“The world must see this summit as a turning point.” The Brazilian President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, does not mince his words to characterize the meeting which begins, this Tuesday August 8, between the eight members of the Amazonian Cooperation Treaty Organization (Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana , Peru, Suriname and Venezuela). On the program, it will be a question of the policies to be put in place to protect the tropical forest, a first since 2009. And what better place than Belem, a port city on the banks of the Amazon, to address these subjects?
Since his inauguration on January 1, Lula knows that he must walk on the embers of a country fractured by four years of chaotic power by Jair Bolsonaro. And among the subjects on which it is eagerly awaited, deforestation figures prominently. Because the mandate of his predecessor will have been marked by a complete setback in the progress of the past years, whether under the presidency of Dilma Rousseff or Michel Temer, the latter’s interim successor after his dismissal. Return of laissez-faire for agribusiness, cuts in the budgets of environmental agencies, impunity for illegal deforestation: under Jair Bolsonaro, deforestation has resumed with a vengeance, increasing each year by 75% compared to the previous decade. In 2022, it culminates at 12,481 km² of shaved virgin forest. More than the area of the Ile-de-France region.
Lula affirms it: “Our goal is to achieve zero deforestation in the Amazon by 2030.” In the wake of his inauguration, subsidies to environmental associations are restored, and a new plan to fight against illegal deforestation is announced. Eight months later, the first results are encouraging, according to INPA, the Brazilian organization responsible for mapping the evolution of deforestation in the country. The progression of deforestation thus fell by 30% between January and June 2023 compared to the same period in 2022. In July, it should even drop “by more than 60%”, welcomed, on August 2, Marina Silva, the Minister of the Environment.
A first assessment tinged with contradictions
The progress is therefore real, but it is not enough to account for the environmental balance sheet since Lula’s return to the presidency. If the decline in deforestation is particularly highlighted, it is also to hide the rest of the economic policy pursued by the government. And this one is much less “green” than what he wants to show.
“The priority for Lula remains to achieve its economic objectives”, explains François-Michel Le Tourneau, geographer at the CNRS and specialist in Brazil. “He knows that this is what will make the difference for the success or not of his mandate. Will the population be satisfied with their living conditions? Will they feel enriched? That’s what matters most to him,” explains the researcher.
Lula must also face a Congress that is far from giving him a blank check. The Workers’ Party (PT) has only 68 seats out of 525 in the Chamber of Deputies; by associating all the left-wing parties, Lula can only count on 20% of the deputies won over to his cause. To govern, he therefore joined forces with several conservative parties close to agribusiness, in a government coalition drawing more on the center right than on his Marxist political origins.
Deforestation in the Amazon
© / afp.com/Julia Han JANICKI, Jean-Michel CORNU
“Lula is not an ecologist at heart”
Half forced by the political context, half opportunist, Lula has thus decided to focus his environmental policy on the Amazon, even if it means neglecting the rest of the country. “Lula has a very good record on Amazonian deforestation, which he reduced by 80% during his first two terms. But he is not an ecologist at heart, underlines François-Michel Le Tourneau. By protecting the forest Amazonian region, he concedes in exchange for leaving a free hand to the agro-exporting sector in the rest of the country.”
And while all eyes are on the Amazon, other parts of Brazilian territory have become the preserve of agribusiness, the mainstay of the Brazilian economy. The Cerrado savannah, for example, covering almost a quarter of the territory, has never been exploited as much as since the beginning of Lula’s mandate. The Brazilian government has also released nearly 324 billion reais (more than 60 billion euros) of pre-financing of the agricultural harvests to come, largely intended for the big industrialists. Finally, the Congress passed an unraveling of the prerogatives of the Ministry of the Environment, such as the rural cadastre or the management of water, which Lula was not obliged to accept.
An international strategy
But the displayed protection of the Amazon is also for Lula a means of sending a strong signal to the international community, in order to show that Brazil is once again a power of confidence. Where Jair Bolsonaro had violently torn apart with many international leaders (in the first place with Emmanuel Macron), Lula intends to embody appeasement and unification, in order to bring Brazil out of the diplomatic isolation where his predecessor had it. sunk. And nothing better, to restore its image, than to appear active in the protection of the lungs of the planet.
“For the heads of state of the Amazon basin, it is above all a question of showing that they cooperate with each other and that they have a real objective of preserving the forest. They want to show the world that the Amazon is theirs. , and that they do not want us to internationalize this question. We are much more in geopolitics than in concrete ecological advances to solve environmental problems”, concedes François-Michel Le Tourneau. It is not for nothing that Lula announced with great fanfare that the COP30 will be held in 2025… in Belém.
Lula continues his political action with the qualities that had been his strength in the 2000s: pragmatism and the search for compromise. However, some of his positions have raised questions, such as his denigration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, or his support for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The Brazilian president is walking on a tightrope, between environmental preservation and international convergence on the one hand, and support for national agribusiness on the other. For now, the balance seems to hold. But how long can he continue to satisfy everyone?