Climate paralysis

Post-2012 uncertainty is hampering investment in small clean energy projects, an ethanol producer has said.

Reberth Machado, executive director of Bioenergia do Brasil, said uncertainty over the future of the clean development mechanism (CDM), combined with the current financial crisis, is jeopardising plans to expand a sugarcane plant that also earns CDM credits.

“The whole market is entering into a panic mode. Nobody knows what is going to happen, therefore nobody is doing anything,” Machado told Point Carbon in an interview.

Machado’s company operates Lucélia, the first sugarcane mill in Brazil to earn credits through the CDM.

Lucélia processes 10,000 tonnes of sugarcane each year from its 28,000 hectare estate, and earns CDM credits from the use of bagasse – the woody residue from the cane crop – to power steam boilers and generate electricity.

This power has been used for the production process at Lucélia since 1981, but from 2002 about half of it has been exported to the grid.


Bioenergia saw the opportunity of gaining credits through the CDM to help finance a more efficient boiler, giving the plant surplus electricity.

It is seeking $30 million to install a new boiler, and to increase the generating capacity at the mill from 12 to 28MW and the power exports from six to 21 MW.

It contracted the project developer and aggregator Ecosecurities to calculate the carbon savings and go through the UN registration procedure, receiving in return the rights to commercialise the certified emission reductions (CERs).

Machado said that the seven-year contract with Ecosecurities was ending this year – and was not going to be renewed, leaving the company unable to earn further credits.


The problem, he said, was that with less than three years left under the Kyoto protocol, the volume of credits produced by the plant – 10,000-15,000 CERs per year – was not sufficient to guarantee recovering the investment in revalidating the project.

“They are killing the small to medium-sized projects, just by not having enough time until 2012 to get the money back, and nobody knows what’s going to happen after 2012,” said Machado.

“For the new plant, it is just that much more difficult to attract investors now. Especially international investors that would be looking at the CO2 as an incentive to put the money down, and allow the project to go ahead,” he said.

Ecosecurities’ head of implementation, Belinda Kinkead, confirmed Machado’s account of their dealings with the CDM project.

She pointed out that at the end of 2008, the average time to validate a project was 329 days, plus an additional average of 191 days to register it – so the window to validate new CERs before 2012 was rapidly closing.



Kinkead added that prices for validations and verifications had almost trebled in the last 12 months, meaning that it was not cost-effective to verify 10,000 CERs if the process alone was going to cost €2/tonne.

“Couple that with volatile carbon prices, high price expectations from project developers, global economic conditions and a lot of speculation about whether CDM will continue to exist in its current form post-2012, and many market players are becoming much more risk averse,” Kirkhead told Point Carbon.

Ecosecurities compared the current situation with the “wait and see” attitude that prevailed in the market prior to the coming into force of the Kyoto protocol in 2005.

“There is no doubt that this will impact development of greenhouse gas reducing projects,” said Kinkead. “The sooner there is greater clarity on what will exist post-2012 the better for investors and project developers alike.”

This article was published on the Point Carbon website.

Who owns the Amazon?

On January 9th this year, 13 family members from the Paresi indigenous community settled down to an evening’s fishing on a dammed-up section of the Cágado stream, on the Southern fringes of the Amazon basin in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso.

Just before 10pm, two employees of the nearby Boa Sorte (“Good Luck”) ranch, including its manager, appeared on the scene. Shots rang out, and most of the Indian group fled.

The precise circumstances of the incident are still in dispute. According to the Paresi, one of the employees shouted “You fish thieves!” before opening fire on the unarmed family. The ranch manager claims he came under attack after approaching suspected poachers on the private reservoir, and fired in self-defense.

About the end result, however, there is no dispute. When the family returned to the scene, they found the 42-year-old outspoken Paresi leader Valmireide Zoromará dead, apparently shot in the back. Her husband, Valdenir, not an indigenous person, was seriously injured with a bullet in his head. The two ranch-hands are now in prison being investigated for murder.

Apart from being 2009’s first recorded incident of a fatal confrontation involving Brazil’s indigenous people, the episode was unfortunately nothing out of the ordinary in this violent region – at least 53 Indians were killed in 2008, according to the indigenous rights organization Cimi -- and it has had only limited coverage in the national press.

