What he failed to mention, however, was that the country’s homicide rate had been falling steadily since early 2018, well before the election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro.

Although Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters have tried to “own” recent improvements in public security, the decline in murder has little to do with their efforts.

So, what explains the drop in homicide?

First, it is important to recall that 2017 was Brazil’s annus horribilis – an orgy of lethal violence. More people were violently killed that year – almost 64,000 – than at any other time in the nation’s history.

The explosion of violence was due in large part to a rupture of a truce between the country’s two rival drug-trafficking factions – the First Command of the Capital(PCC – Primeiro Comando da Capital) and the Red Command (CV – Comando Vermelho) – and disputes over control of the country’s drugs trade.

Inter-factional violence coincided with a boom in cocaine production in neighboring Colombia and Peru. The gradual decline in homicide in 2018 and 2019 can be interpreted as a kind of “correction”.

Second, a cluster of measures introduced by the Temer administration in 2017 and 2018 may have also played a partial role in reducing murder. These include improvements in coordinating and managing police forces and improving investigatory capacities from the national to the state level.

The federal authorities also started to more actively separate violent factional leaders from other inmates held in state prisons. Large-scale federal police and military operations were launched in some states to tamp down urban violence.

Even so, these measures should not be overstated: homicide rates started falling in states like Alagoas, Bahia, Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul that did not receive much federal attention.

Third, and arguably even more important, several public security programs and projects had already been launched by Brazilian states well before the 2018 presidential election. Examples include problem-oriented policing and social prevention measures in places like the states of Ceará, Espírito Santo, Pará and Pernambuco.

These interventions focused on improving police training, focusing law enforcement and welfare assets on areas of concentrated disadvantage, and involving local communities more directly in the planning and execution of safety and security.

Stricter controls were also imposed on some state prison facilities, though this did not prevent brutal flare-ups in 2019 in some parts of the country.

Fourth, are structural factors like changes in the economy and demography of Brazil. It is conceivable that the slowdown in the Brazilian economy from 2014 to 2016 may have driven up property crimes while the marginal improvements since 2018 contributed to reducing them.

Meanwhile, the long-term reduction in the country’s youth population – by over 12 percent since 2000 – may also have played a role. While these and other factors may have contributed to varying degrees, more study is surely required to better understand their specific influence.

The steady decline in homicide in 2019 while undoubtedly positive, has come at a price. While overall levels of homicide have declined over the past twenty months, police killings increased by 23 percent in 2019, a historic high. What is more, incidents of sexual violence and racial abuse have also spiked.

Even more ominous, reported disappearances have increased and there have been several discoveries of clandestine graves indicating the likelihood of social cleansing operations perpetrated by police and militia.

While murder rates are down, Brazil still has a chilling record for homicide in 2019. The minister of justice reported that there were “only” 21,289 murders in the first six months of the year. This compares to 27,371 at the same time last year, according to the Violence Monitor (Monitor da Violência).

While homicide reductions have been nationwide, the sharpest drop occurred in the Northeast of the country where factional violence has soared in recent years. Make no mistake, Brazil is still the most violent country in the world by a long shot.

The Bolsonaro administration’s tough on crime rhetoric is emboldening the police to use excessive lethal force. Brazilian police killed as many as 6,220 citizens across the country in 2018 as compared to 5,179 in 2017.

Since Rio’s governor Witzel launched his “war on crime” in 2019, police killings rose to levels not seen since the late 1990s with at least 1,075 victims reported in the first seven months of the year, a 20-year high.

At least 120 snipers have been deployed across the metropolitan region with orders to shoot anyone who is armed, no questions asked. In fact, when taking the police killings into account, Rio’s homicide “reduction” was just 1% over the year.

When police themselves are killed in a confrontation, this also increase reprisal violence. There were 343 on and off duty police killed in 2018, 87 on-duty and 256 off-duty. This compares to 373 police killed in 2017.

A study from Rio de Janeiro found that a policing killing could increase civilian deaths fivefold in the area in the following month. An analysis of Ministério Público, Civil Police and ISP data in Rio detected a 70% increase in gun-related deaths committed by police in areas where an officer had been killed.

The president calls for more police impunity and his determination to loosen gun laws is also encouraging vigilantism. Since 2018, several hundred thousand firearms may have been registered nationally, though no one knows the exact numbers because of conflicting reports from the public authorities.

In the small state of Santa Catarina, for example, a new firearm was registered every 35 minutes in 2019. This is dangerous in a country where roughly three quarters of all murders already involve a gun.

Heavy-handed policing and sentencing may generate a temporary “chilling” effect on violent crime. But studies of mano dura-style interventions across Latin America indicate that these impacts tend to be transitory and short-lived.

They are also frequently followed by a sharp surge in lethal violence as factions adopt ever more violent tactics in response. They are not just painfully ineffective in the medium-term, they are economically inefficient.

With Brazil’s economy on the rocks and the country facing austerity, this is something the government ought to think about.

Robert Muggah is the co-founder of the Igarapé Institute and the SecDev Group.

This article appeared originally in Open Democracy https://www.opendemocracy.net/

The British company Oxitec had released about 450,000 male mosquitoes every week in the city of Jacobina in the Bahia region with official permission over a period of 27 weeks. The experiment was designed to control the infectious diseases dengue, zika and yellow fever.

The gene modification called OX513A in the mosquitoes was designed in such a way that the first descendant generation of the mosquitoes, known as F1, would not reach the adult stage and thus not be able to reproduce.

The hope of the Ministry of Health was to reduce mosquito populations by 90 percent. And this worked well during the field trial. About 18 months after the end of the experiment, the mosquito population returned to what it had been before.

The gene modification of the released mosquitoes also produced a fluorescent protein that made it possible to distinguish the first F1 generation from other mosquitoes.

Researchers at Yale University have examined the mosquitoes found in the region for their genetic alterations one year after the release, as well as 27 to 30 months after the release.

