Brazil Under Fire Over Plan to Cut Amazon Program
11/26/98
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Title: Brazil under fire over plan to cut Amazon program
Source: Reuters
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: November 26, 1998
Byline: William Schomberg
BRASILIA, Nov 26 (Reuters) - Plans by Brazil to cut an internationally
funded Amazon protection programme have enraged local environmental
groups who say the rain forest will pay the price of the country's
attempts to fight economic crisis.
Spending on the Pilot Programme for Brazilian Rainforests stands to be
slashed to just over $6 million from an original proposal of $61
million, a huge cut of 90 percent, officials working on the programme
said on Thursday.
Although most of the funding would have come from the industrialised
G-7 nations and the European Union, the government has included that
money as spending it will cut next year.
The cut is part of a sweeping $23.5 billion fiscal drive agreed with
the International Monetary Fund earlier this month in return for
massive foreign loans to prevent an Asia-style financial meltdown in
Brazil.
``News of the virtual extinction of the PP-G7 has come as a
bombshell,'' the nongovernmental Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA),
a Brazilian environmental group, said in a report.
``We wonder what could have prompted (the government) to destroy the
projects that have provided the best results in environmental and
Indian policies ... and precisely at a time of growing fires and
forest destruction,'' the report said.
The PP-G7 programme was created after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de
Janeiro -- when concerns about the fate of the Amazon were at their
highest -- to channel cash from the rich counties into promoting
sustainable development in the region.
Since then, deforestation has continued to rage. Official figures
released earlier this year estimated an area of jungle twice the size
of Belgium was cut down in Brazil between 1995 and 1997, alarming
scientists around the world about the future of the world's largest
remaining rain forest.
As well as helping rubbertapping and other nondestructive uses of the
forest, the PP-G7 has provided the bulk of funding for Brazil's
programme to demarcate Indian reservations and financed monitoring of
deforestation.
Ecologists say the proposed cuts will leave precious little for
spending on protecting the Amazon, while the high cost of paying the
salaries of government workers is protected by Brazil's constitution.
``The government is going to have a lot of bureaucrats sitting around
with nothing to do,'' said Roberto Smeraldi, head of a programme to
protect the Amazon with Friends of the Earth.
He said Brazil's Environment Ministry would spend nearly $700 million
next year on its payroll but just $110 million on projects, including
high-profile irrigation programmes which generally take priority over
protection of the Amazon.
A ministry official in charge of the PP-G7 programme said the proposed
allocation was ``very small'' and that the ministry was trying to
triple it when the 1999 budget was debated in Congress over the coming
weeks.
But that task would not be easy, given that virtually every other
ministry would be seeking to increase their budget share, said Luiz
Carlos Joels, the program's executive secretary.
``Everyone has their own priority,'' he said. ``If I were to ask my
neighbour what is more important, protecting the Amazon or funding the
health service, I think he'd say, health.''
Smeraldi said Friends of the Earth and other Brazilian nongovernmental
organisations were asking for support from international environmental
groups to lobby the Brazilian government and Congress to reverse the
PP-G7 cut.