It had a familiar ring in another important respect. In common with just about every case of rural shootings in the Amazon, including those with international repercussions such as the assassinations of rubber-tappers’ leader Chico Mendes in 1988 and Sister Dorothy Stang in 2005, its root cause is alleged to be the chronic problem at the heart of the Amazon’s woes: uncertainty over land rights and ownership.

In the case of the January 9th killing, Valmireide Zoromará had fought for years for the the Paresi to be given legal rights to their traditional lands, challenging the ownership claims of local ranchers. She had recently fled her home village because of death threats.

As with everything else involving the Amazon, the dimensions of the land problem are staggering. According to a report published last year by the Amazon Institute for People and the Environment (Imazon), an area the size of Alaska (1.5 million square kilometers) is under uncertain ownership: in other words, subject to some kind of private land claim that has yet to be endorsed or verified by the federal authorities.

A further one million square kilometers, although allegedly public, is subject to widespread illegal occupation, the report concluded.

As well as fuelling conflict, the chaotic land situation is widely seen as being one of the driving forces behind deforestation, and a major barrier to sustainable development of the Amazon region. No wonder, then, that a seemingly-obscure administrative battle over the bureaucratic machinery of issuing land titles has taken on a vital importance in the battle to save the world’s largest tropical forest.

According to Roberto Smeraldi, director of the Amazon Programme for Amigos da Terra (Friends of the Earth), the origins of the current chaos can be traced back to 1854 when Brazil introduced the land legislation still in force today. No mechanism was established then to bring public land – and that included virtually the entire Amazon – into the property of the federal union or national state. That created a situation somewhat akin to the “commons” of 16th and 17th century England that were appropriated through acts of enclosure by the great aristocratic estates.

“We have a kind of ‘nobody’s land’ that can be occupied and appropriated,” says Smeraldi. “Eventually the government or justice system will recognize your fait accompli and you will tend to become an owner. So speculation on land often becomes the main reason for expanding the frontier of colonization.”

In practice, the existing pattern of occupation in the Amazon arose from the policies of Brazil’s military government in the 1970s. In the name of national security, a network of highways was planned to bring some semblance of state presence into the vast “empty” green expanse, portrayed by the generals as a threat to Brazil’s sovereignty over its Northern territories and their resources.

In a policy known as “land without people for people without land”, incentives were given to poor farmers from Southern Brazil to move to the Amazon, especially in the area adjoining the eastern portion of the Trans-Amazonian Highway, the vast 5,300km project to link the Peruvian border to the West with Brazil’s Atlantic coastline.

So began a massive land-grab that has been analyzed in a new study by Imazon, carried out in conjunction with the World Bank, which has yet to be published but whose main findings were presented to a seminar in Brasilia last November, on the Amazon land situation and its potential solutions.

Two distinct types of settlers are identified in the study. The first, known as posseiros, which literally means occupiers in Portuguese, are those who lay claim to an area and obtain an official certificate showing that they have applied for title over the land. These applications have often remained pending for decades, and in the meantime the certificates are treated in practice as proof of ownership.

According to the co-author of the Imazon study, Brenda Brito, this type of land claim has had strong links with the process of deforestation. In the first place, it makes it cheaper to deforest new areas to expand agriculture and cattle ranching than to invest in improving productivity on already-cleared land. This is because the posseiros will normally never have paid anything to the government to occupy the land, other than a negligible rural land tax which is often paid to help give legitimacy to the claim.

Also, says Brito, deforestation has been seen as a means of improving the chances of gaining title over the land.

“By deforesting an area, the posseiro is sending a clear message that someone is already taking care of the land,” she says. “Unfortunately, during the 1980s this connection between deforestation and land occupation was even required by the land agency to issue land titles. In fact, to legalize a public land occupation, the posseiro had to ‘exploit’ the area, which was interpreted as deforesting it.

“Therefore, if the posseiros had deforested only a small part of the total area occupied, chances were that they would never get a land title.”

The second type of land claimant is known in Brazil as the grileiro,, a holder of fraudulently-obtained land titles, often issued by corrupt public notaries. The practice is so widespread that it has given rise to a well-understood word in the Brazilian-Portuguese dictionary, grilagem, referring specifically to this type of fraud.

Every so often, the workings of the system of grilagem are brought into public view. On January 13th this year, in an operation code-named “Wild West”, federal police and prosecutors swooped on a group of twelve people alleged to be collaborating to corruptly appropriate public land in the West of Pará state. They included officials from the federal land agency, lawyers, loggers and soy producers.

