Indigenous representatives like Raoni Metuktire, an internationally recognized Kaiapó leader, followed the Supreme Court trial on the temporary framework, inside and outside of the courtroom in Brasilia, in a case that will determine whether the land rights of the indigenous peoples of Brazil have extreme limits established by the constitution. CREDIT: Nelson Jr./SCO-STF-FotosPúblicas

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 9 2023 (IPS)

Children were thrown into the air and stabbed and cut with knives and machetes. The attackers first opened fire on the victims of the massacre before finishing them off with knives so that none of the 244 indigenous people of the village would survive. The 1904 massacre permanently marked the Xokleng people and may play a decisive role in the future of the native peoples of Brazil.

The tragedy is emblematic of the genocide suffered by indigenous people in Brazilian history. There were more numerous and recent killings, especially during the 1964-1985 military dictatorship. But the 1904 massacre is at the center of a trial in the Supreme Court that will determine the progress of the demarcation of indigenous territories in this South American country.

The trial was triggered by a move by the government of the southern state of Santa Catarina. In 2016 the state’s Institute of the Environment (IMA) lay claim to part of the demarcated land of the Xokleng people for a biological reserve.

But in 2019 the Supreme Court recognized that the case had national repercussions, setting a precedent for all demarcations of indigenous lands, because the IMA’s claim cites something that is called the “temporary framework”.

This framework states that native peoples only have the right to the lands that they physically occupied when the current constitution was promulgated on Oct. 5, 1988, creating the present system of demarcation of indigenous reserves.

The trial began in 2021, with the votes of two of the 11 Supreme Court justices, one against and the other in favor of the temporary framework. It was then suspended due to Judge Alexandre de Moraes’ request for more time to analyze the issue. It was not resumed until last month, on May 7, when Moraes issued his vote and argument, before it was suspended again on Jun. 7.

The 1904 massacre was part of his argument against the framework, as an example of the violence used to dispossess indigenous peoples of their land, which showed that it would be “unjust” to demand their physical presence on their traditional lands on any precise date. The Xokleng were “forced to leave their land in order to survive,” the judge argued.

Judge Alexandre de Moraes (C), of Brazil’s Supreme Court, is the shining star of the country’s judiciary. He issued a vote that could be decisive for the future of indigenous peoples’ lands. He also presides over the Electoral Court and is conducting investigations that could sentence former President Jair Bolsonaro to ineligibility for political office or to jail for spreading disinformation and acting against democracy. CREDIT: Alejandro Zambrana/Secom-TSE-FotosPúblicas

Violence

The Ibirama-Laklãnõ Indigenous Land, where 2,300 people live today, almost all of them from the Xokleng community along with a few Guarani and Kaingang families, was demarcated in 2003: 37,000 hectares recognized as their territory by the government of Santa Catarina in 1926, according to official documents in possession of the native residents of that land.

But in 1965 the military dictatorship limited their territory to just 14,000 hectares. In addition, 10 years later, it ordered the construction of dams in the Itajaí river basin, which crosses the region, to curb flooding in cities and landed estates downstream.

Consequently, it flooded the Xokleng lands and further reduced the area where the indigenous people live and farm, as well as cutting off their roads, aggravating their isolation. An anthropological study conducted in the 1990s recommended that the territory should be expanded to the previous 37,000 hectares, but this was called into question by the local government and by landowners who had invaded part of the land.

Public attention was drawn to the near extermination of the Xokleng people by a book by anthropologist Silvio Coelho dos Santos, “Indigenous people and whites in southern Brazil: the dramatic experience of the Xokleng” ((Indios e brancos no Sul do Brasil: a dramática experiencia dos xokleng, in Portuguese), which includes a report of the 1904 massacre in the newspaper “Novidades”.

Many similar atrocities have been committed in Brazil. But the fact that this massacre in particular was well-documented and proven undermines the temporary framework, defended by many politicians and landowners and used in their legal arguments and in their attempts to reduce conflicts over land.

But it clearly runs counter to the constitution, according to Marcio Santilli, former chair of the governmental National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples (Funai) and founder of the non-governmental Socio-Environmental Institute.

“The basic unconstitutionality is that the articles (on indigenous people) do not address the temporary framework and recognize indigenous territorial rights as ‘original’. According to the constitution, there is no indigenous person without land,” he told IPS.

Thanks to the constitution’s mandate, 496 indigenous reserves, covering 13 percent of the national territory, have been demarcated so far, without taking into account the temporary framework that is now being cited.

And another 238 reserves are in different phases of the demarcation process. Some have already been identified as indigenous lands, while others are still under study, according to the Socio-Environmental Institute, which has a large database on the subject.

In Brazil, according to the 2022 census, there are 1.65 million indigenous people, an increase of 84 percent compared to the 2010 census, although they represent only 0.8 percent of the national population. In this country there are 305 distinct indigenous peoples who speak 174 languages, according to Funai.

Moraes condemned the temporary framework, but his vote worried indigenous leaders because he proposed “full compensation” to “good faith” landowners currently occupying demarcated areas. Until now, only improvements made on property have been compensated and not the land itself, which is considered to have been usurped.

