Wheels of Industry Slowing in Brazil

March 6, 2013 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 06 (IPS) – Industry is the ailing sector of the Brazilian economy, with production falling 2.7 percent in 2012 in spite of government incentives, and in contrast with the strong expansion of retail trade and the lowest unemployment rate in history.The enigma of a stagnant economy that nevertheless has symptoms of growth that is happening too fast for the country to handle, including a shortage of labour and rising inflation, appears to be explained in several recent publications.

Some of the causes mentioned by economists are a fall in the number of young people joining the labour market and accumulated excess inventory.

The slowing of manufacturing activity is the chief concern of the government of President Dilma Rousseff and economic operators, because it accentuates a trend that calls into question the future of the country. Deindustrialisation, recognised years ago by industrialists and a few economists, is now hard to ignore.

Improved forecasts for this year are raising expectations. But low levels of investment, reflected in the 11.8 percent fall in production of capital goods in 2012 and the surge in inflation, which may cause the Central Bank to take measures to curb demand, do not support the promise of a vigorous recovery.

Results at the close of 2012 were "a bucket of cold water," frustrating hopes of resuming the path of growth and indicating that "the crisis is deeper" in Brazilian industry, and not just a circumstantial effect attributable to the severe problems facing the global economy, said Julio de Almeida, a consultant at the Institute for Industrial Development Studies (IEDI).

Brazil "has not kept up with the development of global industry" in the last 20 years, as China, South Korea and India have done, he told IPS. As it has not developed the most dynamic sectors, like electronics and the pharmaceutical industry, it has not advanced enough in technological innovations, either, he added.

For the past 15 years, industry and certain "organised services" have also been suffering from an accumulation of costs, whether logistical, financial or energy-related, which have harmed their competitiveness, he said.

To cap it all, wages have increased in the last five years at a rate much higher than productivity. Only last year they rose by an average of 5.8 percent, while productivity fell by 0.8 percent, according to IEDI.

It is possible for less competitive countries to survive if the world economy is growing at a good rate, but problems appeared with the crisis that broke out in 2008 in the United States and then spread mainly to Europe, which "shrank the industrial market" worldwide and created intense competition in the domestic Brazilian market, de Almeida said.

In spite of it all, de Almeida believes that this year there may be some recovery, thanks to government measures to reduce electricity costs, cut taxes for some industrial sectors, lower interest rates and stabilise exchange rates, as well as its announcement of large forthcoming investments in transport infrastructure.

However, it will be necessary to boost productivity by investing heavily in technological innovations, especially because Brazil’s industrial base is "aged," he said.

In fact, the mechanical engineering industry, especially the automotive industry, is increasingly predominant in the country.

With its long production chain, ranging from automobile parts to agricultural machinery, the automotive segment represented 21 percent of industrial production in 2011, according to the National Association of Automobile Manufacturers (ANFAVEA).

This proportion has doubled in the last 20 years, while the contribution of manufacturing as a whole to GDP has declined, falling to 14.6 percent in 2011. In other words, the importance of automobiles in the Brazilian economy is still rising.

As a result, the main government measure to reduce the recessionary effects of the international financial crisis was to cut taxes on vehicles, from December 2008, after three months of a sharp decline in sales. The strategy had been used before in other crises.

Oil and steel are also key elements in Brazilian efforts to reverse deindustrialisation.

Recovery is being sought in the shipbuilding industry, taking advantage of the oil discovered under a salt layer deep below the sea bed of the Atlantic ocean, close to the Brazilian coast.

In order to bolster national production, legislation was designed to demand variable and increasing proportions of Brazilian-made components, that may reach up to 70 percent of every ship, platform, depth sounder and other equipment constructed for oil extraction.

All these state interventions, such as tax or financial incentives for specific sectors and measures seen as protectionist, including customs barriers and requirements for a high national content for products like automobiles, as well as oil tankers, are rejected by many free market analysts, who have a keen following among operators and media specialised in economics.

Deindustrialisation is not necessarily a "sickness," since "industry is doing badly, but Brazil is doing very well," with high employment and high wages, said economist Edmar Bacha in interviews last year when he announced a book he edited, titled "O Futuro da Indústria no Brasil" (The Future of Industry in Brazil), published in February 2013.

According to the book, the manufacturing sector in Brazil lost competitiveness mainly due to the rise in wages, which drove up costs.

The average wage in Brazil grew 14.4 percent a year between 2006 and 2011, a global record seconded at a great distance by Australia, which had nine percent wage growth, according to co-authors Beny Parnes and Gabriel Hartung.

Bacha, who took part in previous governments that implemented more free market economic policies, maintained that competitiveness is not built by protectionism, but by more open trade, allowing integration into international production chains. Mexico is cited as an example.

Taking a broader range of expert views, the only point of agreement about the loss of industrial capacity is that it is caused by lack of competitiveness. But there are broad differences in interpretations of its origins and solutions.

Analysts in the commodities sector, for instance, question the primacy attributed to industry as the driver of progress and innovation. They argue that agriculture today adds a great deal of technology and knowledge, involving scientific research and mechanisation.

But the Brazilian government is led by so-called "developmentalists," for whom economic growth is paramount, and chief among them is President Rousseff herself.

It is ironic, then, that industrial decline continues while the country is administered by leaders who prioritise the sector and, to recover its competitiveness, have adopted measures accused of being overly interventionist by the partisans of free market solutions.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2013.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Economy, Featured, Latin America Tagged With: , , , ,

Brazilian Ethanol in the Slow Lane to Global Market

February 17, 2013 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

sugarcane_640-629x472

Sugarcane harvesters have become a fixture in the Brazilian landscape. Credit: Mario Osava /IPS

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 15 (IPS) – Following a promising start, Brazil’s dream of positioning ethanol in the global market on an equal standing with petroleum-based fuels is hindered by new and old challenges.Brazil’s goal of expanding ethanol sales across the world will only be attained when there are "more countries in a position to buy and supply," noted Eduardo Leão de Sousa, director of the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Union (UNICA), an organisation that represents the country’s top sugar and ethanol producers.

Brazil and the United States produce close to 85 percent of the world’s ethanol, according to information from the International Energy Agency. Since it is produced almost exclusively for domestic consumption, international sales are still marginal.

De Sousa told IPS that the critical level of demand necessary to stimulate ethanol production is not something that emerges spontaneously and must be driven by public policies, such as regulations that require a certain volume of renewable fuel to be blended into petroleum-based transport fuels.

Growing demand is led by the United States, spurred by the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) programme that set increasing annual quotas for ethanol production through 2022, and the European Union (EU), which aims to bring the percentage of renewable fuels in transport vehicle engines up to 10 percent by 2020.

The RFS programme, created under the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and further expanded in 2007, with the aim of cutting greenhouse gas emissions and reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil, established a limit of 56.78 billion litres for annual consumption of conventional ethanol fuels, which are those produced from food crops such as corn.

As U.S. consumption is nearing that limit, the bulk of the increase towards the 2022 target of 132.5 billion will have to come from cellulosic ethanol – a biofuel from wood, grasses or the inedible parts of plants, which is new and still too costly to produce- and from "advanced" biofuels.