They came to the conclusion that parts of the gene alteration had unexpectedly migrated into the target population of local mosquitoes.

Gene Modification Passed On

In the different samples, between 10 and 60 percent of the mosquitoes carried corresponding changes in the genome. The study was published in Nature: Scientific Reports on September 10.

If the field trial had taken place as originally predicted, the gene modification would not have been allowed to migrate into the mosquito populations because the offspring of the mosquitoes originally released would not have been able to reproduce.

However, it was already known from previous laboratory experiments that a small proportion of about three to four percent of OX513A descendants can reach adulthood; the scientists had assumed that those would be too weak to reproduce.

The authors of the study found that the GM mosquitoes were equally suitable as carriers of infectious diseases as the mosquitos were before the experiment.

Critics Take the Floor

The Yale research team around Jeffrey Powell warns that the newly formed mosquito population could possibly be more robust than the mosquitoes were before.

The authors conclude: “These results demonstrate the importance of having in place a genetic monitoring program during releases of transgenic organisms to detect unanticipated consequences”.

Biologists critical of genetic engineering go one step further with their criticism, among them the Brazilian biologist José Maria Gusman Ferraz: “The release of the mosquitos was carried out hastily without any points having been clarified,” Ferraz told the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo.

The Munich-based research laboratory Testbiotech, which is critical of genetic engineering, accuses Oxitec of having started the field trial without sufficient studies: “Oxitec’s trials have led to a largely uncontrollable situation,” CEO Christoph Then told the German Press Agency, dpa. “This incident must have consequences for the further employment of genetic engineering”, he demanded.

No Gene Drive Experiment

The field trial in Brazil did not use the controversial Gene Drive method, in which mosquitoes are given a very assertive gene that is always dominant during reproduction.

Researchers who experiment with Gene Drive in strictly isolated laboratories hope to eventually use the method to permanently eradicate entire mosquito populations. However, such experiments cannot be reversed and have therefore never been carried out in the open field.

DW

In its recent report, the UN and the International Panel of Climate Change estimates that global food production is responsible for 21-37% of “anthropogenic emissions”. What lies behind this Anthropogen that treats humankind in general as responsible for the climate change emergency? The destruction of the Amazon is in fact the consequence of a geopolitical conflict, connecting Brazil to China, China to the US – and Brazil, as a member of the Mercosur, to the EU.

When it comes to the climate change crisis, the humble soybean has a lot to answer for. Not the bean itself, of course, but the human production and consumption related to it, and more particularly the national politics surrounding it.

When President Trump declared trade war on China, one of the direct impacts was a Chinese response placing 25% tariffs on soy imports from the USA. At the same time, after the election of President Bolsonaro in Brazil, previous legal limitations on deforestation of the Amazon and expansion into the Cerrado, in significant part for soy production, were relaxed.

As the deceptively named Environment Minister, Ricardo Salles, said in a recent interview for the Financial Times (23.08.2019), laws were too restrictive, and commercial development must instead “monetize” the Amazon. Turn fires into dollars.

The result is a perfect climate-change storm. Brazil had already overtaken the USA as the main exporter of soy in the second decade of the twenty first century. This trade war has stimulated a great leap forward in exports to China, already by far the largest importer of soy from Brazil – over 85% of Brazil’s exports by 2018.

Two climate-change denying Presidents, plus growing demand for soy as animal feed for China’s growing meat consumption, plus deforestation and land conversion in Brazil. Result? An explosive climate change acceleration event.

While this event is significant in its own right, it also challenges how we need to think about the nature of the climate change crisis. Two highly influential recent publications in Nature and The Lancet identifying the greatest risks of transgressing planetary boundaries for the sustainability of human (and non-human) life affirmed strikingly that “food production is the largest cause of global environmental change”.

It accounts for up to 37% of total global greenhouse gases, two and a half times more that total global transport. The urgency of addressing land use and food production and consumption has just been highlighted by the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change report, Climate Change and Land. It appeared only days before the news of the burning Amazon hit the headlines.

Moreover, world population is set to rise from nearly 7 billion to 9 billion. At least as significant, there are dramatic shifts in the food people consume, particularly transitions to greater meat consumption.

So, food perhaps presents the biggest but also the most intractable threat of the climate change crisis. In all the National Plans for climate change mitigation and underpinning the 2016 Paris Agreement, food production and consumption was marginalized, or even in many cases omitted. This potato was politically too hot to handle in many national contexts.

So, is this a crisis brought about by the human species in aggregate: The Anthropogen of the IPCC? Or, as many on the left have also argued, is this crisis a product of global capitalism, a general economic engine of limitless expansion and appropriation of nature: The Capitalogen of climate change crisis? Present profit before future planet.

The Trump-Bolsonaro, Brazil-USA-China, climate change crisis event illustrates why we need better social science than either of these globalist accounts, and certainly why we need to pay more attention to national politics in any analysis.

Food production and consumption are especially useful for forcing us to think directly of how different societies are endowed with different environmental resources, as an almost taken for granted, but nonetheless formative background for economic development, and for the national politics of that development.

Societies, and different political economies, differ enormously in how they generate greenhouse gases, how they consume energy, food, water, and how they trade internationally, with different climate change impacts. They also face different political challenges in confronting the climate change emergency. Not every country has the Amazon in its back garden.

Before I started my research into food production and consumption in China, I had not fully appreciated the scarcity of its agricultural land, in spite of its extensive national territory. It has less quality agricultural land per capita than even the UK, and a fraction of that of the USA or Brazil.

Its water resources for food production are even scarcer, a quarter of the world average. Within this environmental context, and following a long history of famines, the politics of food production was dominated by the twin imperative of food security and food self-sufficiency.

Following the death of Mao Tse Tung and the market socialist reforms of Deng Xiaoping, agricultural intensification was combined with a major fragmentation of land ownership under the Household Responsibility System. Egalitarian distribution of leasehold land to 250 million peasant farmers, market incentives, and huge increase in the use of chemical fertilizers aimed to satisfy the twin imperative.