Indigenous people from the metropolitan region of São Paulo block a highway with bonfires, in protest against the temporary framework, which drastically limits the demarcation of territories of native communities. Legislators are trying to give the measure legal status, while the Supreme Court postponed a ruling on the issue for the second time, on Jun. 7. CREDIT: Rovena Rosa/Agência Brasil

Reconciliation rejected

“Moraes wants prior compensation, to pay the landowners first and then demarcate the indigenous land, which can take 10 years. They are looking for a broad compromise to satisfy those who have illegally taken over land,” protested Mauricio Terena, legal coordinator of the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (Apib).

“Why is it always our rights that have to be chipped away at? Our rights are always compromised, we’re always the ones who lose out,” he said while speaking to the indigenous people present in Brasilia to follow the Supreme Court trial.

Nearly 1,500 indigenous people from all over the country camped out in the capital and there were demonstrations against the temporary framework in dozens of cities and towns and along highways in the country, reported Dinamam Tuxá, executive coordinator of Apib.

Moraes also proposed that, in the event of practically insurmountable difficulties, such as the existence of towns in areas recognized as indigenous land, compensation should be offered – in other words, they should be given land in other areas, if accepted by the indigenous community.

“Our territories are non-negotiable,” Terena said. “Our relationship with them runs deep, it is where our ancestors fell.”

His complaint was also due to the new interruption of the trial. Another judge, André Mendonça, a former justice minister in the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), asked for more time to study the case. He has up to 90 days to issue his vote, which would reactivate the trial, but he promised to do it sooner.

“They need time. We left here without an answer,” Terena complained. The process has been dragging on for more than seven years and the temporary framework serves as a justification for invasions of land and violence against indigenous people.

In any case, “Moraes’s vote was positive” because it recognized the unconstitutionality of the temporary framework, said Megaron Txucarramãe, chief of the Kaiapó people, who live in the Eastern Amazon region.

“We will return to Brasilia when the trial resumes, we will continue the fight to secure our constitutional rights and the land for our grandchildren,” he told IPS by phone from the indigenous camp in Brasilia.

“We will return to Brasilia to hold demonstrations whenever necessary to defend our lands, the constitution and the rights of our grandchildren,” Chief Megaron Txucarramãe, a well-known leader of the Kayapó indigenous people from the Eastern Amazon region, told IPS from the indigenous camp set up near the Supreme Court. CREDIT: Courtesy of Megaron Txucarramãe

Lawmakers against indigenous people

But their battle is not limited to the judicial front. On May 30 the Chamber of Deputies urgently passed a bill that would make the temporary framework law, by a majority of 283 votes against 155. Its final approval now depends on the Senate.

“The processes are moving ahead simultaneously and influence each other,” Oscar Vilhena, director of the Law School at the private Getulio Vargas Foundation, told IPS from São Paulo. “If the Supreme Court declares the temporary framework unconstitutional, the bill loses its purpose, but that would increase the costs for the Supreme Court.”

By costs he was referring to increased political pressure from right-wing and landowner-linked legislators, known as the ruralists, who have long attacked the Supreme Court for allegedly meddling in legislative affairs.

In addition, if the proposed rule is declared unconstitutional, “the Chamber of Deputies could resume deliberations on a constitutional amendment already approved in the Senate,” Santilli warned by telephone from Brasilia.

This bill, which has languished in the lower house since 2015, when it was received from the Senate, would precisely establish the payment of compensation for land ownership, not only for improvements to property, to landowners affected by indigenous territories demarcated since the current constitution went into effect in October 1988.

The Toledo Bioenergy Center, in southern Brazil, is under construction, but its biodigesters are already operating with manure and the carcasses of disease-free dead animals from 16 pig farms. The goal is to generate one megawatt of power and for pig farmers to participate in the production of biogas without having to invest in their own plants, so their waste is biodigested and turned into fertilizer, instead of polluting rivers and the soil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
TOLEDO, Brazil , May 8 2023 (IPS)

It is the “best energy,” according to its producers, but biogas from livestock waste still lacks an organized market that would allow it to take off and realize its potential in Brazil, the world’s largest meat exporter.

“There is a lack of steady consumers,” said Cícero Bley Junior, who has been a pioneer in the promotion of biogas in the west of the southern state of Paraná, since he served as superintendent of Renewable Energies at Itaipu Binacional (2004-2016).

Itaipu, a gigantic hydroelectric plant shared by Brazil and Paraguay on the Paraná River which forms part of the border between the two countries, encourages nearby pig farmers to take advantage of manure to produce biogas, avoiding its disposal in the rivers that flow into the reservoir, whose contamination affects electricity generation in the long run.“The animal protein chain must also see itself as a generator of energy, just as the sugarcane sector defines itself as a sugar and energy industry since it began producing ethanol (a biogas) almost 50 years ago.” -- Cícero Bley

The companies that form part of the animal protein chain, in general the meat industry that purchases animals ready for slaughter and offers breeding sows and technical assistance to livestock producers, should also buy biogas and its biomethane derivative from the breeders, Bley said.

“The animal protein chain must also see itself as a generator of energy, just as the sugarcane sector defines itself as a sugar and energy industry since it began producing ethanol (a biogas) almost 50 years ago,” he told IPS.