"Advanced" or "second generation" biofuels are those produced by sustainable feedstock, which are defined by availability of the feedstock, greenhouse gas (GHG) emission levels and biodiversity and land use impact.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency designated sugarcane ethanol as an advanced biofuel because it lowers GHG emissions by more than 50 percent as compared to gasoline, taking into account the full lifecycle of production and consumption, including the use of land to grow the crop.

This development will boost demand for ethanol produced by Brazil and other sugarcane growing countries, bringing it up to 15.14 million litres by 2022.

As for the EU, based on a directive to promote the use of energy from renewable sources (Directive 2009/28/EC) that requires that 10 percent of the energy used in transport be sourced from renewable fuels by 2020, ethanol consumption for that year is projected at 15 to 16 billion litres, half of which could be supplied from outside the bloc, according to de Sousa.

EU and U.S. imports combined, then, will equal Brazil’s current domestic market, developed over the course of almost four decades, de Sousa estimated.

But that demand is not a sure thing. The EU’s executive body, the European Commission, is considering revising its transport fuel target to impose a limit on crop-based biofuels in an effort to prevent negative impacts on food supply, while in the United States the powerful oil and corn lobbies are pressuring against the RFS, the UNICA director said.

Out to conquer emerging markets

Another huge potential market is China, but only if it adopts an ambitious programme once "a supply of diverse and permanent sources is guaranteed," de Sousa forecasted.

Many countries introduced the use of ethanol as a fuel additive in the 1990s. But there are numerous cases in which national programmes for the adoption of this biofuel were postponed or implemented on a trial basis. For example, after establishing a voluntary three percent biofuel blend in 2003, Japan is still reluctant to make it mandatory.

On the supply side, efforts are also "timid," although sugarcane ethanol is being produced in other South American countries and in Central America and Africa, as well as in Southeast Asia, where UNICA sees "great potential."

Mexico has extensive agricultural land but fragmented into tiny private plots that hinder large-scale production. Something similar occurs in India, which already has a large cane production to supply sugar for its 1.2 billion people, de Sousa said.

In Africa, the lack of infrastructure and labour trained for ethanol production are an obstacle to this activity. In Angola and Mozambique, where Brazilian companies are implementing sugar projects, landholding is also an issue, but for a different reason. As all land is state-owned, producers cannot purchase land and must depend on government concessions.

This eliminates land purchase costs but drives away investors who see property as a guarantee.

"The key is having clear rules and streamlining implementation," said Felipe Cruz, investment director at Angola’s Capanda Agroindustrial Pole, an initiative of the Brazilian company Odebrecht, which is building the Angolan Bioenergy Company (Biocom) set to begin production this year.

"The focus is on sugar," António Carlos de Carvalho, Biocom manager and financial director, said. Angola, which was self-sufficient in that food crop prior to independence in 1975, lost its entire sugarcane industry during its 27-year-long civil war. Now it is trying to rebuild it with projects across the country.

In addition to 260,000 tons of sugar, Biocom plans to produce 30 million litres of ethanol, which will be used to replace petroleum-based additives.

Blazing a winding trail

As a pioneer in the use of ethanol fuel and a major sugarcane producer, Brazil has developed technology and companies in the field that have made it possible for the country to pursue ethanol projects in every continent.

This strategy was launched as a response to rising international oil prices in the mid 1970s, when Brazil imported 80 percent of the fuel it consumed.

A decade later, almost all new vehicles manufactured in Brazil were running exclusively on ethanol, while the rest of the country’s vehicle fleet had switched to gasoline blended with an increasing percentage of biofuel. Today, vehicles run on a blend that ranges from 18 to 25 percent.

This initial success was followed by a crisis produced by a drop in oil prices. But in the 1990s, amid growing environmental concerns, Brazilian ethanol emerged as a effective way of reducing pollution.

Also at this time, the U.S. began producing and using flexible-fuel vehicles (or flex vehicles), which run on any blend of up to 85 percent ethanol. In Brazil, an improved version of flex vehicles with no limit to the percentage of ethanol triggered a new biofuel boom in 2003.

But without the expected climate agreements and with environmental concerns clouded by the more pressing economic crisis, global interest in ethanol has waned. Brazilian efforts to create an international market for this product, led by one of ethanol’s champions, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), are not yielding the expected results.

While the strong support from the U.S. -the world’s largest producer of ethanol since 2006-means that Brazil is no longer alone in its efforts, it has exacerbated critics who argue that diverting huge volumes of corn to ethanol production will raise food prices.

Another cause for concern is the potential development of electric and hydrogen vehicles.

De Sousa is confident that "cellulosic ethanol will alter this equation," expanding biofuel production and increasing its sustainability, while all the other alternatives will only be competitive in the long term.

However, no alternative should be ruled out. "Every region will find the solution that is most suitable" for its conditions, he concluded.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2013.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Agriculture, Development, Energy, Environment, Latin America, Report Tagged With: ,

Murder of Landless Workers’ Leader Recalls Brazil’s Dictatorship

February 3, 2013 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Fabiana Frayssinet

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 31 (IPS) – The execution-style killing of a leader of the Landless Workers’ Movement in a sugarcane plantation in the southeastern Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro, where bodies of opponents of the dictatorship were incinerated in the 1970s, recalls one of the most tragic chapters in this country’s history.

In the book "Memórias de uma Guerra Suja" (Memoirs of a Dirty War), Cláudio Guerra, formerly an agent of the Departamento de Ordem Política e Social (DOPS), the 1964-1985 military regime’s political police, tells how the bodies of 10 leftwing activists were burned, in order to leave no trace, in the oven of the Usina Cambahyba sugarcane plant in Campos dos Goytacazes, a municipality in the north of the state of Rio de Janeiro.

Forty years later, the name of this agroindustrial complex of seven plantations with a total area of 3,500 hectares is again linked to the silencing of a bothersome voice, but this time under a full democracy.

Fifty-four-year-old Cícero Guedes was an outstanding leader in the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST). He led the land occupation of the Usina Cambahyba plant which gave rise to the Luiz Maranhão encampment.

"He was a real symbol, and (his murder) sends a powerful message to the MST, which is organising the land claims of rural workers in the area," one of the MST national directors, Marcelo Durão, told IPS.

"We are in conflict with the forces of oppression in the region," he said, and he described Guedes as "a staunch activist, consistent and very focused on the struggle for land, as well as an authority on agroecological production."

Marcos Pedlowski, a professor at the State University of North Fluminense who has studied land reform issues there since 1998, said the murder "is clearly an attempt to break up the organisation, rather than a petty dispute." Guedes was "an icon of efforts in the struggle for land", he said.

guedes

The MST leader was cut down by at least 10 bullets in an ambush in the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 26, near the sugarcane industrial complex. He was cycling home from a meeting to negotiate the legalisation of the situation of the 100 landless families in the encampment.