The combined impact of these types of land occupation – speculative with a view to obtaining title and downright fraudulent – has given rise to what Imazon describes as a “mosaic of conflict” in large parts of the Amazon. This refers to the patchwork of overlapping and often competing claims on the land arising from the legal ambiguities surrounding settlement in recent decades.

A common example of this is where ranchers assert ownership of forest land which has been occupied for generations by traditional groups such as fishing communities, rubber-tappers or subsistence farmers. Without the political influence to challenge the claims, these people find themselves being evicted from their homes and the victims of violence if they stand up to the powerful interests opposing them. It was just such a conflict that led to the assassination of rural union leader Chico Mendes 20 years ago at the hands of local ranchers in the state of Acre, making him Brazil’s foremost environmental martyr.

Overlapping claims have also arisen in areas where indigenous people assert traditional rights over ancestral lands. The process of recognizing those rights under law will normally take many years, and in the meantime if settlers have started to establish their own claims through productive activity, conflicts occur when the Indian lands are approved – the long-running saga of the Raposa Serra do Sol reserve in Roraima, extensively covered in these pages, is a classic case in point.

A final complication in the mosaic is that proposals for new protected areas (national parks etc) in the Amazon will often incorporate land subject to pending claims for title – and the question then arises as to whether the claimants should be compensated for abandoning their “property”. Different courts have reached different conclusions on this question.

With such enormous problems arising from the history of Amazon settlement, it is not surprising that the co-ordinator of the Lula government’s Sustainable Amazon Plan, the minster for Strategic Affairs Roberto Mangabeira Unger, has identified “land chaos” as the foremost problem to be solved if the region is to have a better future.

The efforts to tackle this problem have focused on clearing the massive backlog of claims for land title that have literally stacked up in regional offices of the agency responsible for assessing them, the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Incra). It is reckoned that some 300,000 claims are pending, and a recent government report leaked to the Brazilian press estimated that at the current rate of progress, it would take nearly 1,400 years to get through them.

According to Brenda Brito of Imazon, a key reason for this bottleneck is the dual role indicated by the agency’s name. As well as being responsible for issuing land titles, Incra is tasked with realizing the policy of land re-distribution to help reverse the chronic inequality of ownership in Brazilian society. In practice, this means establishing settlements for landless rural people on portions of large estates deemed “unproductive”, or on public land.

“Part of the difficulty in solving this backlog happens because Incra started to prioritize land reform rather than land titling as of 1985,” says Brito. “However at the same time, Incra never stopped receiving new requests for the latter. As a consequence, both old and new requests were pending decisions, as Incra was concentrating all its efforts in the creation of land settlements.”

Some have also pointed to a direct conflict of interest in this dual role, since the land reform settlements themselves are part of the mosaic of land use in the Amazon. This was brought into sharp relief last September, when the environment ministry’s policy to “name and shame” Brazil’s top 100 deforesters put Incra top of the list, because of the high rate of forest clearances in the areas surrounding the official settlements.

Doubts over Incra’s competence to deal with the problem led to a turf war between Mangabeira Unger’s department and the Agrarian Reform Ministry as to which bureaucrats should be given control of the process. After a meeting with President Lula at the end of January, Unger's proposal for a separate land titling agency was abandoned, but on February 12th, the government published legislation greatly streamlining the granting of title to occupiers of smaller estates in the Amazon.

Under the measure, to be presented shortly to Congress, permanent title for claims up to 1,500 hectares (3,700 acres), the vast majority, will be granted within two to four months, subject to certain conditions. The land must have been occupied lawfully and peacefully before December 2004, be under active cultivation, and the occupier cannot be a public servant or beneficiary of the land reform program.

Depending on the size of the property, claimants will be offered the land for free, or at reduced or market prices, and will be prevented from selling it within ten years. They will also be required to meet the current rule – widely flouted – that all properties in the Amazon should have at least 80 per cent of their area left as native vegetation.

Ahead of the publication of the measure, Minister Mangabeira Unger said, "The fog of confusion will be lifted. My aspiration is that we can regularize 80% of the land claims within three years.

“The big grileiros will be exposed to the full light of day, and these lands will be more susceptible to be re-taken by the federal government.”

