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 After almost eighty years of effort, we have attained self-sufficiency in petroleum. That process began in 1938, with national investments in the sector, and continued with the creation of Petrobras fifty years ago.
It began in the authoritarian, nationalistic, developmentalist, and laborist regime of Getúlio Vargas. It continued in the dictatorship and in the democracy; it faced developmentalist, reformist and neo-liberal models and the administrations of fourteen presidents. Self-sufficiency was achieved because Brazil persisted. Unfortunately, that national project is not being repeated in other areas. After more than one hundred years of the Republic, we are commemorating advances that are small, insufficient, much less than in other countries. Unlike with petroleum, we are commemorating our remaining behind in relation to the rest of the world. We are celebrating the fact that we have had a Brazilian on board a Russian space station when China has already sent its astronauts up in its own spacecraft; India is preparing to do the same shortly; and other countries are advancing in their space research. We consider it a victory to have a passenger who paid for a voyage on a spacecraft with technology unknown to us; we have no other project to master this technology. We do not have a goal for space self-sufficiency and the one we set thirty years ago, when we were probably ahead of China, was not continued. We invest in science and technology in institutes and universities but in a way that is inconsistent, disorganized and without goals. As a result, we have taken smaller steps than other countries, where there is continuity and there are goals to be met. We are not self-sufficient in science and technology because we reduced the investments in the sector and the support to the research centers. We commemorate each time that adults complete their literacy courses, but we abandoned the project of eradicating illiteracy, initiated in 2003. The old, gradual work of literacy instruction continues without a goal of self-sufficiency. We even disbanded the Secretariat for Eradicating Illiteracy. It is as if Petrobras were extinct and Brazil were concerned simply with drilling oil wells. Brazil is commemorating the increase in school enrollments, but it does not seek the self-sufficiency of having all children attend class in full-day sessions and graduate from a quality high school. We are not pursuing goals for education as we did with petroleum. We are celebrating the expansion of the Bolsa Família, when, in truth, its excessive size is proof of the social failure since self-sufficiency of the program would mean that fewer and fewer people have need of it. The program does not assure the families self-sufficiency, which will not come from income but rather from the education of their children. Even worse, instead of maintaining the program from the prior administrations, as was done with Petrobras, we altered its educational objectives, removing its links with the Ministry of Education. Recently the government commemorated the new minimum wage, but without a goal to recoup its value and aim for the self-sufficiency of the families who live on it. In the 1970s, we made a leap in technology with the use of alcohol as fuel to offset the increase in the price of petroleum. When oil prices went down, the project was reduced; we stopped fighting for self-sufficiency in renewable fuel. Even so, the commemorations for self-sufficiency in petroleum ignore the fact that this self-sufficiency is only temporary since greater production means faster depletion of our oil reserves. Self-sufficiency in petroleum deserves to be commemorated; moreover, it must be understood and copied. Understood as the result of a long-term project and copied for other sectors of the society, the economy, the infrastructure. We can be self-sufficient in abolishing poverty, in reducing inequality, in raising the minimum wage, in implanting a universal health-care system, in improving the quality of education for all our children. It is enough that the goals be defined, that the society consider them as goals for self-sufficiency, and that the leaders give continuation to the programs from one administration to another. Just as we did with Petrobras. Cristovam Buarque has a Ph.D. in economics. He is a PDT senator for the Federal District and was Governor of the Federal District (1995-98) and Minister of Education (2003-04). You can visit his homepage - www.cristovam.com.br - and write to him at
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. Translated from the Portuguese by Linda Jerome -
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And for God’s sake, fix those roads! A country cannot function well when the main infrastructure is so damaged.