The dispute over land ownership with agribusiness owners in the region "has been exacerbated by the delay in legal procedures involving properties regarded as unproductive, and therefore subject to expropriation for agrarian reform purposes," said Maria do Rosário Nunes, the human rights secretary for the Brazilian Presidency. The Cambahyba case is an example, she said in a communiqué.

Legal authorisation for the expropriation, which effectively allows it to go ahead, was granted in August 2012, 14 years after the ruling by the Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA).

"The backdrop (to the murder) is the slowness of federal justice," Marcelo Freixo, a state legislator for the Socialism and Freedom Party and chair of the Human Rights Commission of the Rio de Janeiro state legislature, told IPS in an interview.

"The large plantations in the sugarcane processing region are bankrupt and are in debt to the state, in an area where there is a great concentration of poor and landless people. This is where INCRA really has to ensure land reform," he said.

The large estates belonged to the late Heli Ribeiro Gomes, a former deputy governor of Rio de Janeiro, and were passed on to his heirs.

In the book, Guerra says he took advantage of his friendship with Ribeiro Gomes to "disappear" the bodies of the leftwing activists, using the factory oven.

The story is "absurd", according to Ribeiro Gomes’s relatives, but other equally macabre tales have been borne out in reality, even in the present day, like the killing of Guedes and other rural activists whose deaths did not receive as much publicity.

"They say 10 activists were cremated. But we can well believe there were many more," said Durão. The area is notorious for its history of violence against rural workers on the part of the "sugar kings" and their hired killers.

Durão drew attention to the "brutality" of the killing, and its "premeditated nature", with four shots to the head and six to the left side of the chest.

Freixo said it was "a murder by several killers, an ambush… and nothing was taken. Clearly it was an execution."

The northern part of the Fluminense flats has not changed much – at least in terms of fundamental issues like land ownership, human exploitation and violence – since the dictatorship era, nor since previous centuries, when the first forms of slavery in Brazil were introduced on sugarcane plantations.

In 2009, a Labour Ministry report said Campos dos Goytacazes was the area with the highest number of workers labouring in slave-like conditions, a shocking situation in the 21st century, Freixo said. However, it is not surprising, since this region was the last in the country to abolish slavery.

Pedlowski, author of the book "Desconstruindo o Latifúndio – a Saga da Reforma Agrária no Norte Fluminense" (Dismantling the Large Estates – the Saga of Land Reform in North Fluminense), stressed the concentration of land ownership, linked to sugarcane monoculture and violence.

The Gini coefficient, which measures inequality on a rising scale from 0 to 1, is 0.8 for land ownership in Campos dos Goytacazes, the highest inequality coefficient in the state of Rio de Janeiro.

"The same families always rule the roost in Campos," a region that is "the traditional cradle of the extreme right, like Tradition, Family and Property (TFP, a traditional Catholic civic organisation, now-dissolved)," and a place where political corruption scandals have erupted in modern times, the book says.

Guedes fought tirelessly against the use of toxic pesticides in agriculture, in addition to fighting injustice. He was a sugarcane cutter in the northern state of Alagoas before joining MST in 1996 and obtaining a plot of land in the Zumbi dos Palmares settlement.

A father of five, Guedes ran an agroecological farm and was regularly to be found at organic produce markets, as well as participating in local coordination with the government food purchasing programme, which buys produce from family farms to provide school meals.

"He did not learn at the university. The rest of us learned from him," Pedlowski said.

"The MST was his life. He made great sacrifices to form marketing groups for producers…and he was not satisfied with having his own land. He led from the front at other land occupations. He was the animator," he said.

"The elimination of such a dynamic leader shows the degree of impunity and the state of paralysis of land reform, especially since (Brazilian President) Dilma (Rousseff) took office," he said.

According to the MST, the current administration not only has not solved the problem of 150,000 families camped by the roadside waiting for land, but has increased the concentration of land ownership, some of it in the hands of foreign companies.

An INCRA report says that in 2012 the agency invested 1.05 billion dollars and benefited 23,000 families in 117 settlements.

Last year, it says, the agency obtained declarations of public interest on 31 properties for the purposes of land reform.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2013.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Crime, Featured, Human Rights, Latin America, Politics, Social Justice Tagged With: , , , ,

Brazil Emerging as Key Player at U.N.

November 9, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 08 (IPS) – When a U.N. member state agrees to hold an international conference in its capital, the host country is not only offered the privilege of chairing the mega meeting but also given pride of place as the keynote opening speaker.But for the last 67 years, since the inception of the United Nations, Brazil has continued to hold the number one slot on opening day of the General Assembly sessions, a position which rightly belongs to the host country, the United States, which remains the second speaker cast in stone.

As a result of this longstanding tradition – with no logical explanation even from the United Nations – President Dilma Rousseff became the first woman, since the founding of the world body, to open the annual high-level debate of world leaders at the General Assembly in September.

She was immediately followed by U.S. President Barack Obama.

Over the last decade, going back to the presidency of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva ending in 2010, Brazil has participated in nine U.N. peacekeeping missions; hosted important multilateral conferences (in particular the Rio+20 summit last June); actively contributed to discussions on U.N. reform; worked to strengthen the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC); and encouraged a greater role for the U.N. in the promotion of economic and social development.

Brazil is also a founding member of the 132-member Group of 77, the largest single coalition of developing countries at the United Nations, and is the 10th largest contributor to the U.N.’s regular budget, with 38 million dollars for the latest fiscal year.

Described as one the world’s newly emerging powers, Brazil plays a key political and economic role in two of the most powerful international coalitions: IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).

Professor Candido Antonio Mendes de Almeida, president of the Forum of Rectors of Rio de Janeiro, told IPS Brazil’s role in the world community is closely linked with the emergence of BRICs, and "out of the classical peripheries and with a growing influence in Africa, especially in the Portuguese-speaking countries".

"The permanent seat in U.N.’s Security Council will occur as an inevitable consequence," said Mendes de Almeida, author of over 30 books and secretary-general of the Academy of Latinity.

Along with India, Germany and Japan, Brazil is part of the Group of Four (G-4), and one of the front runners for a permanent seat in the Security Council, outpacing Argentina, another potential contender from Latin America.

"At the same time, a full new Brazilian approach in Latin America appears with the stern condemnation of the coup d’état in Paraguay, a counter play to the anti-American escalade of the Bolivarian states, and a full new bilateral expanding trade with Argentina," said Mendes de Almeida, who has participated in several international conferences as a Brazilian delegate or a special guest.

The G-4 has continued to work closely to achieve the goal of "a more representative, democratic and transparent Security Council, in line with the current geopolitical realities".

The Group believes that reform is long overdue and that a longer delay may affect the capacity of the Security Council to deal with new challenges and hinder the effectiveness and legitimacy of its decisions.

"Brazil is confident the reform of the Security Council is perfectly achievable and that a positive result can be obtained in the near future," a spokesman for the Brazilian Mission to the United Nations told IPS.

"It is our hope the intergovernmental negotiations in the General Assembly (currently underway) will gain momentum in the coming months and that this can lead to concrete results on the main aspects of the reform."

