|
Brazil's Minister of Environment, Marina Silva, points to the current Administration's policies to combat deforestation as responsible for the 31% reduction in the deforested area registered this year in the Brazilian Amazon.
In an interview, Wednesday, December 28, on TV Nacional, the Minister affirmed that the change in approach to the problem was fundamental for the country to reduce deforestation. "In our country deforestation has always been a serious problem, causing embarrassment here and abroad and demanding an effective policy to reduce deforestation to a sustainable level," Silva remarked. According to the Minister, prior to the current Administration, between 2001 and 2002, deforestation had increased 27%, from 18 thousand square kilometers to 23 thousand square kilometers. "We perceived the seriousness of the problem and suggested to the core of the Administration another approach, involving other ministries as well as the Ministry of Environment," she explained. As a result, she affirmed, an inter-ministerial group was set up in 2004 to draft the National Plan to Prevent and Combat Deforestation. "The ministries of Environment, Justice, and Defense, the IBAMA (Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources), the federal and highway police, and state governments began to work together. We increased our inspection capacity 60% and expanded our application of fines by more than 80%," she commented. According to the Minister, another innovation was the introduction of a special investigative process to deal with organized gangs that make predatory use of forest resources and encourage squatting for this purpose. "This effort led to the arrest of more than 260 people," she pointed out. In her recap of the year, the Minister also highlighted the increase in the number of environmental licenses granted to hydroelectric plants. "At the start of our term, in 2003, 45 hydroelectric plants were paralyzed due to legal issues involving the environmental licenses that had been granted. The federal government made a huge effort to get them back on track," she affirmed. Silva said that, in 2002, Brazil's environmental licensing sector had only seven permanent employees. The rest were on temporary contracts. "Things are completely different now. We went from seven to 70 permanent employees, highly qualified individuals selected through civil service exams for the process of environmental licensing. "Of the 45 hydroelectric plants that were paralyzed for lack of licenses, only three continue to have this problem, the reason being that they represent investments that are highly complex from the environmental standpoint," she commented. In previous Administrations, according to the Minister, the average number of licenses granted annually was around 145. Under the current Administration, she says, the average has already risen to around 225 licenses, granted through transparent procedures. "To do this, we created the Transparency Site and an entire system to provide total transparency both for society and the entrepreneurs," she concluded. Transparency Site - www.mj.gov.br/transparencia/ Agência Brasil
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.