As a consequence, from being a net importer of nitrogen phosphate fertilizer to a net exporter, China now uses more than 30% of the world total, more than the whole of Northern Europe and the USA put together. With peasants given subsidies to use fertilizers, the amount of fertilizer per hectare is many times that of Europe.

Both Chinese experts and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization recognize the result: an ecological catastrophe. Overuse of nitrogen fertilizer is a major source of nitrogen oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas. So, apart from acidification of the soil and eutrophication of surface water, rice production in particular contributes significantly to China’s greenhouse gas emissions.

And now, as agricultural productivity itself was threatened, China recognizes the problem, and has come up with its distinctive political solutions, a limitation of the use of nitrogen phosphates to a 1% increase until 2020, and a cap on total use thereafter.

This brief account exemplifies the need for the concept of sociogenesis of climate change. A distinctive political economy, operating within its specific land and water resource environment, generates a climate change crisis and then its own characteristic mitigation policies.

This is not a dynamic of a socially amorphous Anthropogen or a globalist Capitalogen in interaction with Nature in general. This is a distinctively Chinese dynamic, in its own environmental context.

Then, at the turn of the century, China recognized that limits of its own land-water resources were such that it could no longer equate food security with food self-sufficiency. Especially to meet the demand for increasing meat consumption, pork in particular, for a population previously unable to afford it, China decisively shifted to importing soy beans from Brazil to feed its expanding pig production.

Enter Brazil. Although Europe had led the way in using soy protein to replace animal protein after the BSE crisis, China followed on to become its biggest market. Brazil’s climate change crisis is almost the opposite to China’s.

From the time of the military dictatorship (1964-1975) there has been a politically driven process of expanding agricultural production through extensification, converting uncultivated land into agricultural land, in an inexorable progression from timber extraction, to cattle and soy production.

This led to the earlier “arc of fire”. Brazil is now the largest exporter of beef, poultry, coffee, orange juice, and, overtaking the USA, soy. Where China’s agricultural land was shrinking, Brazil’s was increasing by 5 million hectares every year since the 1990s, particularly into the Legal Amazon.

In Brazil, big multinational capital, much of it Brazilian, is certainly involved, dominating agricultural production. The top 1% of farms with over 1000 hectares occupy over 45% of cultivated land.

The Roncador Group has a farm of 150,000 hectares, the Amaggi Group Tanguro farm, 80,000 hectares. JBS is the top global meat producer and exporter in the world, and the total Brazilian beef herd now exceeds 200 million.

It is calculated that the methane production of this herd from enteric fermentation exceeds the CO2 emissions from Brazilian land clearance and deforestation.

This is the distinctive Brazilian climate change crisis, not a generic Capitalogen, but a politically fostered national economy in interaction with a unique resource environment. And, until the arrival of Bolsonaro, a distinctive set of policies was put in place to limit land extensification: the registration of land-ownership, pioneering satellite tracking of land incursions, moratoriums on soy and beef production on any newly converted land.

These mitigation policies succeeded in radically reducing, but far from eliminating Amazonian deforestation, and significant ecologies, notably the Cerrado in Mato Grosso, were much less protected.

One more sociogenic contrast. In both China and Brazil, with increasing per capita income, there has been a transition to eating more meat. China now outstrips the USA for pork consumption, and in overall meat consumption had reached an annual per capita quantity of 52.4 kilos in 2011.

Brazil has overtaken the European average, with 92.6 kilos, with beef the premier meat with its much higher GHG impact. None approach Trump beef steak America, with an average of 135 kilos for all meats.

At the opposite extreme, India with its Hindu nationalist vegetarianism, persecuting Muslim beef eaters, has the lowest per capita meat consumption, with a less pronounced transition to more people eating more meat. Cultures of consumption – not individual consumer choices – have major climate change consequences.

Out of sociogenic contrasts come sociogenic connections. Global food trade is not from anywhere to anywhere. Trade flows are highly structured, and in the case of China and Brazil, opposites attract. China’s lack of land and water resources creates the demand for Brazil’s abundance.

China’s politics of trade condition this trade: it imports only whole soybeans, for its own animal feed industry to process. A deal between Brazil and China to trade in national currencies escapes the dominant dollar as reserve currency for international trade. This is a specific nation-to-nation connection between production and consumption. From Brexit, as we know only too well, trade connections are politically made and un-made.

One of the major limitations of the UN brokered Paris Agreement with its national plans for climate change mitigation is that it only treats nations as GHG producers. Trade, and the connection between producers and consumers, is a sustainability black hole.

As has now become only too clear from President Macron’s finger-pointing at Bolsonaro, the trade agreement between the EU and the Mercosur failed to enshrine legal commitments on conserving the Amazon or the Cerrado. The soy connection between China and Brazil shows that nation-to-nation trade is a critical dynamic of the sociogenic climate change emergency.

This takes us back to the beginning. Trump and Bolsonaro have just pressed the accelerator on that dynamic. Economies are political, and the politics of economies are driving the climate change emergency. Combating climate change involves contesting those politics within our different societal and environmental contexts.

One more reason to be European in a European Union context, engaging in the politics of our shared environmental resources and for legally enforceable sustainable international trade. Or go down the route of environmental catastrophe with the Trump-Bolsonaro politics of planetary destruction.

Mark Harvey is Emeritus Professor at the Center for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation at the University of Essex. He is also Honorary Professor, Department of Sociology, Sustainable Consumption Institute, University of Manchester.

His latest book is Inequality and Democratic Egalitarianism. Marx’s economy and beyond and other essays published by Manchester University Press.

This article appeared originally in Open Democracy – https://www.opendemocracy.net/

Many people blame the Brazilian government and its pro-agriculture policies for the current crisis. But as an environmental researcher who has worked in the Amazon for the past 25 years, I can say the seeds were planted before the election of President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. And the prospects of slowing deforestation remain dim, an issue that matters to people around the world.