But the companies do not do so: none of them are affiliated with the Brazilian Biogas Association (Abiogás), he lamented. The dairy industry could greatly reduce the cost of picking up milk from farms if it replaced diesel with biomethane in its trucks, he said, to illustrate.

If no such decision is taken, there will be no large investments in gas-fired engines either, which can use natural gas or biomethane, also called renewable natural gas.

In addition to the environmental benefits, such as the reduction in water pollution and the decarbonization of energy, biogas offers economic advantages by making use of manure that was previously considered waste and converting it into biofertilizer.

It also drives a new equipment industry and local development by decentralizing energy and fertilizer production.

“It’s the best energy, for sure,” said Anelio Thomazzoni, a pig farmer from Vargeão, a small municipality of 3,500 inhabitants in the west of the state of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil. His farm has a 600-kilowatt biogas power plant and a 1-megawatt solar power plant.

“The correct use of crop waste, as fertilizer after biodigestion, made it possible for me to reduce by 100 percent the purchase of potassium chloride and phosphorus,” formerly essential fertilizers, he told IPS by phone from his town.

A visitor in Toledo examines the external controls of the mixer, an essential piece of equipment in the production of biogas and whose absence or mishandling can affect the operation. The complexity of biodigestion, compared to photovoltaic solar energy, is a factor that is slowing down the expected progress of biogas in Brazil, despite its multiple benefits in energy, environmental and economic terms. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Frustrated potential

Brazil today produces only 0.5 percent of the biogas that could result from agricultural, livestock and industrial waste, urban garbage and sewage, estimated Bley, who founded the International Center for Renewable Energies-Biogás (CIBiogás) in 2013.

Brazil would have the potential to replace 70 percent of the diesel it consumes if it allocated all the biogas to the production of biomethane, according to Abiogás. In terms of electricity, it could reach almost 40 percent, but today it is limited to 353 megawatts – around 0.0018 percent of the total – according to the government’s National Electric Power Agency.

In global terms, Brazil is only ninth in biogas electricity generation, accounting for 2.1 percent of the global total, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

The sugarcane sector joined the effort five years ago in promoting biogas, with larger plants for power generation or biomethane refining in the southern state of São Paulo. New initiatives are attempting to accelerate the development of this energy market in the southern region of Brazil, which concentrates two-thirds of the national production of pork.

Residues from the production of sugar and ethanol from cane represent 48 percent of Brazil’s biogas potential, followed by the animal protein chain, which accounts for 32.2 percent, estimates Abiogás. The rest comes from agricultural waste and sewage.

This large pre-treatment tank uses pig carcasses, an abundant material that is still little employed in the production of biogas, which the Toledo Bioenergy Plant in southern Brazil will process to reach a generation capacity of one megawatt, playing a sanitary role at the same time. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Innovative initiatives

The Bioenergy Plant under construction by CIBiogás, a nonprofit technology and innovation institution in Toledo, a city of 156,000 people in western Paraná, seeks to “validate a possible business model,” explained Juliana Somer, a construction engineer who is operations manager at the Center.

Pig farmers provide the “substrate” and receive back a part of the “digestate”, as the manure converted into a better fertilizer is called, without the gases that make up the biogas, extracted in the biodigestion process. With that they fertilize their land.

To generate electricity, biogas must have at least 55 percent methane. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is another component, making up about 40 percent. Hydrogen sulfide must be removed to prevent corrosion of the equipment.

“The objectives are environmental, social, energy-related and the dissemination of technologies,” said Rafael Niclevicz, environmental engineer at CIBiogás. To that end, an area of ​​high pig farm density was chosen, with about 120,000 hogs in five square kilometers.

The manure is collected daily, 70 percent by trucks and the pig farmers themselves, and the rest by pipelines from the nearest farms. Currently, 16 pig farmers, whose herds total about 40,000 animals, supply the plant, which also collects carcasses of disease-free dead pigs.

“The model makes sense for pig farmers who do not want to invest in facilities to produce biogas on their own. It solves the problem of waste disposal and there are socio-environmental benefits for everyone,” said Somer.

This Enerdimbo truck is powered by biomethane and is used to collect manure from 40 pig producers that feeds the company’s large biodigesters in southern Brazil. Solar power is added to biogas to provide 2.5 megawatts of energy, enough to supply 5,000 medium-sized households. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The plant is a joint project between the municipal government, which ceded the land, and Itaipu Binacional, which provided funding. The goal is an installed capacity of one megawatt.

In Ouro Verde, 22 kilometers from Toledo, a similar plant, Enerdinbo, receives the “substrate” from 40 farms within a radius of 15 kilometers, where more than 100,000 pigs are raised, for a total generation capacity of two megawatts, to which are added 500 kilowatts from a solar plant.

It is enough to provide electricity to 5,000 households, estimates EDB Energía do Brasil, the company that offers businesses and residential consumers the possibility of reducing their electricity bills by 10 percent by joining the cooperative that benefits from the electricity generated by Enerdinbo.

The business of EDB, created by businesspeople in Cascavel, 60 kilometers from Ouro Verde, is to implement small renewable energy plants to distribute the benefits of distributed generation among members of the cooperative, with the investment by the consumers themselves to save on energy costs.