Roberto Smeraldi of Amigos da Terra is much more pessimistic about the likely outcome of the proposed changes. He says the “regularization” of land claims is being proposed without the essential safeguard of making it clear that no new public lands will be put onto the market.

“I would say that this type of proposal will heat up land occupation in the Amazon. It will exacerbate conflicts and stimulate people to go out into marginal lands further from road access, in areas where you usually have more forest resources.

“The message that goes out is if you occupy land for long enough, it will pay some day.”

A version of this article was published by www.ecoamericas.com

No mincing words from Minc

The war of words (see last post) between the old and new regimes at Brazil's environment ministry (MMA) is turning ugly.

Having been accused by the former top official at the ministry, João Paulo Capobianco, of running an "excessively personalist" administration since he took over from Marina Silva in May last year, the present minister Carlos Minc got personal in return.

Speaking to the Estado de São Paulo where the original interview appeared,  Minc pointed out that even though Capobianco started out in the pressure group SOS Mata Atlântica, which fights to protect the what is left of Brazil's devastated Atlantic Forest, he had failed to give effect to new legislation criminalising destruction of the ecosystem - since rectified with a presidential decree late last year.

"He did not have dialogue either internally or externally, he didn't talk to Congress, nor to the productive sector," Minc said of Capobianco.

Minc also hit back at Capobianco's claim that the minister had failed to acknowledge a humiliating defeat for the environment with the agreement on a staged phase-in of low-sulphur diesel in Brazil. "Capobianco stayed five and a half years in the ministry and didn't manage to do anything to improve diesel," he said. "In seven months I got the deal. Now in the state capitals, buses and trucks are running on S-50 (50 parts per million of sulphur, as opposed to the current standard diesel content of 500ppm). And in 2012 we´ll lower the content to 10 parts per million. We're winning in stages."

As for the wider argument over the style of government and pushing the environmental agenda, Minc gave as good as he got from Capobianco.

"I'm doing exactly the opposite from Capobianco, who never discussed things with anyone. His intransigence ended up isolating minister Marina Silva. My administration works on dialogue. Inside the ministry, with the executive, with other areas of government and with the Congress."

Minc also criticised Minc's handling of the controversial breakup in 2007 of Brazil's federal environment agency Ibama, in which the old institution kept only its functions to enforce environmental legislation, while its former role of managing protected areas was given to a new body, the Instituto Chico Mendes - named after Brazil's foremost environmental martyr shot 20 years ago last month by ranchers in the Amazonian state of Acre.

At the time, the breakup was widely seen as a punishment by the government for delays in issuing environmental licenses, principally for big hydroelectric dams in the Amazon. Whatever administrative justification the new structure may have had (and there was a strong argument for reforming the previous cumbersome and under-resourced bureaucracy), the perception was of environmental defenders being emasculated in the government system, and a period of chaos followed the decision.

According to Minc, Capobianco "ended up creating a war between between Ibama and the Instituto Chico Mendes which we are only now sorting out. This war led to a five-month strike by Ibama."

The impression of a smooth transition following last year's resignation by Marina Silva - who has so far remained aloof from this squabble - is starting to look a little strained.

Copyright Tim Hirsch 2009. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

Outside the tent ...

The man who until May last year was Brazil's most senior environmental official has accused President Lula of lacking strategic vision on the environment.

João Paulo Capobianco left his post as executive secretary at the Ministry of the Environment (MMA) at the same time as the resignation of the charismatic environment minister Marina Silva, the former rubber-tapper's leader who had been appointed to the post by Lula when he first took office in 2002.

Capobianco, now visiting professor at Columbia University, used an interview with the leading newspaper Estado de São Paulo to criticise not just the president, but also the current environment minister Carlos Minc, accusing him of being "excessively personalist" in his administration.

As the official responsible for co-ordinating Brazil's environmental policy for six years, Capobianco was frank about its failures, especially on the question of deforestation in the Amazon. "I think we really failed to construct a more productive relationship with the economic sector - agriculture, trade, infrastructure, energy, etc," he told Estado.

"The environmental agenda cannot be the monopoly of one or other ministry - it needs to part of a vision of the State, and this vision does not exist. Is Lula sensitive to the environmental issue? Sure he is. But he does not have a strategic vision on the subject, he does not even consider it a strategic question."