That’s in part because the current administration has only aggravated the situation with its anti-environmental agenda. Unless the Brazilian people succeed in making Bolsonaro retreat from his stated goal of developing the Amazon, deforestation will surge again.

Adding fuel to the fire is the quickening pace of the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA), a multi-nation plan to build road, dams and rail lines across the Amazon.

Conflicting Objectives

Brazil managed to significantly reduce deforestation rates at the turn of the millennium with effective environmental policy and voluntary efforts by the private sector. Deforestation, which started in the 1970s, began climbing again in 2015 due to political turmoil and an economic recession that paved the way to policy reversals.

The Amazonian deforestation rate dropped from about 10,700 square miles in 2004 to 1,765 square miles in 2012, and remained low until its resurgence a few years ago. This was because of effective environmental policy, which in Brazil is mostly based on protected areas, such as national parks, and a forestry code limiting the amount of land that can be cleared on individual properties.

Over the years, the Brazilian government has developed a system of protected areas for ecological protection and indigenous reserves. In 2002 it expanded their coverage to about 43% of the entire Amazon. It also created protected areas in zones of land conflict as a means to tamp down rampant fire and deforestation.

Adding to this, enforcement of the forestry code was enhanced by the development of a satellite monitoring system that enabled Brazil’s environmental protection agency to identify law-breaking property owners from space.

In addition to government, the private sector helped lower the rate of deforestation. Soybean farmers stopped planting new fields in the forest, and retailers demanded that the goods they sold come from lands already cleared so they could certify them as “green,” especially beef.

Unfortunately, these efforts began to unravel almost as soon as they proved themselves effective. The background reason is that many people have long viewed the Amazon as a vast store of valuable resources to be used for the economic development of a poor region.

The agenda of IIRSA – an extensive infrastructure building project launched in 2000 to link the region’s economies and remote areas – expresses this view, common to all nations that share the Amazon Basin.

These include, in addition to Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela. It should come as no surprise that their individual orientations to the region all reflect a contradiction between economic development on the one hand and conservation on the other.

In Brazil, the government not only creates protected areas, it downsizes them in order to prepare for infrastructure projects. Former President Dilma Rousseff even downsized Amazon National Park in 2012, the first in the Amazon, to make way for the Tapajós Hydroelectric Complex, a key component of the IIRSA plan. The government does not act in a vacuum, and in Brazil a powerful congressional bloc, the rural/mining caucus known as the Ruralistas, works tirelessly at undermining environmental policy.

This has led to revisions in the forestry code, in 2012, that favor agriculture, not the environment, by exempting those who illegally deforested before 2008 from having to reforest in accordance with the law. Continuing Ruralista political action made it easier in 2017 for land grabbers to obtain title to illegally seized lands.

Fears of a Tipping Point

President Bolsonaro has inherited a set of weakened environmental policies and all indications are that he will continue to weaken them. At the same time, he has acted on his promise to open the Amazon to development by announcing plans to build a bridge across the Amazon River and to extend a paved road all the way to the border with Suriname. The IIRSA agenda appears to be accelerating, and as people flock to the region to take advantage of the jobs it creates, the fires can only get worse.

Since the opening of the Amazon to development in the 1970s, fires have been deliberately set on a yearly basis to make way for fields and pastures and to fertilize soils. The Amazon maintains a moist climate, which limits their extent. Thus, super fires have never raged over hundreds of square miles as happens with wildfires in the U.S. But this could change due to the cumulative effect of the repeated use of fire.

Research shows that every year when the forest burns, the destructive effect spreads beyond the flames to kill trees and desiccate the landscape. This can make the forest ever more vulnerable to fire through the buildup of flammable materials and the coalescence of fire-scarred ecosystems across broad swaths of the entire basin.

If Brazil does not retreat from the course it is on, scientists warn there will come a time in the near future when Amazonian fires burn without control and push the forest to a point of no return, what some have called a “tipping point” that will permanently change the underlying ecosystem. Without a restoration of environmental policy in Brazil, the worst fires are yet to come.

Robert T. Walker is professor of Latin American Studies and Geography at University of Florida

This article was originally published in The Conversation. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/in-brazils-rainforests-the-worst-fires-are-likely-still-to-come-122840

Prosecutors and judges are spending funds – seized from those who profit from modern slavery – on documentaries and movies in a drive to spark debate, engage with more people and bring to life the reality of slave labor in Brazil.

“Public opinion is fundamental,” said prosecutor Luiz Carlos Fabre, who brokered a deal between a production company and the Labor Prosecutor’s Office to part fund a series about slave labor for a major regional broadcaster, HBO Latin America.

“These issues need to be in the spotlight always,” said Fabre, whose office provided about 200,000 reais (US$ 53,100) for the upcoming series, which has yet to be given a release date.

With more than 40 million people enslaved worldwide, the entertainment industry has made a host of documentaries and films that explore life as a modern slave. But it is unorthodox for a government to commission content and detractors question the value of funding entertainment to educate.

Under Brazilian law, civil fines for labor violations and court convictions relating to public issues should be awarded to the victims or spent on helping the affected community.

Prosecutors and judges decide how to spend the funds, and have committed tens of thousands of dollars in recent years to anti-slavery screenplays.

A short cartoon on the dangers of child labor was screened last month at a fair in Juina, a small city in Mato Grosso state – a region where prosecutors say child workers are not seen as a problem by the public. It was also shared across social media.

“We heard people say: better (for a child) to be working, than on the streets doing nothing,” said prosecutor Ludmila Pereira Araújo, so she used 92,000 reais (US$ 23,256) in labor fines to produce the cartoon, adapted from a comic book series.

“We made it to try and reach younger people that use social media heavily,” Araújo said.

Money No Object

Money gained through fines and court convictions has been used by prosecutors and judges to build hospital wings and immigrant centers, buy equipment for labor inspectors, and fund social enterprises that aim to do business and do good.