Enerdinbo and the Toledo Bioenergy Plant seek to expand biogas by avoiding the difficulty for pig farmers and other small farmers or ranchers to invest in the energy business.

A view of one of the three large biodigesters of Enerdimbo, a plant of the EDB Energía do Brasil company that distributes the benefits of distributed electricity generation to numerous members of the cooperative, whose power bills are thus reduced by 10 percent. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Demand from animal protein producers

“Small and medium-sized rural producers are true heroes who face various risks when deciding, in isolation, to implement a waste treatment project generated in the animal protein chain for the production of biogas on their properties,” said a manifesto from the producers and bioenergy specialists.

The document, released at the South Brazilian Biogas and Biomethane Forum on Apr. 18 in Foz do Iguaçu, in the far west of Paraná, calls for greater support from the public sector and from companies that link biogas production and the meat industry, for their “strategic value for Brazil’s energy transition.”

Only 333 animal waste biogas plants are suppliers to the national electricity grid, that is, 0.005 percent of Brazil’s 6.5 million livestock farms, the document stressed.

By Mario Osava
BOA VISTA, Brazil, Feb 6 2023 (IPS)

Roraima, the northernmost state of Brazil, on the border with Guyana and Venezuela, is undergoing an energy transition that points to the dilemmas and possible solutions for a safe and sustainable supply of electricity in the Amazon rainforest.

As the only state outside the national grid – the National Interconnected Electric System (SIN) – it is dependent on diesel and natural gas thermoelectric plants, which are expensive and polluting sources, that account for 79 percent of Roraima’s electric power.

The financial and environmental cost is exacerbated by the transportation of fossil fuels by truck from Manaus, the capital of the neighboring state of Amazonas, 780 kilometers from Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima.

But the people of Roraima pay one of the lowest prices for electricity in Brazil, thanks to a subsidy paid by consumers in the rest of the country.

These subsidies will cost about 2.3 billion dollars in 2023, benefiting three million people in this country of 214 million people, according to the National Electric Energy Agency regulator.

A fifth of the total goes to Roraima, which from 2001 to 2019 received electricity imported from Venezuela. This meant the state needed less subsidies while it enjoyed a degree of energy security, undermined in recent years by the deterioration of the supplier, the Guri hydroelectric plant, which stopped providing the state with energy two years before the end of the contract.

Fortunately, Roraima has natural gas from deposits in the Amazon, extracted in Silves, 200 kilometers from Manaus, to supply the Jaguatirica II thermoelectric power plant, inaugurated in February 2022, with a capacity of 141 megawatts, two thirds of the state’s demand.

Roraima thus reduced its dependence on diesel, which is more costly and more polluting.

But what several local initiatives are seeking is to replace fossil fuels with clean sources, such as solar, wind and biomass.

This is the path to sustainable energy security, says Ciro Campos, one of the heads of the Roraima Renewable Energy Forum, as a representative of the Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA), a pro-indigenous and environmental non-governmental organization.

The city government in Boa Vista, the state capital, home to two thirds of the population of Roraima, has made progress towards that goal. Solar panels cover the roofs of the city government building, municipal markets and a bus terminal, and form roofs over the parking lots of the municipal theater and the Secretariat of Public Services and the Environment.

In addition, a plant with 15,000 solar panels with the capacity to generate 5,000 kilowatts, the limit for so-called distributed generation in Brazil, was built on the outskirts of the city.

In total there are seven plants with a capacity to generate 6,700 kilowatts, in addition to 74 bus stops equipped with solar panels, some of which have been damaged by theft, lamented Thiago Amorim, the secretary of Public Services and the Environment.

In addition to the environmental objective, solar energy allows the municipality to save the equivalent of 960,000 dollars a year, funds that are used for social spending. Boa Vista describes itself as “the capital of early childhood” and has won national and international recognition for its programs for children.

The Renewable Energies Forum and the Roraima Indigenous Council (CIR), which promote clean sources, say the aim is to reduce the consumption of diesel, a fossil fuel transported from afar whose supply is unstable, and to avoid the construction of the Bem Querer hydroelectric plant.

The project, of which there are still no detailed studies, would dam the Branco River, Roraima’s largest water source, to form a 519-square-kilometer reservoir that would even flood part of Boa Vista. It would affect nine indigenous territories directly and others indirectly, said Edinho Macuxi, general coordinator of the CIR.

Bem Querer would have an installed capacity of 650 megawatts, three times Roraima’s total demand. It has awakened interest because it would also supply Manaus, a metropolis of 2.2 million inhabitants that lacks energy security, and could produce more electricity just as the generation of other hydroelectric plants in the Amazon region is declining.

Almost all of Roraima is in the northern hemisphere, and the rainiest season runs from April to September, when water levels run low in the rest of the Amazon region. The state’s hydroelectricity would therefore be complementary to the entire Brazilian portion of the rainforest.

That is why Bem Querer is a project inextricably connected to the construction of the transmission line between Manaus and Boa Vista, already ready to start, which would integrate Roraima with the national grid, enabling it to import or export electricity.