As a non-permanent member, Brazil has served 10 times on the Security Council.

And as of last month, Brazil has contributed 2,220 troops and police personnel to nine U.N. peacekeeping missions, in Western Sahara, Haiti, Cyprus, Lebanon, Abyei (Sudan), Liberia, South Sudan, Timor-Leste and Cote d’Ivoire.

The largest contributions are to peacekeeping missions in Haiti (1,894 troops) and Lebanon (268 troops).

Although IBSA has been seeking to foster South-South cooperation and strengthen economic and trade relations among developing nations, it played a more active role when all three countries, by a coincidence, served simultaneously as non-permanent members in the Security Council in 2011.

Faced with the unprecedented challenges posed by the Arab Spring, and in the context of global economic crisis, IBSA developed a very close dialogue in the Security Council.

The three countries also articulated a strong common position on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the role of the Security Council.

This stance was expressed both in the IBSA Tshwane Declaration (2011) and in the first ever joint-statement delivered by the group in the General Assembly debate in 2011 on the Palestinian question.

Meanwhile, the IBSA Facility for Poverty and Hunger Alleviation (IBSA Trust Fund) supports projects in Palestine (Gaza and the West Bank), Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Timor Leste, Laos, Vietnam, Sudan and South Sudan.

On Syria, the IBSA common position in July-August 2011 led to a joint demarche to the Syrian government, based on a clear condemnation of violence against civilians; a call for an end to all violence and true engagement in a meaningful, Syrian-led political dialogue conducive to full respect for human rights and basic freedoms.

As Rousseff told the General Assembly, "There is no military solution to the Syrian crisis. Diplomacy and dialogue are not just our best option: they are the only option."

While Brazil has moved closer to achieving some of the U.N.’s development goals, including hunger and poverty alleviation, universal primary education, combating HIV/AIDS and environmental sustainability, it has lagged behind in one key goal: gender empowerment.

As a Brazilian diplomat reminded delegates last month, for the first time in the country’s history, a woman president took office. Still, he admitted, women continue to be largely underrepresented in decision-making positions.

Although women make up about 52 percent of all Brazilian voters, only 10 percent of legislators are women. And of the 38 ministries, only 10 are headed by women.

But he assured that Rousseff has made it her priority "to enhance the participation of women in top decision-making levels".

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Analysis, Foreign Affairs, Geopolitics, Latin America, Politics Tagged With:

Free Trade with China? No, Gracias

August 9, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 8 2012 (IPS) – There is little likelihood that South America’s Mercosur trade bloc will take up China’s proposal to establish a free trade agreement, at least in the short term. Experts and industrialists fear an invasion of cheap Chinese goods, and unequal competition.

Although the sources consulted by IPS agreed that trade and investment between Mercosur (Southern Common Market) and China will continue to expand, they said a free trade deal was unrealistic under the present circumstances.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao expressed interest in such an agreement on his Jun. 25 visit to Buenos Aires, in a videoconference with Presidents Cristina Fernández of Argentina, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, and José Mujica of Uruguay.

The four leaders welcomed the idea of forging closer trade ties between Mercosur and China.

Paraguay, Mercosur’s fourth founding member, has been suspended from the bloc since that country’s legislature removed President Fernando Lugo in a lightning-quick impeachment trial on Jun. 22.

At any rate, Paraguay is facing the dilemma of maintaining diplomatic relations with Taiwan or agreeing to cut off ties in order to negotiate with Beijing.

The fifth full member of Mercosur, Venezuela, had not yet been admitted to the bloc at the time of the videoconference. It officially joined on Jul. 31 in Brasilia.

At the last Mercosur summit, held in the Argentine province of Mendoza four days after Wen’s visit, the governments of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay agreed to strengthen cooperation with China.

They also approved a proposal to send a joint trade mission this year to China ‘s commercial hub, Shanghai.

But they did not elaborate on the Asian giant’s suggestion of freeing up trade, which analysts agree will be a long, complex process.

Mauricio Mesquita Moreira, an Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) expert on international trade, said the conditions are not in place for reaching a free trade deal in the near future.

“On one hand, Argentina and Brazil have industries that are highly vulnerable to competition from Asia. And on the other, the state still has too much of an influence in the promotion of industry in the Chinese economy for Mercosur to accept a liberalisation of trade,” the Brazilian economist told IPS.

“The smaller partners, Uruguay and Paraguay, lack industrial structure, and could benefit from an agreement with China. But being in Mercosur also gives them benefits such as privileged access to the bloc’s larger markets,” he said.

Mesquita Moreira was in Buenos Aires this month to present a study carried out by the IDB together with experts from the Asian Development Bank Institute, which analyses the future of ties between Asia and Latin America.

The study recommends an increase in trade and investment between the two regions.

Argentine economist Guillermo Rozenwurcel, director of the Centre for Research on Economic Development in South America (IDEAS), said “the Chinese proposal is not viable in the least, over the next 10 to 15 years.

“The presidents gave a diplomatic response to the Chinese interlocutors, to show that they had listened to the proposal. But until the playing field is level, there are few prospects for real discussions on free trade,” he told IPS.

Rozenwurcel also said there was little “political margin” for considering the question.

On the other hand, “there is a challenging and complex, but possible, outlook” for boosting trade, investment and scientific and technological cooperation between this region and Asia, he added.

According to the study by the IDB and the Asian Development Bank Institute, trade between Latin America and Asia has grown by an average of 20.5 percent a year since 2000, to 442 billion dollars today.

With that sharp increase over the last 12 years, China, Asia’s biggest supplier of imports to Latin America, is now the region’s second largest trading partner, after the United States.

But the pattern of trade between the two regions is based mainly on exports of raw materials from Latin America and sales of manufactured goods from Asia, experts point out.

Abeceb, a private consultancy in Argentina, reported that trade between Mercosur and China climbed from 10.3 billion dollars a year in 2003 to 77.9 billion dollars in 2011, and could reach 200 billion dollars by 2016.

But Abeceb also noted that in the same period, Argentina’s purchases of manufactured goods from Brazil such as textiles, capital goods, plastics or pharmaceutical products fell as a result of competition from lower-cost imports from China.

In the case of textiles, for example, 56 percent of Argentina’s imports came from Brazil in 2003, but today that proportion is less than 23 percent. Meanwhile, purchases of textiles from China grew from two to 34 percent of the total.

And while footwear imports from Brazil fell from 79.2 percent to 37.5 percent between 2003 and 2011, purchases from China rose from 12.6 to 36 percent in the same period.

The president of Argentina’s toy industry chamber, Miguel Faraoni, said a free trade accord between Mercosur and China “would be very counterproductive.”

“Competition is impossible due to the differences between the policies of each one. China produces between 75 and 80 percent of the toys sold around the world, which means it would be an unequal fight,” he said.

Faraoni said the share of locally produced toys sold on the domestic market has gone up from 10 percent in 2002 to 50 percent today. He also noted that the number of foreign companies producing toys in Argentina has increased.