Yet a lack of spending guidelines worries some civil servants.

Jonatas Andrade, a judge with more than a decade of experience working in the state of Pará, said he felt more and more uneasy as the stash of money he managed kept growing.

“It would be pretentious on my part … to presume to know where to best spend it,” said Andrade, who consults with state officials and anti-slavery campaigners on how to use the money.

In 2015, he allocated 1 million reais (US$ 252,786) to fund the film “Pureza” – a real-life account of anti-slavery activist Pureza Lopes, who traveled Brazil in search of her son after learning that he had been enslaved on a farm in the rainforest.

The movie will be shown at international film festivals and in Brazilian cinemas over the next two years, according to Andrade, who said he hoped it would raise awareness.

In Brazil – whose government has rescued more than 53,000 people in slave-like conditions since 1995 – slavery is defined as forced labor, and also includes debt bondage, degrading work conditions and long hours that pose a health risk to workers.

President Jair Bolsonaro, who took office on a populist campaign targeting the opposition’s corruption and economic ineptitude, last month criticized Brazil’s labor laws and said the definition of slave labor “terrorized” bosses.

Screenplays with a message can be ineffectual without good planning and appropriate screenings, be it in schools, labor unions or regions rife with slavery, said Fred Lucio of ESPM Social, a consultancy promoting corporate social responsibility.

Otherwise, the film might win awards but touch nobody.

“Many times the government gives money…and has no further involvement,” said Lucio. “Then it’s just throwing public funds to waste.”

This article was produced by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Visit them at http://www.thisisplace.org

Another way to measure a country’s progress is the extent of public education, e.g. how many citizens complete high school. A country’s health may be measured by the effectiveness of its healthcare system, for example, life expectancy and infant mortality.

With these measurement tools, it’s easier to gauge the difference between a country like Brazil and one like the U.S. What’s not easy to gauge is how these two countries developed so differently when they were both “discovered” at the same time.

In 1492 and 1500 respectively, the U.S. and Brazil fell under the spell of white Europeans for the first time. While the British and Portuguese had the same modus operandi, namely, to exploit their discoveries for whatever they had to offer, not to mention extinguishing the native Americans already living there if they got in the way, the end result turned out significantly different in the U.S. than in Brazil.

There are several theories on how/why the U.S. developed at a faster pace than Brazil. The theories originate via contrasting perspectives – from psychology to economics to geography.

One of the most popular theories suggests the divergence between the two countries is linked to politics, i.e. the U.S. established a democratic government in 1776, while Brazil’s democracy it could be said began only in earnest in the 1980s.

This theory states that the Portuguese monarchy, as well as the 19th and 20th century oligarchies that followed it, had no motivation to invest in industrial development or education of the masses. Rather, Brazil was prized for its cheap and plentiful labor to mine the rich soil of its vast land.

There is another theory based on collective psychology that says the first U.S. colonizers from England were workaholic Puritans, who avoided dancing and music in place of work and religious devotion.

They labored six days a week then spent all of Sunday in church. Meanwhile, the white settlers in Brazil were unambitious criminals who had been freed from prison in Portugal in exchange for settling in Brazil.

The Marxist interpretation of why Brazil lags behind the U.S. was best summarized by Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan writer, in 1970. Galeano said five hundred years ago the U.S. had the good fortune of bad fortune.

What he meant was the natural riches of Brazil – gold, silver, and diamonds – made it ripe for exploitation by western Europe. Whereas in the U.S., lacking such riches, the thirteen colonies were economically insignificant to the British.

Instead, U.S. industrialization had official encouragement from England, resulting in early diversification of its exports and rapid development of manufacturing.

II

Leaving this debate to the historians, let us turn our focus to the future. According to global projections by several economic strategists, what lies ahead for Brazil, the U.S., and the rest of the world is startling.

Projections forecast that based on GDP growth, in 2050 the world’s largest economy will be China, not the U.S. In third place will be India, and in fourth – Brazil.

With the ascendency of three-fourths of the BRIC countries over the next decades, it will be important to reevaluate the terms developed and developing. In thirty years, it may no longer be necessary to accept the label characterized by Nelson Rodrigues’s famous phrase “complexo de vira-lata,” for Brazil’s national inferiority complex.

For Brazilians, this future scenario presents glistening hope. A country with stronger economic power would mean the government has greater wealth to expend on infrastructure, crime control, education, healthcare, etc.

What many Brazilians are not cognizant of are the pitfalls of economic prosperity. While Brazilians today may be envious of their wealthier northern neighbors, there are some aspects of a developed country’s profile that are not worth envying. For example, the U.S. today far exceeds Brazil in the number of suicides, prescription drug overdoses, and mass shootings.

GDP growth and economic projections depend on multiple variables, chief among them the global economic situation and worldwide political stability. A war in the Middle East, for example, can affect oil production and have global ramifications.

Political stability within a country is also essential to its economic health. Elected presidents play a crucial role in a country’s progress, especially as presidents may differ radically in their worldview.

The political paths of the U.S. and Brazil are parallel today. In both countries, we’ve seen a left-wing regime (Obama/PT) followed by a far-right populist one (Trump/Bolsonaro), surprising many outside observers, and in the U.S. contradicting every political pollster, all of whom predicted a Trump loss to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

In Brazil, although Bolsonaro was elected by a clear majority, his triumph has created a powerful emotional polarization in the country similar to what is happening in the U.S. Families, friends, and colleagues have split in a love/hate relationship toward the current presidents in the U.S. and Brazil, leaving broken friendships and family ties.

Both presidents face enormous challenges to keep their campaign promises. In Brazil, a sluggish economy just recovering from a recession shows no signs of robust GDP growth for at least the next two years.

High unemployment continues to devastate the consumer confidence index in Brazil, and Bolsonaro is suffering under his campaign boasts that his Economy Minister, Paulo Guedes, has all the answers to fix Brazil’s slump.