“We can connect, but we reject dependency, we want a safe and autonomous energy model. We will have ten years to find economically and politically viable solutions,” said Ciro Campos.

Solar panels with a capacity to generate 30 kilowatts no longer work in the Darora Community of the Macuxi people, an indigenous group from Roraima, a state in the far north of Brazil. The batteries only worked for a month before they were damaged because they could not withstand the charge. CREDIT: Boa Vista City Hall

By Mario Osava
BOA VISTA, Brazil, Jan 25 2023 (IPS)

“Our electric power is of bad quality, it ruins electrical appliances,” complained Jesus Mota, 63. “In other places it works well, not here. Just because we are indigenous,” protested his wife, Adélia Augusto da Silva, of the same age.

“The solar panels were left here, useless. We want to reactivate them, it would be really good. We need more powerful batteries, like the ones they put in the bus terminal in Boa Vista.” -- Lindomar da Silva Homero
The Darora Community of the Macuxi indigenous people illustrates the struggle for electricity by towns and isolated villages in the Amazon rainforest. Most get it from generators that run on diesel, a fuel that is polluting and expensive since it is transported from far away, by boats that travel on rivers for days.

Located 88 kilometers from the city of Boa Vista, capital of the state of Roraima, in the far north of Brazil, Darora celebrated the inauguration of its solar power plant, installed by the municipal government, in March 2017. It represented modernity in the form of a clean, stable source of energy.

A 600-meter network of poles and cables made it possible to light up the “center” of the community and to distribute electricity to its 48 families.

But “it only lasted a month, the batteries broke down,” Tuxaua (chief) Lindomar da Silva Homero, 43, a school bus driver, told IPS during a visit to the community. The village had to go back to the noisy and unreliable diesel generator, which only supplies a few hours of electricity a day.

Fortunately, about four months later, the Boa Vista electricity distribution company laid its cables to Darora, making it part of its grid.

“The solar panels were left here, useless. We want to reactivate them, it would be really good. We need more powerful batteries, like the ones they put in the bus terminal in Boa Vista,” said Homero, referring to one of the many solar plants that the city government installed in the capital.

Tuxaua (chief) Lindomar Homero of the Darora Community is calling for new adequate batteries to reactivate the solar power plant, because the electricity they receive from the national grid is too expensive for the local indigenous people. Behind him stands his predecessor, former tuxaua Jesus Mota. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Expensive energy

But indigenous people can’t afford the electricity from the distributor Roraima Energía, he said. On average, each family pays between 100 and 150 reais (20 to 30 dollars) a month, he estimated.

Besides, there are unpleasant surprises. “My November bill climbed to 649 reais” (130 dollars), without any explanation,” Homero complained. The solar energy was free.

“If you don’t pay, they cut off your power,” said Mota, who was tuxaua from 1990 to 2020.”In addition, the electricity from the grid fails a lot,” which is why the equipment is damaged.

Apart from the unreliable supply and frequent blackouts, there is not enough energy for the irrigation of agriculture, the community’s main source of income. “We can do it with diesel pumps, but it’s expensive; selling watermelons at the current price does not cover the cost,” he said.

“In 2022, it rained a lot, but there are dry summers that require irrigation for our corn, bean, squash, potato, and cassava crops. The energy we receive is not enough to operate the pump,” said Mota.

A photo of the three water tanks in the village of Darora, one of which holds water that is made potable by chemical treatment. The largest and longest building is the secondary school that serves the Macuxi indigenous community that lives in Roraima, in northern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Achilles’ heel

Batteries still apparently limit the efficiency of solar energy in isolated or autonomous off-grid systems, with which the government and various private initiatives are attempting to make the supply of electricity universal and replace diesel generators.

Homero said that some of the Darora families who live outside the “center” of the village and have solar panels also had problems with the batteries.

Besides the 48 families in the village “center” there are 18 rural families, bringing the community’s total population to 265.

A solar plant was also installed in another community made up of 22 indigenous families of the Warao people, immigrants from Venezuela, called Warao a Janoko, 30 kilometers from Boa Vista.

But of the plant’s eight batteries, two have already stopped working after only a few months of use. And electricity is only guaranteed until 8:00 p.m.

“Batteries have gotten a lot better in the last decade, but they are still the weak link in solar power,” Aurelio Souza, a consultant who specializes in this question, told IPS from the city of São Paulo. “Poor sizing and the low quality of electronic charging control equipment aggravate this situation and reduce the useful life of the batteries.”

The low quality of the electricity supplied to Darora is due to the discrimination suffered by indigenous people, according to Adélia Augusto da Silva. The water they used to drink was also dirty and caused illnesses, especially in children, until the indigenous health service began to chemically treat their drinking water. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

In Brazil’s Amazon jungle, close to a million people live without electricity, according to the Institute of Energy and the Environment, a non-governmental organization based in São Paulo. More precisely, its 2019 study identified 990,103 people in that situation.

Another three million inhabitants of the region, including the 650,000 people in Roraima, are outside the National Interconnected Electricity System. Their energy therefore depends mostly on diesel fuel transported from other regions, at a cost that affects all Brazilians.

The government decided to subsidize this fossil fuel so that the cost of electricity is not prohibitive in the Amazon region.

