In complete contrast to his predecessor the current President of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has founded his international reputation on the preservation of the rainforest and the biodiversity connected with it. While Brazil did form a partnership at the end of last year with Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which together account for 52% of the world’s rainforest, their joint statement primarily concerned how preventing deforestation and maintaining the forest was to be paid for.
President Lula’s especial sphere of interest is inevitably his own region, and where Brazil itself is concerned he has committed to a policy of ending deforestation in the Amazon by 2030. His objective is to propel the other Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization members – Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Suriname and Guyana – to adopt the same goal. The organization which was formed in 1978, has been dormant for all of fourteen years, but was revived by President Lula in the form of a summit held in the city of Belém last Tuesday.
The only other declared sympathizer in his regional quest to prevent deforestation, is Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro, and the two met in the Colombian Amazonian city of Leticia early in July to discuss issues of coordination. This followed an earlier meeting between environmental ministers from Amazonian countries, although whether Guyana sent a representative to this has not been reported. Both leaders called on rich nations to provide the funds for the preservation of the Amazon, given the significance of its role in relation to climate change, while with reference to eliminating illegal deforestation by 2030, President Lula was reported as saying, “This is a commitment that the Amazon countries can assume together at the upcoming Belém summit.”
The problem is that the Amazon countries did not make any such commitment when they met. In the first place the heads of government of only some nations bothered to put in an appearance at the meeting. Apart from the presidents of Brazil and Colombia, the only other leaders in attendance came from Bolivia and Peru. Everyone else, including Guyana, just sent senior officials. Given that, it must have been apparent to the Brazilian government even before the talks got underway that any hope of fulfilling their aim was probably slim at best.
While the joint declaration which the eight nations ultimately issued spoke of an alliance for combating the destruction of the forest and a common list of measures for achieving this, it was effectively voided of meaning by leaving the countries to follow their own individual deforestation targets. In the war between the forest and lucrative extractive industries, it seems the forest has lost out. While Guyana’s excursion into the field of oil and gas is offshore in nature, some of the participants at the summit are heavily engaged in exploration and extraction within the forest itself. Reuters reported Peru’s intention of placing 31 oil blocks over 435 indigenous communities, and said that Bolivia had recently finalised an ‘Upstream Reactivation Plan’.
As it is there has been a serious escalation of forest destruction in Bolivia, and the news agency went on to say that along with Venezuela it was the only Amazon country to decline to sign onto the 2021 agreement to work towards halting deforestation by 2030. One hundred countries in total signed that accord. Ecuador is an interesting case because next Sunday its voters are being asked to decide in a referendum whether oil exploitation in the Yasuní rainforest should continue. It will say a great deal about how the ordinary man and woman in the street (and forest) regard the issues surrounding forest preservation.
Given that more than one country is currently engaged in Amazon oil extraction, there was little tolerance at the meeting for President Petro’s campaign to end new oil development there. The President was reported as comparing the left’s desire to keep drilling for oil to the right’s denial of climate science, and he rejected a gradual “energy transition” away from fossil fuels. This, he was reported as saying, was a way to delay the work needed to stop climate change.
In the case of countries like Guyana and Suriname, the issue is not oil extraction in the forest, but mining in particular. Reuters reported that the summit did not put a time limit on ending illegal gold mining, although leaders committed to cooperating on the matter and doing more to tackle cross-border environmental crime. In Guyana, of course, the issue is not just illegal gold-mining, but the extent and number of permits which have been issued legally, in addition to where they have been granted – some in Indigenous titled lands.
The person who was sent to represent this country at the summit was Prime Minister Mark Phillips, who is not a man recognised by the public at least to have independent authority in any particular department of government. Whether that is so or not, it was telling that President Irfaan Ali did not attend himself. In what must be the ultimate of ironies he was in the Dominican Republic following a trajectory which was the precise opposite of President Lula’s desired path.
He was there negotiating MOUs in relation to the establishment of a local oil refinery and petrochemical plant, among other things, with President Luis Abinader. Never mind that the man tasked with carrying out a feasibility study for such a project had told the government since 2017 that it would be a very risky investment which would require a vast amount of capital, or that Dr Clive Thomas had written that the case for an oil refinery since that time had not “significantly improved, both domestically and internationally.” But then the government, cocooned in the certainty of its own infallibility, was never much disposed to pay attention to outside views or criticisms.
So there was the Prime Minister, making many of the right noises at the summit, at the same time as President Ali was assiduously pursuing a programme inimical to climate change. Brigadier Phillips did attempt to reconcile the two opposing positions by saying that as an “emerging oil state” Guyana continued “to direct its efforts towards the diversification of its energy portfolio to include renewable energy sources.” Few here are persuaded the administration is pursuing that with any assiduity, but in any case Brazil itself as a major offshore oil producer is on shaky ground. The Amazon oil producing nations may have pointed out the contradictions in Brazil’s position.
Then the Prime Minister added the argument so favoured by many developing nations: that environmental protection must not “translate to the absence of development.” How development is defined, however, is another subject which the government has shown no willingness to discuss, let alone the best way of achieving it, whatever it might be. To the best of the public’s knowledge that seems to translate to more highways and the like, but little change in the economic prospects of the ordinary man and woman.
The “sacred” relationship between the indigenous people and the land and the forest was not omitted, and the Brigadier declared it as “imperative” that they continued in the integral role of the Amazonian organisation’s “sustainable development mechanism”. What that means in practice was not elaborated on, but there are some communities, particularly those assailed by miners, who would want the Prime Minister’s words to have greater substance on the ground.
“If we continue on our current trajectory, the prognosis offers no relief in sight. The status quo of the environment is clearly on a downward spiral, and it is in the interest of future generations that a concerted effort be made to arrest the situation,” he stated. That effort as far as Guyana is concerned does not include President Lula’s policy of ending Amazon deforestation by 2030. The country’s miners, it seems, can breathe easy again. Exactly how and when the government envisages deforestation in Guyana will cease has yet to be revealed.
On the day after the Amazonian countries met, they were there again, this time as part of a larger gathering including Brazil’s partners Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as St Vincent and the Grenadines and the Republic of Congo. As with the partnership agreement last year this one produced a pact to demand that developed nations create funding mechanisms to enable poorer ones to combat climate change and preserve biodiversity. The call for richer countries to fund underdeveloped ones in relation to the climate change issue hardly produced any divergence of opinion, unlike the situation the day before, but then it did not call for any action from the Amazonian participants which they might find problematic.
Reuters reported Maecio Astrini of the environmental lobby group Climate Observatory as saying:
“The planet is melting, we are breaking temperature records every day. It is not possible that, in a scenario like this, eight Amazonian countries are unable to put in a statement – in large letters – that deforestation needs to be zero.” If the Guyana government does not intend to sign on to a cessation of deforestation by 2030, when does it think deforestation should stop?