Such comments are perhaps not surprising from a man who lived through constant battles with other government ministries over questions such as the licensing of hydro-electric dams, legalisation of genetically-modified soya and the special pleading of the powerful rural lobby in the Brazilian Congress. He is, after all, now "outside the tent" and free to voice the frustrations which, frankly, are felt in just about every environment ministry on the planet.

What is more unusual about the Brazilian system is that even those still inside the tent can at times be refreshingly frank about the internal struggles they face. This was Carlos Minc himself, speaking just before Christmas at a seminar on deforestation figures and quoted by the government news service Radiobras: "One ministry goes and opens up a road, another goes and builds a hydro-electric dam, and another expands the agricultural frontier. Then deforestation goes up and I'm the one who has to explain it."

Minc's undoubted dynamism and his willingness to fight the corner for the environment do not bring him much praise from Capobianco, however. In the Estado interview, he describes Minc as a friend with unquestioned commitment to the environmental agenda, but adds, "He is conducting an excessively and dangerously personalist administration. He wants in every way and at all times to give the impression that he's being a good minister and leading a good administration. This is really bad, because in truth the environmental issue is a complex one which inescapably involves conflicts."

Capobianco cites as an example the recent government decision to allow the state-run fuel supplier Petrobras a six-year phase-in period to introduce low-sulphur diesel. Minc's ministry portrayed the deal as a victory, but according to Capobianco, "It was a huge defeat for the construction of a responsible socio-environmental agenda for the country. Perhaps the biggest defeat of recent years, because it involves an environmental issue directly linked with public health and with well-recognised negative impacts."

Capobianco also criticises what he describes as Minc's "ecopragmatism" on the question of environmental licensing, mentioned in an earlier post - summarized by his phrase "dois pra lá, dois pra cá", two steps forward, two steps back. The former official says, "It doesn't work like that on environmental questions, because 'two steps back' can cause damage so serious that not even 'ten steps forward' can repair. The fact that you might receive more money to protect one cave does not minimise the loss of another. You might even lose that cave, but society needs to be clear about the consequences of that decision."

Copyright Tim Hirsch 2008. All rights reserved.

Putting the brakes on biofuels

The worldwide reaction against rapid expansion of biofuels has continued, with a proposal by the United Kingdom government to slow down the rate at which the country’s transport fuel must increase its renewable content. The announcement follows the publication of an official review which concluded that uncontrolled use of biofuels could drive changes in land use that may increase overall greenhouse gas emissions, as well as push food prices still higher.

While the review praised Brazilian ethanol as amongst the most efficient types of biofuel, it included a case study warning that carbon dioxide emissions from producing the fuel could increase by more than 60% if sugarcane is planted in place of native Cerrado vegetation.

The reverse in British biofuels policy was a response to a report on the indirect effects of biofuels production, carried out by the head of the government’s independent Renewable Fuels Agency, Professor Ed Gallagher. It did not argue for a moratorium on biofuels, as some European NGOs are now demanding, but did say current targets in Britain and the European Union for increasing mandatory biofuel use should be revised. It said continued increases in biofuels content beyond 2013 should only proceed if it could be conclusively proven that the environment and food supply were not being compromised, either directly or indirectly.

The British Transport Secretary, Ruth Kelly, responded immediately to the report by announcing a consultation to change the current “Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation”, which sets the minimum biofuels content that UK fuel suppliers must meet. The proposal is that instead of increasing the biofuel level to 5% by 2010/11, this target should be delayed until 2013/14.

The review was commissioned by the British government as a reaction to growing international concern about the sustainability of rapid biofuels expansion, including the potential impact on the Amazon rainforest and other Brazilian ecosystems. Among the indirect impacts feared are the added pressure from increased Brazilian soya production, as American farmers switch from soya to corn to produce ethanol, and the displacement of cattle to the Amazon basin as former pasture lands in other parts of Brazil are occupied by sugarcane plantations.

The Gallagher review says the issues surrounding these possible indirect impacts are highly complex, and require much more research before they can be accurately assessed. However, it notes (not specifically about Brazil), that “the balance of evidence shows a significant risk that current policies will lead to net greenhouse gas emissions and loss of biodiversity through habitat destruction.

“This includes effects arising from the conversion of grassland for cropland.”

