Summit to Save the Earth Brazil's Two Faces

By Michael S. Serrill

Brazil is the perfect setting for the Earth Summit, which will bring nearly 100 world leaders and 30,000 other participants to Rio de Janeiro during the next two weeks. There is no better showcase of the natural wonders that the summiteers will pledge to preserve and protect: the country contains the world's largest tropical rain forest, its biggest river system and its richest array of plant and animal life. And there is also no better showplace for the threats that face such natural wonders: with the world's 10th largest economy, the country is guilty of all the pollution, deforestation, encroachment on native populations and grandiose development projects that typify the global environmental crisis.

For years Brazilian authorities viewed ecological concerns with suspicion and scorn, as if they were part of an international plot to thwart the country's development. All that was supposed to change with the March 1990 inauguration of Fernando Collor de Mello, Brazil's first President with a green heart. Collor named Jose Lutzenberger, one of the world's foremost champions of rain-forest preservation, head of a new environment secretariat. The President also vowed to reverse decades of untrammeled development that destroyed 415,000 sq km (160,000 sq. mi.) -- an area the size of Iraq -- of the Amazon rain forest. He blew up airstrips used by gold miners who had invaded Yanomami Indian lands in the country's far north and made recognition of native territorial claims a top priority. The most visible symbol of environmental progress could be seen by satellite: the rate of destruction of the rain forest dropped 27% from 1989 to 1990, and 20% in 1991.

Collor proclaimed a "change of mentality" in Brazil, and his early measures earned international applause. But now he is under the same fire from environmental critics as his predecessors. "There has been no forward movement," says Fabio Feldmann, the leading environmentalist in Brazil's Congress. "On the contrary, what we have seen is total paralysis."

Collor's government stands accused of failing to fulfill some of its most important promises. Many conservation areas and national parks exist only on paper. Cattle ranchers, farmers and miners continue to burn, bulldoze and poison the forests. Brazilian environmental agencies still lack the staff and equipment they need to protect endangered flora and fauna. Foreign funds dedicated to Brazilian conservation efforts languish unused because the Collor government, plagued by corruption and staff turnover, has failed to develop projects that would make use of the money.

Even the slowdown in Amazon destruction, critics say, owes less to Collor's policies than to a sagging economy. Says Willem Groenefeld, who runs an environmental institute in the Amazonian state of Rondonia: "Nobody has any money to cut the forest down."

Activists put much of the blame for Brazil's lack of progress on Lutzenberger, the brilliant but eccentric and irascible Environment Secretary. Branded a disaster for his lack of administrative and political skills, he was abruptly fired by Collor in March. The dismissal came a week after Lutzenberger urged World Bank officials in New York City not to lend Brazil money to clean up its environment because the main government agency that would handle the funds was a "nest of corruption." Collor sacked the head of that agency at the same time he fired Lutzenberger.

The gist of Collor's disagreement with his former Environment Secretary goes right to the core of the Rio summit agenda. Lutzenberger refused to endorse Collor's version of "sustainable development" -- the notion that preservation of Brazil's rain forests and other natural resources is compatible with economic growth. The interim Secretary, a nuclear physicist named Jose Goldemberg, is a strong advocate of this vision of controlled development.

Collor argues that "we cannot discuss the environment issue without taking into account the situation of poverty and misery in which three-quarters of humanity lives" -- including the 70% of Brazil's 146 million people who < barely earn enough to feed themselves. Even fervent environmentalists concede the point. "Brazil is very important to the international community because of its biological diversity," says Feldmann, "but within the country, other issues are much more important. It's hard to relate to sustainable development when you also have problems of equity and social justice."

In official meetings leading up to the Earth Summit, Brazil's representatives argued that the developing world cannot let environmental concerns get in the way of the need to find homes and jobs for its citizens. In February, 800 representatives of Brazilian environmental groups, universities and government agencies signed the Vitoria Declaration, which, among other things, states that the developed world is responsible for global warming and that "Third World countries have the right to increase their consumption of energy to attend to their development needs."

Brazil has so far declined to sign any separate U.N. agreement on protecting forests. The government is also reluctant to join what it describes as "schemes to transform forests in developing countries into preserved areas in return for compensation from the industrialized world." This is an apparent reference to suggestions that Brazil should receive relief from its huge foreign debt in return for protecting the Amazon Basin. While Collor in principle has endorsed debt-for-nature swaps for small projects, only one deal has been negotiated.

Collor's opponents charge that Big Business is the real force behind the government's policy. "The antiecology lobby is better organized than we are," says Alfredo Sirkis, head of Brazil's Green Party. "What does sustainable development mean in the Amazon? The big polluters are hiding behind these two words." In fact, a wood-pulp producer in the Amazonian state of Para has described as "sustainable development" a plan to clear-cut 5,000 hectares (12,000 acres) of virgin tropical forest and replant the area with eucalyptus trees.

Collor's most ambitious achievement has been to reserve tracts of valuable land for Brazil's 240,000 native people, whose numbers have dwindled under the assault of economic progress. In November 1991 the President bucked opposition from rural politicians and the military to map out a region the size of Hungary as a homeland for the Yanomami, an ancient tribe now reduced to fewer than 10,000 people within Brazil. Their lands along the border with Venezuela were invaded by gold miners, bringing disease and environmental devastation. Collor argues that there was a "solid consensus" for the move to protect the Indians, but opponents are still grumbling. "It shocks and stupefies me that an area so vast and rich in tin and gold is handed over to the Yanomami," says Aureo Mello, a senator from the state of Amazonas.

Critics on the left charge that Collor has been less assertive in setting aside lands for other, equally threatened Indian tribes, such as the Guarani in the south and Sarare in Mato Grosso. And only now is he honoring a pledge to create additional extractive reserves: areas where indigenous peoples and settlers can support themselves through rubber tapping, the harvesting of fruit and nuts, and other forms of livelihood that do not harm the environment. Four such reserves were created before Collor took office; five new ones were set aside by the President just in time for the Earth Summit.

The uneven nature of Collor's record reflects the tricky balancing act between environmental and economic concerns that is affecting most developing nations. But in Brazil, at least, there has been a change in tone -- as well as a few experiments at mixing development with preservation -- that marks a considerable advance from the past. As the host of the Earth Summit, Collor proclaims that the gathering will be "the turning point in mankind's behavior toward the environment." The best place to look for signs of whether he is right will be in the land that he leads.

With reporting by Ian McCluskey/Rio de Janeiro