not have seats on the fund’s board.
“Those executing decisions will be the National Development Bank, and the board will be set up by the Brazilian federal government, state governments and representatives of the scientific community. And nobody on the outside will give opinions,” he said.
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