The British review acknowledges that the efficiency of different biofuels production methods varies greatly in terms of their CO2 emission savings, with the Brazilian ethanol system scoring very highly, especially because the waste bagasse from sugarcane plants is used in many mills to produce renewable electricity.

However, one of a series of case studies commissioned for the review warns that this efficiency could be severely compromised if large-scale sugarcane expansion takes place on land currently occupied by native ecosystems, especially in the Cerrado.

The Brazilian case study, carried out by consultant Giúlio Volpi, formerly of WWF, is critical of the government agricultural research body EMBRAPA for claiming that 71 million hectares of the Cerrado is still available for agricultural expansion, without providing information either on the biodiversity status of this land, or on the potential loss of carbon that would take place if it were cultivated.

The report goes on to quote an unpublished study which estimates that conversion of Cerrado soils to sugarcane involves the loss of around 10% of their carbon – assuming the native vegetation contained 25 tonnes of carbon per hectare, this would lead to the emission of 237 grammes of carbon dioxide for each cubic metre of ethanol produced, an increase of 63% on the current average situation.

The case study accepts the argument that the negative impacts of biofuels expansion can be very much reduced if production is concentrated on the large areas of degraded cattle pasture available, especially in former Cerrado regions. Among its policy recommendations are increases in productivity of cattle production, “agro-ecological zoning” to control the location of new sugarcane plantations (due to be announced this month by the Brazilian government), and stricter enforcement of anti-deforestation laws.

In the British government report, Professor Gallagher makes it clear he believes biofuels can potentially still play a significant role in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. However, his call for a slowdown, and its immediate acceptance by UK ministers, are further evidence of Europe’s growing doubts about the sustainability of what was once seen as a crucial weapon in the fight against climate change.

This article was published in Portuguese on www.oeco.com. Copyright O Eco, All Rights Reserved.

A month of Minc

A month after the sudden and dramatic resignation of Marina Silva as Brazil’s environment minister, it is still early days to assess the performance of her successor Carlos Minc, especially as he only formally took office nearly two weeks after her departure. But if anyone thought the new man would bide his time and ease himself gradually into the controversies that prompted Ms Silva’s exit, Minc has proven them dramatically wrong.

Responding to the unplanned change of environment ministers, President Lula insisted there would be no change in government policy on the environment. One month on, it does seem that the course steered by the Environment Ministry (MMA) remains roughly in the same direction. But a very different type of captain is at the helm.

Marina Silva, while adored and almost worshipped by the environmental movement, remained a somewhat aloof figure, giving few interviews to the media, and usually choosing to fight her many battles with government colleagues behind closed doors rather than in the public spotlight.

Minc has proven to be the very opposite, a down-to-earth Carioca reluctant to swap the beaches of Rio for the dry political landscapes of Brasilia – and not even waiting for his appointment to be officially confirmed before pronouncing in public on environmental licensing, deforestation and just about any other subject he could think of. And he has barely kept his mouth shut to the media ever since.

An early indication that Carlos Minc was not going to shy away from contoversy came in a very public war of words with the governor of Mato Grosso and soya magnate Blairo Maggi – Minc anticipated the publication of the figures for Amazon deforestation in April to warn the public that they would be bad, and that Mato Grosso would once again top the list of deforesting states. The response from Maggi was less than complimentary.

Minc also burst onto the scene with a string of new ideas, including that of a national “environmental force” to strengthen protection of Brazil’s forests and other ecosystems. He has since elaborated on that to propose a contingency force of firefighters and military police, both under control of the state governors, along the lines of the national security force set up after long negotiations to deal with emergencies, including last year’s upsurge of gang violence in Rio de Janeiro. In Brazil’s complex power play between the functions of state and federal authorities, Minc is walking into a potential minefield here, and he knows it.

Add to all this new, expanded targets for protected areas in the Amazon, and a stepping up of the “Arc of Fire” operation against illegal deforesters started during Marina Silva’s time in office, and Minc has left observers almost breathless trying to keep track of his latest statement or announcement.

What is still not clear, however, is how much of the frenetic activity of his opening weeks will result in solid measures to protect the environment, and what the changeover in ministers really means for the direction of government policy. For this reason, many of those in the NGO sector are understandably reluctant to commit themselves at this stage with an opinion on Minc’s performance so far.