Additionally, there is no end to the destruction caused by corruption in Brazil. Some experts believe corruption to be the main reason why Brazil has one of the world’s largest wealth inequality gaps.

Political corruption robs government coffers of desperately needed funds for education and infrastructure, in addition to creating an atmosphere that encourages everyday citizens to underreport income and engage in the shadow economy, thereby sidestepping tax collectors and regulators.

“Why should I be honest about reporting my income when nobody else is? The politicians are only going to steal the tax money anyway,” one Brazilian doctor told me.

While Bolsonaro has promised a housecleaning of corrupt officials, this is a cry Brazilians have heard from every previous administration. In only the first half-year of his presidency, he has made several missteps, such as nominating one of his sons to be the new ambassador to the U.S., despite the congressman’s lack of diplomatic credentials. A June poll found that 51 percent of Brazilians now lack confidence in Bolsonaro’s leadership.

Just this week, Brazil issued regulations that open a fast-track to deport foreigners who are dangerous or have violated the constitution. The rules published on July 26 by Justice Minister Sérgio Moro define a dangerous person as anyone associated with terrorism or organized crime, in addition to football fans with a violent history. Journalists noted that this new regulation had coincidental timing for an American journalist who has come under fire from Moro for publishing private communications of Moro’s.

Nevertheless, despite overselling his leadership skills, Bolsonaro has made some economic progress. With the help of congressional leader Rodrigo Maia, a bill is moving forward in congress for the restructuring of Brazil’s generous pension system.

Most Brazilians recognize the long-term value of such a change, which can save the government billions of dollars over the next decade. At merely the possibility of pension reform, outside investors have responded positively, and the São Paulo stock exchange has performed brilliantly, reaching an all-time high earlier this month.

In efforts to boost the economy, Bolsonaro and Paulo Guedes have taken the short-term approach advocated by the Chicago school of economics championed by Milton Friedman, who claimed the key to boosting a slugging economy was to cut government spending.

Unfortunately many economists, such as Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, disagree with this approach. They believe the most effective way to revive a slow economy is exactly the opposite, to spend more money not less. They say the government should be investing money in education and infrastructure projects, which can help put people back to work.

Bolsonaro/Guedes have also talked about reducing business bureaucracy and revising the absurdly complex Brazilian tax system, which inhibits foreign and domestic business investment. It remains to be seen whether Bolsonaro has the political acumen to tackle this Godzilla-sized issue.

Should Bolsonaro find a way to reform the tax system, the pension system, and curb the most egregious villains of political bribery and kickbacks – a tall order – his efforts could indeed show strong economic results in time for the next election in 2022.

Meanwhile, some prominent leaders have already lost faith in Bolsonaro’s efforts. The veteran of political/economic affairs, Joaquim Levy, has parted company with the president after being appointed head of the government’s powerful development bank, BNDES.

Levy and Bolsonaro butted heads over an appointment Levy made of a former employee of Lula’s. When neither man refused to back down, Levy resigned his position at BNDES.

Many observers believe Bolsonaro’s biggest misstep has been his short-term approach to fixing the economy by loosening the laws protecting the Amazon rainforest. He and Guedes believe that by opening up more of the Amazon to logging, mining, and farming, we will see immediate economic stimulation.

On July 28, the lead article of The New York Times detailed the vastly increased deforestation in the Amazon taking place under Bolsonaro’s leadership.

Environmental experts argue that the economic benefits of increased logging and mining in the Amazon are microscopic compared to the long-term damage to the environment. After pressure from European leaders at the recent G-20 meeting to do more to protect the world’s largest rainforest, Bolsonaro echoed a patriotic response demanding that no one has the right to an opinion about the Amazon except Brazilians.

In retaliation to worldwide criticism, Bolsonaro threatened to follow Trump’s example and pull out of the Paris climate accord; however, Bolsonaro was persuaded by cooler heads to retract his threat. To prove who was in control of Brazil’s Amazon region, he appointed a federal police officer with strong ties to agribusiness as head of FUNAI, the country’s indigenous agency.

In a further insult to the world’s environmental leaders, not to mention common sense, Paulo Guedes held a news conference on July 25 in Manaus, the largest city in the rainforest, where he declared that since the Amazon forest is known for being the “lungs” of the world, Brazil should charge other countries for all the oxygen the forest produces.

Bolsonaro/Guedes also have promised to finish paving BR-319, a controversial highway that cuts through the Amazon forest, linking Manaus to the state of Rondônia and the rest of the country. Inaugurated in 1976, BR-319 was abandoned by federal governments in the 1980s and again in the 1990s as far too costly and risky.

Environmentalists believe the highway’s completion will seal a death knoll on many indigenous populations by vastly facilitating the growth of the logging and mining industries. Several dozen heavily armed miners dressed in military fatigues invaded a Wajãpi village recently in the state of Amapá near the border of French Guiana and fatally stabbed one of the community’s leaders.

While Brazil’s environmental protection policies are desperately lacking these days, not all the news here was bad. On the opening day of the 2019 Pan America Games in Lima, Peru, Brazilian Luisa Baptista, swam, biked, and ran her way to the gold medal in the women’s triathlon. The silver medal went to Vittoria Lopes, another Brazilian.

B. Michael Rubin is an American writer living in Brazil.

Pictures in exuberant landscapes and laborious looks, in the style of bloggers. None of this is new when we are talking about an Instagram profile. But when these pictures are being taken and posted by a nice 78-year-old lady, it draws the attention on the social networks.

The digital influencer is Izaura Demari, who, with her extravagant combinations, has already more than 20,000 followers on her social media. The Paraná-native profile aggregates pictures of her two passions: traveling and taking care of her looks.

“I feel very happy [with the repercussion], very well. I like to take get dressed, going out to the mall, taking pictures with my friends,” says the influencer, who thanks to all this hubbub has already appeared in fashion magazines and TV shows.