This subsidy is paid by other consumers, which contributes to making Brazilian electricity one of the most expensive in the world, despite the low cost of its main source, hydropower, which accounts for about 60 of the country’s electricity.

Solar energy became a viable alternative as the parts became cheaper. Initiatives to bring electricity to remote communities and reduce diesel consumption mushroomed.

But in remote plants outside the reach of the grid, good batteries are needed to store energy for the nighttime hours.

Part of the so-called “downtown” in Darora, which has lamp posts, houses, a soccer field and a shed where the community meets. A larger community center is needed, says
the leader of the Macuxi village located near Boa Vista, the capital of the northern Brazilian state of Roraima. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

A unique case

Darora is not a typical case. It is part of the municipality of Boa Vista, which has a population of 437,000 inhabitants and good resources, it is close to a paved road and is within a savannah ecosystem called “lavrado”.

It is at the southern end of the São Marcos indigenous territory, where many Macuxi indigenous people live but fewer than in Raposa Serra do Sol, Roraima’s other large native reserve. According to the Special Secretariat for Indigenous Health (Sesai), there were 33,603 Macuxi Indians living in Roraima in 2014.

The Macuxi people also live in the neighboring country of Guyana, where there are a similar number to that of Roraima. Their language is part of the Karib family.

Although there are no large forests in the surrounding area, Darora takes its name from a tree, which offers “very resistant wood that is good for building houses,” Homero explained.

The community emerged in 1944, founded by a patriarch who lived to be 93 years old and attracted other Macuxi people to the area.

The progress they have made especially stands out in the secondary school in the village “center”, which currently has 89 students and 32 employees, “all from Darora, except for three teachers from outside,” Homero said proudly.

A new, larger elementary and middle school for students in the first to ninth grades was built a few years ago about 500 meters from the community.

Water used to be a serious problem. “We drank dirty, red water, children died of diarrhea. But now we have good, treated water,” said Adélia da Silva.

“We dug three artesian wells, but the water was useless, it was salty. The solution was brought by a Sesai technician, who used a chemical substance to make the water from the lagoon drinkable,” Homero said.

The community has three elevated water tanks, two for water used for bathing and cleaning and one for drinking water. There are no more health problems caused by water, the tuxaua said.

His current concern is to find new sources of income for the community. Tourism is one alternative. “We have the Tacutu river beach 300 meters away, great fruit production, handicrafts and typical local gastronomy based on corn and cassava,” he said, listing attractions for visitors.

A riverside park in Boa Vista, which would probably disappear with the construction of the Bem Querer hydroelectric plant, 120 kilometers downstream on the Branco River. The projection is that the reservoir would flood part of the capital of the state of Roraima, in the extreme north of Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
BOA VISTA, Brazil , Dec 21 2022 (IPS)

“Roraima did not have a Caribbean character; now it does, because of its growing relations with Venezuela and Guyana,” said Haroldo Amoras, a professor of economics at the Federal University of this state in the extreme north of Brazil.

The oil that the U.S. company ExxonMobil discovered off the coast of Guyana since 2015 generates wealth that will cross borders and extend to Roraima, already linked to Venezuela by energy and migration issues, predicted the economist, the former secretary of planning in the local government from 2004 to 2014.

Roraima, Brazil’s northernmost state, which forms part of the Amazon rainforest, is unique for sharing a border with these two South American countries on the Caribbean Sea and because 19 percent of its 224,300 square kilometers of territory is covered by grasslands, in contrast to the image of the lush green Amazon jungle.

It is also the only one of Brazil’s 26 states not connected to the national power grid, SIN, which provides electricity shared by almost the entire country. This energy isolation means the power supply has been unstable and has caused uncertainty in the search for solutions in the face of sometimes clashing interests.

From 2001 to 2019 it relied on imported electricity from Venezuela, from the Guri hydroelectric plant, whose decline led to frequent blackouts until the suspension of the contract two years before it was scheduled to end.

The closure of this source of electricity forced the state to accelerate the operation of old and new diesel, natural gas and biomass thermoelectric power plants. It also helped fuel the proliferation of solar power plants and the debate on cleaner and less expensive alternatives.

Alfredo Cruz would lose the restaurant and home he inherited from his great-grandfather, who registered the property in 1912. The Bem Querer reservoir would lead to the relocation of many riverside dwellers and would even flood part of the capital of the northern Brazilian state of Roraima, Boa Vista, 120 kilometers upriver. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

In search of energy alternatives

Against this backdrop, the Roraima Renewable Energies Forum emerged, promoted by the non-governmental Socio-environmental Institute (ISA) and the Climate and Society Institute (ICS) and involving members of the business community, engineers from the Federal University of Roraima (UFRR) and individuals, indigenous leaders and other stakeholders.

The objectives range from influencing sectoral policies and stimulating renewable sources in the local market to monitoring government decisions for isolated systems, such as the one in Roraima, as well as proposing measures to reduce the costs and environmental damage of such systems.

“Not everyone (in the Forum) is opposed to the construction of the Bem Querer hydroelectric plant, but there is a consensus that there is a lack of information to evaluate its benefits for society and whether they justify the huge investment in the project,” biologist Ciro Campos, an ISA analyst and one of the Forum’s coordinators, told IPS.