“Production, employment and investment in machinery and new technologies have grown, and we are exporting eight percent of what is produced to the region and to the Latino market in the United States,” he said.

Faraoni stated that Argentine industry could compete in terms of price and quality with Brazil, “which has the same rules of the game,” but that “opening up the market to China would reverse the gains made in the last few years.”

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Featured, Latin America, Trade Tagged With: , , , ,

Brazil Drives Energy Integration in South America

May 18, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Mario Osava

SÃO PAULO, May 18, 2012 (IPS) – Energy integration in South America will be a reality "in the medium to long term," driven by hydropower and drawing on Brazil’s experience, predicts Altino Ventura Filho, secretary of planning in this country’s Ministry of Mines and Energy.

Promoting the development of an integrated regional energy system, which will be "an example for the world," is a policy focus in Brazil, Ventura Filho said at the second Latin American hydropower summit, organised May 9-10 in the southern city of São Paulo by Business News Americas, an online business information service based in Santiago, Chile.

The process has already begun among the Mercosur (Southern Common Market) countries – Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay – with binational projects and interconnections that "avert conflicts," promote energy security, and bring down costs because they more than compensate for investment in power lines and plants, Ventura Filho said.

And integration with Argentina will be given an enormous boost with the construction of two binational hydroelectric plants, Garabí and Panambí, on the Uruguay River, which forms part of the border between Brazil and Argentina and between Argentina and Uruguay. The plants will have a combined capacity of 2,200 MW by the end of the decade.

Uruguay will be ready for full energy integration with Brazil’s national grid in November 2013, said Gonzalo Casaravilla, president of UTE, Uruguay’s state electric utility.

That will reduce the vulnerability of Uruguay’s energy supply, which depends on hydropower generated by just two rivers, meaning it is hit hard when rainfall is scarce, and the country must increase oil imports, Casaravilla pointed out.

"In winter, we need energy from Brazil, and in spring we have energy to offer," Casaravilla explained. He forecast a major reduction in the cost of meeting the electricity needs of the country of just 3.3 million people wedged between Brazil and Argentina.

South America, "the only energy self-sufficient region" thanks to the abundance of rivers, oil, natural gas, wind and sun, can optimise its resources by promoting integration in electricity systems between two groups of countries, said Sinval Zaidan Gama, head of operations abroad in Brazil’s state-owned power company Eletrobras.

The northern group comprises Guyana, French Guiana and Suriname, small territories on the north coast of South America. The idea is to interconnect them and integrate them with the rest of the region, while developing their enormous hydropower potential, Gama said. Because they consume little energy, they would generate a large surplus to export to their neighbours.

The southern group would have far greater weight in the move towards regional integration, because it would include large Mercosur and Andean nations rich in water resources.

Harnessing the rivers in Peru, for example, would supply that country’s less-developed, energy-poor south, as well as arid northern Chile.

It would be "positive for both countries," and would also help "clean up Chile’s energy matrix," especially in the north, which currently depends mainly on fossil fuels, Gama said.

Chile, meanwhile, could export hydropower from its southern rivers to Argentina. Transmission of the energy would be cheaper and more efficient, because the power lines would stretch just 200 kilometres on average, compared to the thousands of kilometres of lines needed to reach the country’s large cities, the Eletrobras executive said.

In fact, Chile would benefit greatly from these interconnections because its hydroelectric potential is concentrated in the south of the country, while demand is highest in the centre – around the capital, Santiago, about 2,000 km to the north – and the even more distant copper-rich north, Gabriel Olguín, assistant manager of research in new technologies in Transelec, a private Chilean electricity transmission company, told IPS.

Transmission is the big problem in Chile, he said, because the unusual long, narrow shape of the country drives up the costs.

Among the Mercosur countries, integration is more advanced, with energy exchange agreements and binational hydroelectric dams like Itaipú, which Brazil shares with Paraguay; Yacyretá between Argentina and Paraguay; and Salto Grande, the first one built by two South American partners, Argentina and Uruguay, in the 1970s.

"Building a hydroelectric dam in one single country is already a complex undertaking" which becomes even more difficult if an agreement between two countries is required, due to the need to respect national regulations and autonomies, said Gama. But he added that it is a "natural and intelligent" way to maximise sustainable use of resources.

Eletrobras coordinates 117 Brazilian state-owned companies, and still controls a large part of electricity generation, transmission and distribution in South America’s giant.

The company was weakened during the wave of privatisation in the 1990s, but the government has strengthened it in the last few years, so that it can operate abroad, among other objectives.

Eletrobras has 42 projects in the pipeline in 16 countries, but "many are in the embryonic stage" and just 30 to 40 percent will actually pan out, Gama admitted.

Brazil has developed an integrated national grid connecting the power generators and distributors across the country, with the exception of a few isolated areas, like the Amazon jungle in the north, which is partly supplied by Venezuela. That makes it possible to save 20 percent in power generation, said Ventura Filho.

Those benefits will be extended throughout South America, where it is only natural to meet 65 to 70 percent of electricity demand by means of water resources, the Ministry of Mines and Energy official said.

Hydroelectricity has an advantage that is not frequently mentioned, he noted: investment is recovered during the period that the concession for the dam lasts, which is 30 years in the case of Brazil.

Then in the many remaining years of the dam’s useful life, operating and maintenance costs are very low, which keeps down energy costs for society for decades. There are dams that have already been operating for over a century, he pointed out.

But binational projects do not necessarily benefit both partners equally. Itaipú, the biggest hydropower dam in the region, has made Paraguay a country rich in hydroelectricity – which, however, hardly benefits the domestic market.

Even today, 28 years after the enormous hydropower complex came on-stream, it provides only 14 percent of Paraguay’s energy needs, said Carlos Colombo, head of the committee managing the power lines that are being built to transmit electricity from Itaipú to Greater Asunción along a 350-km power line to be completed in 2013.

The power line, which will cost 555 million dollars, financed by a Mercosur fund and by the Itaipú power plant, will mark the start of "a new era" in Paraguay, he said, because it will help fuel the country’s industrialisation, will improve the quality of life of the local population, and will further bolster economic expansion, from the already high 15 percent GDP growth in 2010.

The power line was not built earlier because "there was no state policy on this," Colombo told IPS. That has kept the landlocked country of 6.5 million from taking better advantage of its part of the power generated by the dam – half of Itaipú’s 14,000 MW capacity – to boost development. Instead, most of its share has been exported at a low price to Brazil.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Energy, Latin America, Report Tagged With:

Urban Farming Takes Root in Brazil’s Favelas

May 3, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet

NOVA IGUAÇU, Brazil, May 2, 2012 (IPS) – Women in one of the poorest neighbourhoods of this city 40 km north of Rio de Janeiro no longer have to spend money on vegetables, because they have learned to grow their own, as organic urban gardening takes off in Brazil.

The land here is not fertile, like it is in the hilly region of the state of Rio de Janeiro that supplies the city’s markets. And the climate is sometimes too hot for vegetables to grow without stress or pests.

But in the poor neighbourhood of Parque Genesiano da Luz in the city of Nova Iguaçu, local women can now proudly say they eat what they themselves have grown.