The idea of posting the pictures came out after the reaction people had with her style. She says that she was often approached while walking through the mall or down the street. As well as asking to take pictures with her, people began to question how they could follow her on social media.

It was then that her son, 50-year-old Márcio Aurélio Demari, decided to create a Facebook page and an Instagram profile. The answer was instantaneous, and grandma Izaura, as she calls herself in the networks, has obtained 5 thousand followers in a single week.

Striking Moment

There were so many special moments and so much affection from the people that Izaura is not able to list the better ones. “Ladies would even stop looking at art works in museums to talk to me,” Izaura remembers from a trip she took to Gramado with her son.

“Once a woman saw her in the street and stopped the car just to hug her. She asked from which fairy tale she had come out of,” remembers the proud son.

The lifestyle of the near-octogenarian has a positive influence on several other women. Those who are in her age group feel inspired to become more daring in their outfits, and go out more. “This is a joy in my life, I feel very happy,” she says.

Izaura used to cultivate orchids at her home. But since her husband died, 16 years ago, and she moved to an apartment, she decided to rethink her routine. It was then that her passion for traveling came about. Four months ago she moved once again, this time to Florianópolis, in the Brazilian southern state of Santa Catarina, the setting of many of her pictures.

Her three sons, five grandsons and three great-grandsons are taking advantage of the fame, along with Izaura. They buy newspapers to show their friends, and proudly show off their grandmother’s social networks. “My sister says: ‘mother, I can’t be like you!'”, says Márcio, laughingly.

Izaura’s trademark is her style, but the son points out that she focuses on different and cheap clothes – and not expensive or famous brands. Including hats, kerchiefs, and turbans, she has already over 400 pieces of clothing.

And she is not interested in minimalism, on the contrary – the influencer likes color, high heels, necklaces and large sunglasses. The rule is to have fun.

Source: Maria Miqueletto / Portal Gazeta do Povo / Brazil

See it at: https://www.instagram.com/voizaurademari

The Brazilian Space Agency has released data documenting a massive spike in deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. Citing figures from June, the agency registered an 88.4% increase over the same month in 2018.

That figure comes on the heels of increased deforestation in May, which was up 34% compared to 2018.

The agency measures annual July to July activity, but says the first 11 months of this year’s report already show a 15% rise over the previous period.

That increase translates to some 4,565 square kilometers (1,762 square miles) of lost rainforest over an 11 month period. June alone saw the loss of 920 square kilometers.

Environmentalists have long been concerned about the steady loss of one of the world’s largest sources of oxygen and carbon sequestration and their fears were compounded when far-right anti-environment candidate Jair Bolsonaro became president in January.

Bolsonaro has aggressively dismantled environmental laws and protections for indigenous people living in the Amazon in order to spur economic growth.

Much of the area being clear cut is converted for agricultural planting, such as soy beans and grains, as well as for ranching and mining. The need for such clear cutting has been fueled by the world’s growing lust for meat as a dietary choice.

Soon to lose a space the size of Iran?

Bolsonaro has repeatedly criticized the country’s Ibama environmental agency for what he complains are excessive fines against logging. He argues that fines simply drive up prices, making illegal logging more lucrative.

His son Flavio, who is a senator, has also pushed for legislation that would relieve farmers of the obligation of maintaining 20-80% tree cover on their land.

Bloomberg news agency reports that this could lead to the clearing of up to 1.6 million square kilometers of rain forest— a space roughly the size of Iran.

Though the deforestation may provide short-term profits for Brazil and international companies it is bad news for the environment and could also threaten the passage of trade deals.

Last week, the European Union announced that after almost 20 years it had reached an agreement with the Mercosur bloc — Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay — on a new free-trade deal.

However, EU countries are adamant that all parties involved must uphold commitments to the Paris Agreement on climate change — these include a pledge to curb deforestation.

French President Emmanuel Macron has already said he will not sign the treaty if Brazil pulls out of the Paris accord, something that President Bolsonaro has threatened to do.

Light at the end of the tunnel?

Observers, such as Paulo Adario, a forest strategist for the environmental group Greenpeace, say that although things will get worse under Bolsonaro, it could lead to policy changes for the better down the road.

Speaking of recent deforestation data, Adario said: “When they have the final numbers, if it is really a lot, it would be a nightmare for Bolsonaro. This is something that is really important from an international and Brazilian point of view because the Amazon is an icon.”

DW

Though dialogue under the Bush/Obama, Lula/Rousseff/Temer administrations reveals an alliance fraught with complexity, the general relationship over the past two decades has been one of reconciliation, partnership, and synergy.

Certainly, the United States and Brazil share the legacy of two countries committed to perpetuating an agenda of progressive diplomacy.

The Bush and Lula governments of the early 2000s generally maintained an agenda of cooperation. Coordinating policy on issues such as counter-narcotics, terrorism, energy security, trade, environmental issues, human rights and HIV/AIDS as mentioned in a Wikipedia profile, the two administrations sought to promote a general posture of conciliation, while at the same time pursuing the common goal of Brazil’s regional and international integration.

For example, the United States approved of Brazil’s role in peacekeeping in Haiti (MINUSTAH) in 2004, and Brazil supported the US response to the World Trade Center terrorist attack in 2001. Despite some distance, Bush supported Brazil’s emergence on the world stage at the UN, with programs in Africa and at the Doha Round, and collaborated in health and sanitation, biodiversity, agricultural, energy policy, science and technology issues as well.

With the conclusion of the Bush and Lula presidencies, the Rousseff administration espoused an invigorated bilateral cooperation, revealing a continued posture of goodwill between the two nations.

Particularly in the areas of commerce and investment, energy, defense, climate change, human rights, education, and science and technology, the US and Brazil sought to perpetuate a program of cooperative ideas and ideals.

Though unfortunately marred by the Snowden spying scandal under Obama, the shared aim of promoting dialogue on virtually all diplomatic fronts reinforced the strategic partnership.

