After six months of a partial strike, Brazilian environmental agents doubled down and announced an intensification of their protest for better work conditions and wages. The decision came after months of deadlock in the negotiations with the federal government, which in early June stated it had “reached the maximum limit, from a budgetary point of view, of what it can offer.” “The government unilaterally closed the negotiating channel we had,” Wallace Lopes, a director at the association representing the environmental specialists, ASCEMA, told Mongabay. Since January, federal employees from the federal environmental agency, IBAMA, the agency for the conservation units, ICMBio, the Brazilian Forestry Service and the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change have reduced their activities on the ground and focused on bureaucratic work. Now, only 10% of the personnel will be available to monitor activities in the field, including controlling deforestation, illegal burning, predatory fishing and illegal mining. Large operations, which demand the displacement of many employees for a long period, are suspended during the strike. “Operations to seize cattle, destroy goldmines, combat deforestation in the Amazon hotspots, contain the advance of gold mines in the Yanomami and Munduruku Indigenous lands — all of this will be put on hold,” said Lopes, who is also an IBAMA agent. Brazilian environmental specialists have been on strike since early January, demanding better salaries, a risk bonus and a new public tender for the category. Image courtesy of ASCEMA Nacional. Agents from five states already initiated the new phase of…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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