Another reason is that the early signals about life under Minc can seem a little contradictory. For example, according to the director of environmental policy at Conservation International, Paulo Gustavo do Prado Pereira, among the positive signals to emerge from Minc’s brief tenure is his defence of the existing Forest Code, which stipulates that in the Amazon region, landowners must leave at least 80% of their property as natural vegetation – a rule which has come under strong attack from the rural lobby in Congress, generating speculation that it would soon be changed.

On the other hand, as the Instituto Socio-Ambiental (socio-environmental institute) points out, one of the first decisions Minc made in office was in effect a concession to the rural lobby in general and to Blairo Maggi in particular, despite the bad-tempered rhetoric the two men had exchanged in public. He clarified (or weakened, depending on your viewpoint) a key anti-deforestation measure to deny credit to landowners found to have infringed environmental regulations – stipulating that it applied only to areas officially considered within the Amazon forest biome, and excluding those areas in the transition zone between the Cerrado, or savanna, and the Amazon. The practical result of this measure will be to keep the lines of credit open to many farmers in Mato Grosso, whether or not they have been observing environmental laws.

Another area in which Minc’s tendencies are difficult to read is the question of environmental approval for major infrastructure projects, perhaps the biggest single issue that had got Marina Silva into trouble with government colleagues and created the frustration which led to her resignation. It was another subject on which he pronounced before he was even confirmed in the job, saying that rigor in the assessment made of the environmental impacts of a project should be combined with much less bureaucratic procedures and a speeding up of the approval process. This had been one of Minc’s priorities as state environment secretary of Rio de Janeiro, and something he has since followed up with the new directorate of the environment agency Ibama.

According to the campaigns director for SOS Mata Atlântica (Save the Atlantic Forest), Mario Mantovani, the setting of specific targets inside which environmental licences should be issued is the one negative point so far in Minc’s performance: “These are targets that can’t be met, because there are lots of bad projects out there – so he is taking a risk here,” says Mantovani.

On the other hand, according to Mantovani, Minc is a skilled negotiator and he is broadly optimistic that he will prove a good minister – but will face the same pressures from inside government that caused Marina Silva’s downfall.

“ Minc has one great merit: he’s been in the media since the day he arrived, drawing attention to environmental issues. Now he has to show what he is able to do in practice,” Mantovani adds.

Paulo Gustavo Pereira of Conservation International is also generally positive about Minc’s period of office, although he says it is too soon to say whether he is optimistic or pessimistic. He argues that Marina Silva’s policies on conservation will continue under Minc, with Lula’s support, because “Brazil fears damage to its image abroad, and consequent damage to its agricultural business, especially biofuels.”

Minc himself gave perhaps the best clue to his style of operating when he said, early on, that his strategy was a kind of political choreography, “Two steps forward, two steps back” (in Portuguese, Dois pra lá, dois pra cá) – for example for every two licences issued, create two new parks.

For some, this is risky pragmatism, for others a good strategy for getting things done within the limits of what is possible. Whichever way, the new man attempting to steer Brazil’s environmental policy through some very rough waters should give us all an intresting ride.


This article was written for the website www.oeco.com

Ethanol and the Invisible Ecosystem

Anyone who has been following closely the recent arguments about the ethanol boom and the expansion of sugarcane plantations in Brazil will be familiar with this map. Drawn up by the powerful sugar producers’ union of São Paulo state (UNICA), it is regularly used in presentations by supporters of the industry to demolish the claim that this biofuel is threatening the rainforest.

Pointing to the “sensitive biomes” of the Amazon and the Pantanal (the largest inland wetland on Earth), the map shows that the concentration of sugarcane production and ethanol plants is a safe distance from both. It is a compelling visual demonstration, until you ask the question: what is all that white space in the middle of the map?

The answer, it turns out, is the Cerrado, or Brazilian woodland-savanna. One of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots as defined by Conservation International (CI), it is home to 4,400 plant species that occur nowhere else in the world, 10 threatened endemic bird species, and a range of charismatic mammals including giant anteater, giant armadillo, jaguar and maned wolf. It has also, according to CI, lost nearly 80 per cent of its original vegetation, which is why it qualifies as a hotspot (the Amazon, which has only lost some 16%, does not).

Looked at this way, the map seems somewhat less than reassuring as a guarantee of the environmental sustainability of sugarcane and its current focus of expansion in Brazil. Which is why it was a surprising choice for inclusion in a report and presentation on the industry by the Brazilian affiliate of one of the world’s best-known wildlife organisations, WWF-Brasil.