Clarified by a lucid report by the Council of Foreign Relations, as well as a joint communiqué publication by Obama and Rousseff dated June 2015 pertaining to Global Brazil and US-Brazil Relations from 2011, the coordinated US/Brazilian agenda is evident, and the topics are worthy of citation:

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, trade policy, monetary policy, space, education, nuclear policy, trade and investment, counter-narcotics efforts, biofuels/renewable energy, climate change, trade and investment, aviation, infrastructure, environment, labor, security, the United Nations/OAS, science and technology, health care, human rights, agriculture, homeland security, cybersecurity, and defense.

In the end, the Rousseff/Obama governments sought a “mature working relationship” by which to further an agenda of shared concerns.

Tracing the path of relations after Rousseff, the Temer administration continued the policy of diplomatic openness. In a speech at the Brazil Institute in 2016 by then US Ambassador Liliana Ayalde, the goal of peaceful coordination of relations is evident – for example, and at length, in the Embraer/Boeing, SMEs, mutual economic interdependence, patent registration, environmental issues, Paris Climate Change Agreement, Defense Cooperation Agreement, Brazil-US Defense Industry Dialogue, Internet Governance, Olympic security/law enforcement, UN/OAS Partnerships, Latin America, Africa, Caribbean, general peacekeeping, the Montreal Protocol, Syria, North Korea, and the
advancement of Women and Girls.

Furthermore, Temer’s and Pence’s Joint Press statement of June, 2018,
reflect this symbiotic relationship – most notably mentioned were cultural and academic exchanges, tourism, trade, investment, job creation, space exploration, coordination and collaboration on organized crime initiatives, and the ongoing crisis in Venezuela and Central America.

In retrospect, what can be said of the bilateral relation between the United States and Brazil in the early 21th century? Generally speaking, it has been one of an ongoing complementary alliance, rooted in a recognition of shared goals and mutual aspirations.

But the legacy of US/Brazil relations from the Bush and Obama administrations remains to be seen. The future of the relationship under Trump, Bolsonaro, and any future US and Brazilian administrations from 2019 on may or may not be determined by the precedent of the historical friendship between the two countries.

Indeed, the past two decades demonstrate the possibility for both closeness and distance in the bilateral accord, and with Bolsonaro’s visit to Washington, the issue emerges as a basis for speculation, curiosity and anticipation.

Perhaps the most compelling theme in the history of US/Brazil relations in the early 21st century is represented by rubric of the Monroe Doctrine, particularly in regards to US influence in Latin America in general, and in Brazil in specific.

Clearly, despite the fact that Brazil maintains a relatively closed economy, diplomatic interaction with the United States and around the world dictate that the era of Brazil’s isolation has not only ended, but has been over for decades.

One should bear in mind that Brazil integrates and interacts significantly with China and the EU, and any posture of benign neglect on the part of the United States will only stifle what has been a longstanding fruitful bilateral relationship, and could potentially curtail US influence in the region.

Ultimately, US/Brazil relations hinge on the recognition of the necessity of ongoing diplomatic, political, economic and cultural relations and exchange, while at the same time aspiring to goals of Brazil’s integration.

For the United States, Brazil represents not only an opportunity to pursue dominance in the Western Hemisphere, but the possibility of crafting a policy mutually beneficial political and economic agendas for both countries.

For Brazil, the United States offers the possibility of embracing a partnership which can propel the South American nation’s interests to regional and international influence, while at the same time, ameliorating the basic standard of living of its citizens, with the help of the United States as a benevolent regional superpower.

In fact, this legacy of diplomatic and economic coordination has been around since 1822, with the US as the first country to formally recognize Brazil’s independence.

Looking back on the past two decades, the United States and Brazil stand poised to gain under the Trump and Bolsonaro administrations, based on a history of mutual engagement and respect for each country’s fundamental aims of domestic economic improvement, democratic stability, and international integration.

Former Barcelona striker Evaristo de Macedo, 85, and ex-Flamengo defender, Andrade, 62, teamed up with Qatar which is promoting sport in poor areas as part of the legacy of the 2022 World Cup, which Doha is hosting.

They worked with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and Flamengo FC to provide training to local youngsters.

The sessions were attended by boys and girls from Campo Grande, Favela do Vidigal and Cidade de Deus, to promote “youth empowerment, inclusion and resilience” through sport.

The project is a successor to UNODC’s “Line Up, Live Up” program, which used sport-based initiatives as a tool to prevent youth violence and crime.

Qatar’s “Generation Amazing” project has reached 500,000 people in disadvantaged parts of the world such as Nepal, Pakistan, Jordan, Lebanon, the Philippines and India – and hopes to benefit a million people by the time the tournament kicks off in three and a half years’ time.

The event was arranged to coincide with the tiny Gulf state’s appearance at the Copa America tournament in Brazil this month.

The former Brazilian stars were joined by Bora Milutinovic, a former Serbian player, who holds the record for taking five different countries to five successive world cups between 1986 and 2002.

Talking about Generation Amazing, he said: “Sport can help young people to think differently. Thanks to sport you can learn discipline, motivation, team spirit, how to be respectful, all of the values that you need to be successful in life.

“The decisive factor is to be aware of how we can improve the world. The best way to do this is to share knowledge, and people who have experience can share a lot of things with children who don’t have these opportunities.”

The organizers said the aim of the Rio project was to “empower young boys and girls to become socially responsible citizens by helping them build life skills to better cope with the daily life challenges and move away from involvement in violence, crime or drug use”.

Hassan Al Thawadi, Secretary General of Qatar’s Supreme Committee, said: “Generation Amazing and the UNODC are natural partners as both entities seek to positively affect children’s lives in areas of the world most in need of assistance.

“Generation Amazing seeks to effect that improvement in lives through the power of football and today’s event is a wonderful showcase of that immense power in action.

“We sincerely appreciate the involvement of Flamengo, Evaristo and Bora Milutinovic for bringing the event to life and assisting in providing the children in attendance with a day to remember”.