Bem Querer, a power plant with the capacity to generate 650 megawatts, three times the demand of Roraima, is the solution advocated by the central government to guarantee a local power supply while providing the surplus to the rest of the country.

For this reason, the project is presented as inseparable from the transmission line between Manaus, capital of the state of Amazonas with a population of 2.2 million, and Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima, population 437,000. The line involves 721 kilometers of cables that would connect Roraima to the national grid.

Indigenous people in the northern Brazilian state of Roraima are striving to install solar plants in their villages and are studying how to take advantage of the winds in their territories, which are considered favorable for wind energy. Their aim is to prevent the construction of Bem Querer and other hydroelectric plants that would affect indigenous lands, according to Edinho Macuxi, coordinator of the Indigenous Council of Roraima. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

“In its design, Bem Querer looks towards Manaus, not Roraima,” Campos complained, ruling out a necessary link between the power plant and the transmission line. “We could connect to the SIN, but with a safe and autonomous model, not dependent on the national system” and subject to negative effects for the environment and development, he argued.

Hydroelectric damage

The plant would dam the Branco River, the state’s main water source, to form a 519-square-kilometer reservoir, according to the governmental Energy Research Company (EPE). It would even flood part of Boa Vista, some 120 kilometers upstream.

The hydropower plant would both meet the goal of covering the state’s entire demand for electricity and abolish the use of fossil fuels, diesel and natural gas, which account for 79 percent of the energy consumed in the state, according to the distribution company, Roraima Energia.

But it would have severe environmental and social impacts. “It would make the riparian forests disappear,” which are almost unique in the extensive savannah area, locally called “lavrado,” of grasses and sparse trees, said Reinaldo Imbrozio, a forestry engineer with the National Institute of Amazonian Research (Inpa).

A view of the Branco River, five kilometers above where its waters would be dammed if the controversial Bem Querer hydroelectric plant is built, which would generate enough electricity to meet the entire demand of the Brazilian state of Roraima as well as a surplus for export, but would have environmental and social impacts magnified by the flatness of the basin that requires a very large reservoir. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

In addition to the flooding of parts of Boa Vista, the flooding of the Branco and Cauamé rivers, which surround the city, will directly affect nine indigenous territories and will have an indirect impact on others, complained Edinho Macuxi, general coordinator of the Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR), which represents 465 communities of 10 native peoples.

The CIR, together with ISA and the ICS, built two solar energy projects in the villages and carried out studies on the wind potential, already recognized in the indigenous territories of northern Roraima.

“The main objective of our initiatives is to prove to the central government that we don’t need Bem Querer or other hydroelectric projects…that represent less land and more confusion, more energy and less food for us,” he stressed to IPS at CIR headquarters.

“We will have to leave, said the engineers who were here for the studies of the river,” said Alfredo Cruz, owner of a restaurant on the banks of the Branco River, about five kilometers upstream from the site chosen for the dam. At that spot visitors can swim in the dry season, when the water level in the river is low.

Economics Professor Haroldo Amoras says the state of Roraima is becoming more Caribbean, because its economy is increasingly linked to its neighboring countries to the north of Brazil, Guyana and Venezuela, which, in addition to being importers, are the route to the Caribbean for Roraima’s agricultural and agro-industrial products. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The rapids there show the slight slope of the rocky riverbed. It is a flat river, without waterfalls, which means a larger reservoir. The heavy flow would be used to generate electricity in a run-of-river power plant.

Cruz inherited his restaurant and house from his great-grandfather. The title to the land dates back to 1912, he said. But they will be left under water if the hydroelectric plant is built, even though they are now located several meters above the normal level of the river, he lamented.

Riverside dwellers, fishermen and indigenous people will suffer the effects, Imbozio told IPS. The property of large landowners and people who own mansions will also be flooded, but they have been guaranteed good compensation, he added.

What the Forum’s Campos proposes is the promotion of renewable sources, without giving up diesel and natural gas thermoelectric plants for the time being, but reducing their share in the mix in the long term, and ruling out the Bem Querer dam, which he said is too costly and harmful.

Energy issues will influence the future of Roraima, according to Professor Amoras. The most environmentally viable hydroelectric plants, such as one suggested on the Cotingo River, in the northeast of the state, with a high water fall, including a canyon, are banned because they are located in indigenous territory, he said.

The participation of civil society is important for the Brazilian state of Roraima to make progress towards sustainable energy alternatives that can reduce diesel consumption, offer energy security and avoid the impacts of hydroelectric dams, according to Ciro Campos, an analyst with the non-governmental Socio-environmental Institute. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Oil wealth, route to the Caribbean

In the neighboring countries, oil wealth opens a market for Brazilian exports and, through their ports, access to the Caribbean. The Guyanese economy will grow 48 percent this year, according to the World Bank.

Roraima’s exports have grown significantly in recent years, although they reached just a few tens of millions of dollars last year.

Guyana’s small population of 790,000, the unpaved road connecting it to Roraima and the fact that the language there is English make doing business with Guyana difficult, but relations are expanding thanks to oil money.