The women sell the rest of what they produce – 70 percent – through the Univerde cooperative they set up, which comprises 22 families who put five percent of what they earn back in, to run the cooperative.

Production is carried out on an individual basis, but everything else, including the sales of produce, is done collectively.

"It’s wonderful to see what you grow in the garden, bring everything home fresh, and give your children such healthy food," Joyce da Silva, one of the members of the cooperative, told IPS. "So much so that when the low-production season arrives, we don’t even buy outside, because now we know that conventional products have a lot of poison. And I don’t want to eat that anymore."

The gardens, which are each about 1,000 square metres in size, are located on what once were empty lots. Below them lie pipelines of the state oil company, Petrobras, which financed the project when it got under way in 2007.

When the financing dried up, many of the more than 50 families taking part at the time dropped out, due to a lack of resources.

But a group of women decided to continue, against all odds: they didn’t have funds, tools, or transportation to haul seeds and seedlings or take their products to the street markets to sell them.

But they were determined not to give up the independence they had achieved.

"Before getting involved in the cooperative, I only looked after my home," da Silva said. "But afterwards, I gained economic independence. Another kind of independence is the health I achieved for my family. And also the improved living conditions. Things at home improved in general."

The Urban Agriculture Programme, which now provides the women with technical assistance, was created in 1999, and was expanded into peri-urban areas in 2011 by AS-PTA, a non-governmental organisation that promotes urban family gardening and agroecology.

This programme is aimed at boosting the incomes of families in peri-urban areas – poor neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Queimados and Magé, where it benefits a total of 650 people.

The urban farmers do not use chemicals. Both the fertilisers and pesticides they use are homemade and non-toxic.

The majority of the food consumed in the city comes from far away, which means prices are driven up by transport costs, Marcio Mattos de Mendonça, the coordinator of the Urban Agriculture Programme, told IPS.

"The people who live in these communities need food from nearby areas," he said. "Fresh vegetables are often left off the menu, and unhealthy kinds of food are given priority."

In line with the global demographic trend, Brazil’s population of more than 192 million people is increasingly urban.

In 2000, 81 percent of Brazilians lived in urban areas, and 10 years later the proportion has risen to over 84 percent, according to the 2010 census.

But the growing urbanisation has not snuffed out the vocation for farming passed down through the generations, Mendonça said. In many poor urban areas like the favelas or shantytowns lining the hills of Rio de Janeiro, people have kept alive the custom of growing vegetables and medicinal herbs, and raising small animals like pigs, goats or barnyard fowl.

Aldeni Fausto, who always grew vegetables in her yard, inherited that practice which has been kept alive by migrants from rural areas and which she is now successfully reproducing within the city limits.

"Living in nature is what I like the most," she said. "The pleasure of planting, harvesting and feeding ourselves, reviving our family’s roots and traditions and teaching them to our children; that is so important, so we don’t forget our history."

Fausto, the president of the Univerde cooperative, said the distancing of rural migrants from their land led to "an increase in diseases, an imbalance in nature, and financial problems, because these people have nothing to eat and no interest in producing food."

But "if people planted a little bit in every corner, they wouldn’t suffer from a lack of food," she said.

Da Silva looks at it from another angle. "I never imagined producing food in the middle of the city. This area didn’t even have a market. And sometimes we couldn’t even afford to go somewhere else to buy things," she said.

The visit to the cooperative was one of the field trips organised by World Nutrition Rio 2012, an international nutrition congress organised in Rio de Janeiro Apr. 27-30 by the World Public Health Nutrition Association and the Brazilian Association of Collective Health.

Among other issues, the congress discussed healthy eating habits, the planet’s resources, and the need to recognise and support traditional food systems – three core concepts that underlie the activities of the Univerde cooperative.

Da Silva said her family had various health-related problems linked to eating habits that she now understands were harmful.

Her daughter, for example, had anaemia. "Even though she is dark-skinned like I am, she looked sort of yellowish and was very weak. But with this food, she is now in good health, her skin shines, and her lips and gums are nice and red; this was the best thing about it, for me," da Silva said.

Fausto also noticed improvements in her family’s quality of life. "Although I don’t look like it, I used to be fat. I have seen changes in my body, in my health, in my children’s diet. My mind now is more at ease, and I have found an equilibrium," she said, pointing out that she is now free of obesity-related health problems like back pain and hypertension.

But the route these women chose is not an easy one. Without strong support, like the funding they received at first, the sustainability of the cooperative is always an issue of concern.

Of the more than 50 plots of land available for urban farming in Nova Iguaçu, only 22 are currently in use, said one of the visitors from the congress, Angélica Siqueira, a student in her final year of coursework for a degree in nutrition at the alternative economy centre of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.

"There is still a prejudice that the countryside is poor," Siqueira told IPS. Her team is attempting to apply urban and peri-urban farming techniques in poor neighbourhoods in her state, in southern Brazil, through the Technological Incubator of Popular Cooperatives.

The hope of the cooperative members is that now they have official certification, they will be able to sell their produce to the federal government’s school meals programme, which stimulates purchases by public schools of food produced by family farmers.

"Before, we didn’t even know how to run a company, and now we administer our own cooperative," said Fausto, a true convert to urban gardening. "It’s therapy. One little plant gives you back gratitude and love."

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Agriculture, Americas, Development, Featured, Poverty Tagged With:

Brazilian Favela Becomes a Living Museum

April 20, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 20, 2012 (IPS) – The history, daily life and folk artistry as well as spectacular views of this southeastern Brazilian city are all part of a living museum created by community leaders in a favela that is displaying its cultural heritage as well as its wounds.

"At one time, before there was electricity in the favela (shantytown), the local people would come out on the street at night to talk to each other by moonlight," Rita de Cassia Santos Pinto told IPS, seated in front of a mural that is part of a series painted on the walls of local houses.

As a journalist, Santos Pinto says she doesn’t normally like to be interviewed. But when the topic is the history of her community, she is enthusiastic and her words flow freely. As we tour every corner of the Morro do Cantagalo favela’s crowded dwellings clinging to valleys and hillsides, the walls and houses also start to speak.

One mural depicts the history of samba, the musical genre that originated in the favelas; another shows episodes from the 1964-1985 military dictatorship against the backdrop of bare brick, tin-roofed dwellings.

The series of more than 20 murals by graffiti artists from Cantagalo and other parts of Rio de Janeiro tells the story of the community in colourful pictures.

The houses-cum-canvases are on the circuit of a fee-paying tour of the favela which includes, depending on the interests of the tourists, kite-making and -flying workshops, lessons on playing the "cavaquinho" (an instrument similar to the ukulele and the key to producing rhythm and harmony in Brazilian samba and choro music), visits to stores selling arts and crafts, and local eateries.

"We want to break down the barriers of national museums that only exhibit the works of famous artists," said Santos Pinto, who as well as being a reporter is a tour guide, social facilitator, "curator of memories", and one of the community leaders who founded the Museu de Favela (MUF – Favela Museum).