The WWF report, sponsored by the Government of the Netherlands, originally set out to analyse the expansion of the Brazilian sugarcane sector in the context of the declining subsidies for sugar production in the European Union (EU). Made inevitable because of successful challenges in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) by Brazil and others, the gradual liberalization of the sugar trade regime will allow Brazilian sugar to compete more fairly on the world market, attracting higher prices without the distorting impact of EU subsidies.

As the study developed, however, the sugar issue was overshadowed by the extraordinary boom in ethanol production, with the Brazilian sugar-alcohol industry attracting massive international interest – both positive and negative – for its unrivalled technological experience and capacity to increase production in the era of astronomical oil prices and concern about fossil fuel impacts on global warming.

In its conclusions, presented at one of a series of debates on biofuels at the University of São Paulo, the WWF report shows a curious contrast between the “headline” judgements – overwhelmingly positive – and some of the detailed analysis, which points to the need for significant strengthening of existing safeguards to prevent environmental harm and threats to food security in particular regions.

On the big picture, the co-ordinator of WWF-Brasil’s agriculture and environment policy, and principal author of the report, Luiz Fernando Laranja da Fonseca, presented an analysis which differed little from that regularly set out by the Brazilian government and by the sugar-alcohol industry itself.

Essentially, the analysis attempts to shoot down two principal “myths” about biofuels expansion in Brazil prevalent in international circles, and particularly in Europe. First, that it threatens sensitive ecosystems like the Amazon (that map appears at this point on the Powerpoint presentation), and second that it contributes to the current world food supply crisis. On the second point, the argument used is that sugarcane occupies a small proportion of agricultural land, dwarfed by crops such as maize (corn) and soya (soybeans), and that there are vast tracts of degraded cattle pasture that provide more than enough spare capacity to expand both food and biofuels production.

The WWF report argues that at this “macro” level, the negative impacts of sugarcane expansion are low, and that there are significant benefits to the climate from using one of the world’s most energy-efficient forms of biofuels production – made even more efficient by the growing use of the woody crop waste known as bagasse to generate electricity.

When it comes to potential regional impacts, however, the report paints a very different picture, especially regarding the Cerrado. It cites another report published late last year by the Institute for Society, Population and Nature (ISPN), funded by the EU. This report suggested that some of the areas currently experiencing the most rapid growth in the planting of sugarcane were also those identified by Brazil’s federal environment ministry (MMA) as priority areas for conservation of the Cerrado ecosystem.

Source: ISPN, from MMA and INPE

For example, in this map showing part of the state of Goiás to the west of the federal capital Brasilia, the purple areas of sugar cane plantations and red production plants are shown to coincide with the beige shaded areas defined by the government itself as “very high priority” areas for conservation of the Cerrado.

Even in the areas of São Paulo state where sugarcane already dominates the landscape, both the ISPN report and the current WWF study warn that further expansion of the crop could have damaging impacts on water resources and on biodiversity. For example, the region around the city of Riberão Preto – the Dallas of Brazil’s ethanol rush – some 45% of the land surface is already covered by sugarcane. Further expansion, argues WWF, should be accompanied by better strategic planning and accompanied by measures such as new protected areas to safeguard what remains of the natural resources of the area.

On the question of food security, the report also cautions that at the local level, there is a risk that small-scale agriculture, which produces the great majority of Brazil’s food supply, could give way to large-scale ethanol production, and that farmers displaced from their lands could be driven to peripheral urban areas with all the social consequences that brings.

The WWF study also acknowledges that while the direct impact on the Amazon from sugarcane production is minimal – although a small amount is grown in the region – there is a risk of indirect impacts if the displacement of cattle production and other crops in the Centre-South region by sugarcane pushes those activities to the rainforest frontier. However, it does not come to a firm conclusion on this, arguing instead that methodologies should be developed to measure these indirect impacts.

So lurking beneath the generally positive outlook on ethanol expansion given in this WWF analysis lie some pretty severe points of caution. Perhaps one of the key messages is that if the industry and its supporters really want to put a convincing case for the sustainability of this booming biofuel, the Cerrado should cease to be an invisible white gap on the map, and acknowledged as a valuable ecosystem worthy of care and attention in the planning of energy and food production in Brazil.

This article was published on www.oeco.com.br