Brazil’s “Transversal Environmental Agenda,” released on 25 January 2024, contains many good things for the government to be doing, but it misses the opportunity to implant what a transversal agenda should be, namely a way of ensuring that the actions of the various federal agencies, at the very least, avoid provoking environmental disasters. The document’s omissions show the lack of a real “transversal” effect to adapt actions throughout the government to the limitations imposed by environmental concerns. Instead, it lists the things that the various ministries are doing with an environmental label, such as promoting low-carbon agricultural practices. The unmentioned “elephants in the room” are the most important part, revealing how very far we still have to go to avoid impending environmental catastrophes. Prevention and control of deforestation The report rightly commemorates the decline in deforestation rates in 2023 as a result of command-and-control efforts on the part of the current presidential administration’s Ministry of Environment (MMA). Command-and-control is indeed essential. However, completely lacking in the document are plans to address the major underlying causes of deforestation, such as building roads in Amazonia that open vast new areas to the entry of deforestation (BR-319 and associated side roads being the prime example (see here, here, here, here and here), legalizing illegal land claims in “undesignated” government land (see here, here, here, here and here), and subsidizing the transformation of cattle pasture to soybeans, which, in practice, means soy planters buying pasture land from ranchers who then move to frontier areas…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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