The first ever all-encompassing favela museum seeks to depict and value the identity of Cantagalo’s 20,000 people on the basis of their own accounts of their lives, and to integrate them into the society that has kept them at arm’s length for so long.

From the impoverished Northeast to the favela

One of the posters on display at the MUF – part of an itinerant collection which is also touring traditional museums in Brazil – tells the story of Santos Pinto’s parents, who are now in their eighties, in their own words.

Her father, Feliciano da Silva Pinto, a migrant from the northeastern state of Bahia who worked in the city of Rio de Janeiro as an electrician, fell in love with Eunice Santos whom he used to see coming down from the "morro" (hill) every day to fetch water and carry it home in a jerry can on her head.

"To win her heart, he started giving her water himself," to shorten her journey, Santos Pinto said, breaking into laughter.

This is one of many stories about the migrants from poor areas of the country who built the humble dwellings in Cantagalo, now numbering 5,300, that are connected by what seems to the outsider to be an endless and unfathomable maze of alleys and steep stairways.

An elevator, recently constructed under the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC) launched by the left-wing government of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), now eases the climb and saves favela residents and visitors over 60 metres of climbing, up hundreds of steps.

"Everybody’s memories are worth recording," said the journalist, who takes down people’s oral histories to try to reconstruct the earliest history of the favela and "give a voice to those who have never had one."

The history of Cantagalo and two adjacent favelas, Pavão and Pavãozinho, which have merged into one complex, is bound up with the origins of Brazil’s major cities, and includes fugitive slaves hiding in the Cantagalo hills, as well as the flimsy shacks built in the first decade of the 20th century by migrants from poor regions seeking work in Rio.

The trio of favelas grew up as an enclave between Ipanema and Copacabana, upmarket residential districts of Rio that are a tourist magnet for visitors, where the grand houses and skyscrapers have often been built by poor and illiterate migrants like the parents of MUF cultural director Marcia de Souza.

Souza described another of the museum’s initiatives: every year 12 "warrior women" are elected from the favela, women who "overcame difficulties in their lives, like violence and educating their kids, and who, even if one of their children was in prison for drug trafficking, managed to save the rest of their family and keep them away from violence and drugs," she told IPS.

The symbolic prize for these women is the celebration of their lives, which are reconstructed on the walls through photographs, personal objects and stories.

Peace time

The Cantagalo-Pavão-Pavãozinho group of favelas used to be one of the most violent areas in the south of Rio de Janeiro, with daily shootouts between drug trafficking gangs, until three years ago when police pacification units (UPP) were introduced as part of a campaign to increase security, improve infrastructure and implement social programmes.

MUF was founded as an independent community NGO in 2008, before the arrival of the UPPs, and according to its founding members its early days were an uphill struggle.

Now their complaint is the lack of public funding for their initiative, and they are seeking individuals and organisations or agencies willing to invest in what they describe as their vision of the future.

The museum’s supporters see its future as a collection of open-air galleries, "whose stakeholders will be the residents themselves, who contribute the walls of their homes, their knowledge and their activities."

The idea is to transform Cantagalo-Pavão-Pavãozinho into a significant tourist attraction in Rio, a must-visit "monument" to the history of the favelas, the cultural roots of samba, the culture of Afro-Brazilians and of migrants from the Northeast, and the visual and performance arts.

In that spirit, architects and architecture students from other Brazilian states, and from Argentina and France, are participating in the activities of the living museum.

The group of architects is planning interventions to improve areas of the favela. The solutions need to be creative and inexpensive, such as the installation of a giant screen for projecting movies for the community to be located on the MUF rooftop, which also houses a large water tank.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Culture, Education, Latin America, Report Tagged With: , ,

Brazil Pushes for Sustainable Development Goals

December 6, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz

RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 6, 2011 (IPS) – With seven months to go until the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development, Brazil is uniting in support of proposals to be included in the summit’s draft final document, which aim to transfer its successful national social and environmental sustainability programmes to the global scale.

The Brazilian national commission for drawing up the proposals, created in June and made up of 30 ministerial delegates and 40 representatives of civil society, has delivered its document to the United Nations, as have 70 other countries and a number of NGOs, making a total of 600 documents to be discussed at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, better known as Rio+20, to be held in June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro.

Claudia Maciel, general coordinator of sustainable development at the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, told IPS that Brazil aspires to the ambitious goal of creating the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at this conference.

Brazil proposes establishing global goals for sustainable social and economic progress for the period 2015-2030, as a kind of expansion of the targets adopted by U.N. member countries in 2000 under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which have a 2015 deadline and take 1990 indicators as their baseline.

The MDGs include eradicating poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child and maternal mortality, combating HIV/AIDS and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability and forming a global partnership for development.

———-

Rio "clothed all in green-oh"

As Rio prepares to host the 2012 U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, local authorities have announced that it will be the world’s first major city to adhere to an initiative for assessing sustainability and reporting its economic, environmental and social performance.

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), which evaluates administrative transparency and sustainability levels, produces international standards for sustainability reporting consisting of 77 economic, social and environmental indicators, to measure the economic, environmental, and social performance of an organisation or city.

"As the host of Rio+20, Brazil, and especially Rio de Janeiro, must have the strength to transform into concrete achievements" the commitments reached by the conference, said the mayor of Rio, Eduardo da Costa Paes.

Rio de Janeiro has thus become a pioneer among the world’s cities, committing itself to collecting extensive data to monitor its sustainability.

So far, only nine other cities in the world have followed in Rio’s footsteps and adhered to the GRI. They include Amsterdam, Melbourne, and smaller cities in Sweden. In this respect, Rio is ahead of megacities like Paris and London, which have not announced whether they will participate.

The first sustainability audit of Rio de Janeiro is due to be published in April 2012, ahead of Rio+20.

———-

"The idea (of the SDGs) is to launch broad goals that will mobilise countries, as the MDGs managed to do. For instance, the goal of reducing poverty, but taking environmental aspects into account and focusing on sustainability," said Maciel.

The difference between them is that the MDGs are goals that had already been reached by industrialised countries, while the SDGs affect everyone on the planet equally, she said.

"We are going to try to foster this debate at the conference. We are aiming to integrate the agendas of countries and of the U.N. agencies themselves. The idea is not to enter into conflict with the MDGs, but to complement them," Maciel said.

Another Brazilian proposal which may attract attention is the creation of a global social and environmental protection programme, similar to Brazil’s Bolsa Familia (Family Subsidy) initiative, a cash transfer programme conditional on children receiving health care and attending school, but in this case made conditional on action for environmental protection.

"We are examining our experience to promote solutions at the global level. Without a doubt, this is another ambitious proposal," Maciel said.

On the economic front, the Finance Ministry has suggested creating a public procurement system that favours the most sustainable industrial processes, since around 15 percent of global GDP goes to public purchases of goods and services.

This proposal aims to develop a criterion of sustainability for government purchases. According to Maciel, some countries have already adopted this practice, but they are in the minority. Brazil itself has not yet officially adopted this measure.

