By Alejandra Cámara – August 25, 2019
The fire advances in Amazonia while public opinion looks astonished as, for more than two weeks, the flames consume everything in its path without taking measures to stop them. President Jair Bolsonaro accused, at the beginning of this week, the NGOs of being the arsonists to call attention to deforestation, but after the call of president Macron of France to declare the emergency in the G7, the threat of the European Union of not signing the trade agreement with Mercosur and the offer of the US president to send help to mitigate the fire, Bolsonaro changed the dialectic and yesterday sent a statement by twitter saying that Brazil has put in place the mechanisms to combat it. It should be noted that just a few weeks ago, the director of INPE (National Institute for Space Research of Brazil) was fired after a dispute with the president; the director defended the satellite data that showed that deforestation was 88% higher in June than the previous year, Bolsonaro called the findings “a lie.” But all this is just the last chapter of a threat that is far from being solved.
The Amazonia is the largest tropical forest in the world, and represents a sink area of CO2 (carbon dioxide) with regional and global relevance. The main ecosystem services are: water supply, fishing, CO2 storage, climate regulation, provision of homes for plants and animals, protection of biodiversity, home of native communities, among others. To sum it up, the Amazonia contains our pharmacies, supermarkets, fresh water reserves, the planet’s thermostat, etc., in short, everything that human beings need to survive until we discover a new way.
To understand the issue of deforestation in Brazil a little better, it is necessary to begin further back in history and comment that tropical deforestation has been occurring for decades on an industrial scale, initially generated by the demand for wood. However, the impact and complexity of its causes have changed substantially, while forests today are not only cut down for wood but also by the land required to produce other commodities. In Amazonia, the main one is SOY. Standing forests “seem to lack” economic value and their conversion to agribusiness generates very high returns. The generators of industrial deforestation in Brazil act along the supply chain from small landowners and ranchers, through traders called the ABCD group (ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus) that are generally the collectors, distributors, marketers and commodity processors. Finally, we have the final consumers, us, the ordinary people.
Due to public pressure over deforestation, in 2006, an Amazonia Soy Moratorium was signed voluntarily where Cargill and Bunge, among others, pledged to prohibit the direct conversion of the Amazon forest into soybean plantations. Many have proclaimed its phenomenal success but there are critics who believe that this moratorium hides several failures since its apparent success is due, in large part, to the fact that there was already so much land deforested in the Amazon by 2006, that there was a lot of space for the expansion of soybeans without cutting the forest. In addition, the dismantled areas to which soybean production was moved, often displaced livestock to the forest, cut again by land grabbers for farmers. But the most worrying thing is that the Moratorium covers only one part of the Amazon, it does not cover the Cerrado savanna, where soybean producers have aggressively logged millions of acres of biodiverse habitat. Another of the “coincidences” was that as of this moratorium, the rates of deforestation in the ecosystem of the Gran Chaco Argentino Paraguayo (where the same multinationals and soybean production operate) have doubled in recent years. Critics see the moratorium as a tool to greenwash the image of companies and NGOs; its advocates say it inspired other agreements on tropical deforestation around the world. Personally, I strongly believe in the first and to a lesser extent in the second.
The situation of the NGOs is a separate chapter and it is important to clarify that it does NOT happen with all, as in all cases, there are some NGOs that are operating with absolute transparency and ethics, but it is not the case for all of them. In the last decade and following international agendas we have seen many associations between NGOs and corporations that have a strong responsibility for deforestation – as I said before, the group of the 4 large do NOT own land, they are only buyers of soybeans and often hide themselves by saying: we are not the ones who deforest. Of course, they are not directly, but they have a very important indirect role being buyers and price markers, often pushing landowners and small producers to increase their production. The financial relations that these corporations maintain with certain NGOs (supposedly guardians of the Amazonia), is not confidential or private information, it is easy today to find them on the web and I invite you to do so. The “observer financed by the observed”, something that we see today in several ecosystems around the world.
I do not want to leave out associations of certification of responsible / sustainable soybeans etc, there are several, where also, in some cases, the certifier or verifier is financed by which has to be certified or verified. Conflicts of interest are clear, and they are just as far as a search on Google to be checked out.
