After Criticizing Foreign Aid, Bolsonaro Now Seeks US$50 Million for New Amazon Fund

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Months after President Jair Bolsonaro declared that foreign countries wanted to buy the Amazon and refused financial aid for the forest, the Brazilian government will use the United Nations conference on climate change – COP-25 – to ask for donations from developed nations for a new fund to preserve the biome.

A similarly existing instrument, the Amazon Fund, has been stalled after Bolsonaro extinguished the councils that administered it. Environment Minister Ricardo Salles also tried to change the Amazon Fund’s management rules and pointed out signs of irregularities in projects supported by the fund, actions that further contributed to the suspension of transfers by its foremost donors.

In the first few months of his mandate, Bolsonaro was a strong critic of actions sponsored by foreigners, mainly Europeans, for environmental protection in the Amazon. He has declared that the governments of other nations were trying to “buy the region in installments”.

Now, the proposal taken up by Environment Minister Ricardo Salles and Foreign Relations Minister Ernesto Araújo is that the resources of a new fund be managed by the IDB (Inter-American Development Bank), an institution that would also be in charge of analyzing the projects to be financed.

Because of Brazil’s negative image abroad with the fires in the Amazon and, more recently, with the record-high rate of deforestation, the government proposed that the money be used for projects in all Amazonian countries, in an effort to lessen resistance. As a result, it could also benefit actions in countries like Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, and Peru.

Another of the government’s arguments to create a new fund is that, in addition to preservation projects, it would be necessary to focus on the economic development of the Amazon, one of the regions with the lowest HDI in the country.

The IDB-administered fund would also allow payment for environmental services, creating a reward for producers who preserve areas that could be deforested, according to sources interviewed by the report.

A team from the inter-American bank was in Brasília earlier this week to deal with the new fund. On Tuesday, November 19th, Araújo and Salles also presented the idea to ambassadors from developed countries that are potential donors.

Salles is expected to attend the COP-25 in Madrid in December, and will have the mission of greeting foreign delegations in an attempt to persuade them to make donations to the new fund.

In a document describing the general lines of the proposal, the supporters of the initiative state that the goal is to finance projects in the Amazon for reforestation, sustainable agriculture and infrastructure, bio-economy, land regularization, emission reduction and payment for environmental services.

“In recent decades, the region’s economic growth has been matched by a significant loss of bio-ecological diversity and carbon stock, as a result of the occupation of previously undisturbed natural ecosystems. Although large areas of the Amazon rainforest are still preserved, it is imperative to promote the sustainable development of the region, in order to guarantee the subsistence of its inhabitants, while the ecosystem is preserved,” says the text.

The government expects the fund to be up and running by July 2020, with initial capital estimated at US$50 million.

On Wednesday, November 20th, Salles spoke about the COP-25 and said that Brazil should demand more contributions from developed countries for the development of the Amazon region.

The Brazilian government believes that the environmental commitments made by the international community should include transfers to developing countries, resources that are not being made available.

“It is necessary that considerable resources, in amounts compatible with the challenge of preserving the Amazon, begin to flow to developing countries,” said the minister.

Establishing a fund for sustainability projects in the Amazon is a reaction to Brazil’s international image crisis in environmental matters.

In addition to the wave of fires recorded in the biome in the middle of this year, the country broke its previous record in the destruction of the Amazon rainforest this decade.

According to the government PRODES (Amazon Deforestation Calculation Program) monitoring system, 9,762 km² were deforested between August 2018 and July 2019, an increase of 29.5 percent over the previous year.

The potential establishment of a fund managed by the Inter-American Bank is not the only initiative of Bolsonaro’s government with international organizations.

On Wednesday, November 20th, after a meeting with governors of states in Brazil’s “Legal Amazon” region, Salles said at a press conference that a cooperation project with USAID (United States Agency for the Protection of the Environment) was in the fundraising phase. Sources in Bolsonaro’s government consider that Brazil could raise up to US$100 million from this source.

The plan for the new IDB instrument is not for it to be a substitute for the Amazon Fund. The government recently resumed talks with the Norwegian and German governments and, should there be an agreement, transfers by those countries could be resumed in the future.

Source: Folhapress