In spite of efforts to foster participation by civil society in the drafting of the Brazilian document, the public input process was imperfect, and the document is only a summary of the thousands of issues raised, Maciel admitted.

Some specific issues, like nuclear energy, are entirely absent from the Brazilian document sent to the U.N.

"The document reflects a consensus, and this was not achieved on the nuclear issue," Maciel said.

Another matter that was not included was that of climate refugees, people displaced by climatically induced environmental disasters. This issue "was not raised with sufficient force to be incorporated in the text," she said.

But the toughest challenge will be to reach a consensus on the final declaration at the Rio+20 conference itself.

In Maciel’s view, reaching a consensus is essential, in order to unite the world behind solutions for the severe problems resulting from the current development model.

"The crisis is generating demand for changes. A new model has to be discussed. The proposals are still too general and they need to be considered in greater depth," the Brazilian diplomat stressed.

U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs Sha Zukang, who is also the secretary-general of Rio+20, said that a single development model with a protectionist bent will not be imposed at the conference.

"The emphasis in the green economy is on a way of dealing with economic decisions, valuing nature and debating social issues," said Sha, who was in Rio de Janeiro Nov. 23 to report on advances and challenges in the preparations for the 2012 conference, which is being held two decades after the first Earth Summit, or U.N. Conference on Environment and Development.

One of the major challenges is to build a consensus around the forthcoming draft text that defines the final commitments of the U.N. member countries, Sha said.

He said he hoped member states will be able to agree on the "green economy as a pathway to sustainable development" and come up with a "tool kit" for the implementation of the principles that they will agree on, based on examples of best practices worldwide.

Sha also supports the idea of creating a U.N. Sustainable Development Council, similar to the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), to integrate the social, economic and environmental pillars of sustainable development within the U.N.

A meeting will be held Dec. 15-16 at U.N. headquarters in New York, to determine the format and structure of the contents of the Rio+20 final document.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Development, Environment, Featured, Latin America Tagged With: ,

BRAZIL: Small-Scale Land Speculators Contribute to Amazon Deforestation

July 28, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Stephen Leahy*

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jul 28, 2011 (Tierramérica) – Many migrants from southern Brazil who clear forests in Brazil’s state of Amazonas are making their living as small-scale land speculators and not as farmers or as cattle ranchers, new research has found.

This on-the-ground reality and the proposed changes to Brazil’s Forest Code are likely to ramp up deforestation rates again, despite the country’s commitment to reduce deforestation 80 percent by 2020, experts say.

The Forest Code (Law 4771) was adopted in 1965 and has undergone numerous reforms, the most recent in 2001. This past May 24, an overwhelming majority in the Chamber of Deputies voted in favor of a bill to relax its requirements with regard to forest conservation. The bill is currently under study in the Senate.

A detailed study conducted in the municipality of Apuí along the Transamazon Highway in Amazonas found that many families in the region earned little income from cattle.

Instead, they were clearing the land in order to claim land titles to sell the land to large corporate ranchers, according to the study "Forest Clearing Dynamics and the Expansion of Landholdings in Apuí, a Deforestation Hotspot on Brazil’s Transamazon Highway", published in the journal Ecology and Society in June.

From the early 1990s the population of Apuí has tripled, and the municipality has had some of the highest rates of deforestation in all of the state of Amazonas. Approximately 90 per cent of the area has been converted into pasture, the study found.

"These families are always moving into new forest areas to deforest so they can claim land title. And after a few years they sell it for a much higher price," said study co-author Gabriel Carrero of the Institute for Conservation and Sustainable Development of Amazonas (IDESAM).

Carrero’s co-author is noted tropical forest expert Philip Fearnside of the National Institute for Research in Amazonia (INPA).

Under Brazilian law, land title can be given to those who "improve" unclaimed lands. Those families clearing forests in Apuí are "just trying to make a better life for themselves," Carrero told Tierramérica from Manaus in Amazonas.

They do have cattle, but it is more of a hobby that can raise some cash, he said, based on detailed interviews with 83 households who owned more than 300 properties in the region.

"The real incentive is to sell their property to large farmers who have sold their lands in southern Brazil or Paraguay and are looking to buy large consolidated tracts of land," said Carrero.

Then the families move away from the frontier, go up the road into untouched forest and do it again, he explained. "This is just their way of life."

Access to the unclaimed forest land follows roads. When roads and other infrastructure improve, land values jump, facilitating speculation, he said.

"Our study proves that roads are the most important driver of deforestation," he added.

Globally, deforestation puts an astonishing 2.9 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year, according to the first detailed calculation published 15 July in the journal Science.

For comparison, total yearly emissions from all fossil fuels (coal, gas, oil) plus production of cement are just under 8 billion tons.

There is a "huge influx of carbon from deforestation and it is much larger than previously thought," said Pep Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project in Canberra, Australia and co-author of the study published in Science.

The potential benefits of the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) carbon credit scheme – which would pay communities and countries to conserve forests – could be even more important than anyone thought, Canadell told Tierramérica in an interview.

"I’m much more familiar with Indonesian forests, and REDD has had no effect on deforestation so far," he said. However, large donations from Norway, Australia and the United States totaling close to 1.5 billion dollars are having an impact on the ground in that country.

The U.N.-backed REDD is likely years away from putting cash in the hands of families in Amazonas or Indonesia or anywhere else, Canadell said.

"Families struggling to make a living aren’t going to wait years to see if the international community gets its act together on REDD," he commented.

No one in Apuí is making money from carbon credit programmes like REDD, said Carrero. "Land speculation is more profitable," he added.

Deforestation and land sales will be even more profitable with proposed changes to Brazil’s Forest Code, Carrero warned.

Those changes will allow landholders with less than 400 hectares to deforest all of their land in the "legal" Amazon region, as well as granting an amnesty for the many who have violated the conservation requirements now in force.

The Code currently allows the clearing of only 20 percent of the forest on landholdings in the "legal" Amazon, a geographic division that includes all states partially or totally covered by the Amazon rainforest biome.

"I’m 100 percent certain that this will increase deforestation and result in a big increase in greenhouse gas emissions from the Amazon," Carrero said.

Brazil’s agribusiness is behind the proposed changes and is pressuring politicians for more flexible laws.

"It is cheaper to deforest a hectare of land than to improve a hectare of degraded land," Carrero noted.

Ironically, it is Brazil’s success in reducing deforestation rates by 70 per cent from 2004 to 2009 that is behind the big push to change the laws.

"The recent crackdown on municipalities with high deforestation rates was so successful, farming and ranching interests want to get the laws changed," Rhett Butler, writer and conservationist at the NGO Mongabay.com, told Tierramérica.

The Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC), the world’s largest scientific organization devoted to the study, protection and sustainable use of tropical ecosystems, has warned that the proposed changes to the Brazilian Forest Code will result in higher levels of deforestation.

In early July the Association issued an official resolution urging the government to do a science-based assessment of the potential ecological impacts before proceeding.

Brazil officially pledged to cut deforestation by 80 percent from historic levels by 2020 under the 2009 Copenhagen Accord.

*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


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