So far, I told you about corporations and NGOs, but it would not be fair if all the responsibility fall on them because we also found other actors on the podium of responsibility. Let us now talk about what is happening at a global level, within the United Nations, what countries (governments) do to address these issues. For years the international environmental agenda was led by the Climate Change Agenda, due to its urgency, it was the one with the greatest visibility. How is Climate Change related to deforestation? It’s simple: trees are the ones that capture CO2 and release oxygen, if humans are emitting a lot of CO2, the first thing we should do is not get rid of those that absorb it. Returning to the climate change and deforestation agenda, we must remember the Kyoto Protocol with its Clean Development Mechanism. This encouraged the creation of a market where the maintenance of standing forests was subsidized through market mechanisms (financed by corporations that were subject to pay for their CO2 emissions). This worked quite well and I participated, at that beginning, closely seeing how large Brazilian, Peruvian and Colombian landowners were self-proclaimed protectors of the Amazon rainforest when the protected hectare was worth more than USD 5 / year. After 2008 with the global financial crisis, governments put aside the environmental urgencies and this, coupled with the pressure of international lobbies of corporations and other interest groups, ended up killing the mechanism causing the price of subsidy to fall up to cents of USD/ year. It was funny, if not painful, to see how those same landowners, once defenders of the rainforest became again serial predators.
Governments within the UN, on the climate agenda, were always and are greatly influenced by international (sector and corporate) lobbies, and in my opinion they do not have the courage, ethics and greatness necessary to address them. I remember my first encounter with one of the strong lobbies in Washington. It was in December 2011 during the Climate Change Conference (COP 11) in Durban, South Africa. That was my baptism of fire, in the future I would meet them face to face again but that is another story and as the reader will understand is information that I reserve to myself.
I also consider the UN responsible for deflating the Climate Agenda and replacing it with a more fashionable one: the 2030 Agenda of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – 17 Objectives that look spectacular on paper but as an agenda is much more ambitious (and utopic) to perform than to combat global warming. Climate Action (n ° 13) is just one of the 17 objectives. Among the SDGs are Good Health and Well-being (No. 3), Quality Education (No. 4) and Gender Equality (No. 5). In these three objectives, the UN promotes gender ideology *. Gender Ideology is generally conditioned on budgets to countries both in education, in gender and health issues. This ideology that appeared for the first time in UN documents at the World Conference on Population and Development, which took place in Cairo in 1994, has more to do with global natality control than with the sexual freedom of human beings, their right to education and the empowerment of women. And why do I talk about gender ideology here? Because it is interesting to see how the UN agendas relate to each other. Being more than 7000 million inhabitants and growing at exponential rates globally we have two options:
- Change the way we consume natural resources, for which we must make profound changes to our global economy; or
- Control global population growth.
Unless we have a spare planet or unless there is a “black swan” that forces the international community to start directing the amount of needed financial resources for environmental protection, I am convinced that it is the second one the election taken in circles of international power. Apparently, it is easier to control a distracted and uninformed population, than spending financial resources on doing what needs to be done …
The Amazon is under fire, not only at mercy of the flames … and so are we.
* See 2010 Report “Special Report of the United Nations on the right to education” released in December of 2018
Alejandra is Founder and Director of GENESIS, a consultancy firm dedicated to Climate Change and Sustainable Finance. Since 2017 and up to April 2019, she was Advisor in Sustainable Finance of the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange (BCBA). Among its clients are the United Nations (UNDP and UNIDO), the Ministries of Environment and Agroindustry of Argentina and Energy (MIEM) of Uruguay and several private companies. In 2018, she advised the G20 presidency in the negotiations carried out by the Climate Sustainability Working Group. She has over 17 years of international experience in environmental markets (carbon credit markets and green bond markets). She worked for more than a decade at BUNGE SA, serving as Originator of Carbon Projects and as Head of International Climate Change policies reporting to the company’s board of directors in New York. She was also director in London for the most renowned private Think Tank of Climate Change: Climate Change Capital. Previously she worked in the oil and gas industry with strong experience in projects to reduce emissions in that industry. Alejandra has participated in the development of more than 250 climate, environmental and social projects. She has been a speaker at several international conferences on climate change and sustainable finance. Alejandra holds two bachelor’s degrees and an MBA in Finance from the University of Texas.