This will pave the way to the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), whose scale does not attract transnational corporations, but will interest Roraima companies, said Fabio Martinez, deputy secretary of planning in the Roraima state government.

Venezuela expanded its imports from Roraima, of local products or from other parts of Brazil, because U.S. embargoes restricted trade via ports and thus favored sales across the land border, he said.

“The liberalization of trade with the United States and Colombia will now affect our exports, but a recovery of the Venezuelan economy and the rise of oil can compensate for the losses,” Martinez said.

Roraima is a new agricultural frontier in Brazil and its soybean production is growing rapidly. But “we want to export products with added value, to develop agribusiness,” said Martinez.

That will require more energy, which in Roraima is subsidized, costing consumers in the rest of Brazil two billion reais (380 million dollars) a year. If the state is connected to the national grid through the transmission line from Manaus, there will be “more availability, but electricity will become more expensive in Roraima,” he warned.

Aerial view of the Municipal Theater of Boa Vista and its parking lot covered by solar panels, near the center of a city of wide avenues, empty spaces, abundant solar energy and high quality of life compared to other cities in Brazil’s Amazon region. In the background is seen the Branco River, which could be dammed 120 kilometers downstream for the construction of a hydroelectric plant that would flood part of the capital of the state of Roraima. CREDIT: Boa Vista city government

By Mario Osava
BOA VISTA, Brazil , Dec 13 2022 (IPS)

Solar energy is booming in Roraima, a state in the far north of Brazil, to the benefit of indigenous people and children in its capital, Boa Vista, and helping to provide a stable energy supply to the entire populace, who suffer frequent electricity shortages and blackouts.

The local government of Boa Vista, a city of 437,000 people, installed seven solar power plants that bring annual savings of around 960,000 dollars.

“We have used these savings to invest in health, education and social action, which is the priority of the city government because we are ‘the capital of early childhood’,” said Thiago Amorim, municipal secretary of Public Services and Environment.

Solar panels have mushroomed on the roofs of public buildings and parking lots around the city. The largest unit was built on the outskirts of Boa Vista – a 15,000-panel power plant with an installed capacity of 5,000 kilowatts.

In the city, the parking lot of the Municipal Theater, a bus terminal, a market and the mayor’s office itself stand out, covered with panels. There are also 74 bus stops with a few panels, but many were damaged when parts were stolen, Amorim told IPS in an interview in his office.

In total, the city had a solar power generation capacity of 6700 KW at the end of 2020, equivalent to the consumption of 9000 local households. It also promotes energy efficiency in the areas under municipal management.

“Eighty percent of the city is now lit up by LED bulbs, which are more efficient. The goal is to reach 100 percent in 2023,” said the municipal secretary.

The solar energy park about 10 kilometers from downtown Boa Vista has 15,000 panels with an output of 5,000 KW. It is one of the seven electricity generation units built by the city government to save some 960,000 dollars a year in energy and thus increase the social spending that makes Boa Vista “the capital of early childhood”. The plant is located on the plains of northeastern Roraima, an extensive savannah of 42,706 square kilometers, which stands in contrast with the image of the Amazon jungle. CREDIT: Boa Vista city government

The mayor’s office, during the administration of Teresa Surita (2013-2020), was a pioneer in the installation of solar power plants and also in comprehensive care for children from pregnancy to adolescence, for youngsters in the public educational system.

The city’s Welcoming Family program provides coordinated health, education, social assistance and communication services for mothers and children, from pregnancy through the first six years of the children’s lives. The day-care centers are called Mother Houses.

In recent years, students in the local municipal elementary schools have performed above the national average, coming in fifth place in student testing among Brazil’s 27 state capitals.

This was an especially outstanding achievement because the influx of Venezuelan migrants more than doubled the number of students in Boa Vista schools in the last decade.

Despite this, the quality of teaching was not affected, according to the indicators of the Education Ministry’s Basic Education Evaluation System.

A “little Amazon jungle” in the center of the city of Boa Vista with giant animal sculptures is the main children’s park of the three dozen in the city, with animal playground toys and structures. The playgrounds in the capital of Roraima, a state in the extreme north of Brazil, aim to educate children about the Amazon rainforest. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The results of the local early childhood policy have been recognized by several national and international specialized entities, including the United Nations Children’s Fund, which awarded it the Unicef Seal of Approval in 2016 and 2020.

More visible than the solar panels are the 30 playgrounds of varying sizes scattered around the city, in some cases featuring large playground equipment and structures in the shape of national wild animals, such as crocodiles and jaguars. They are called “selvinhas” (little jungles).

The use of solar power has spread to other sectors of life in Roraima, a state with only 650,000 inhabitants, despite its large area of 223,644 square kilometers, twice the size of Honduras, for example.

In May, there were 705 solar plants in homes, businesses and private companies, in addition to public buildings, in the state, with a total installed capacity of 15,955 KW (just under one percent of the region’s total).

In Roraima there are solar plants in the courthouses in four cities, in an aim to cut energy costs through a program called Lumen.

The secretary of Public Services and Environment of Boa Vista, Thiago Amorim, stands next to a map of the city which shows the areas already illuminated by energy-efficient LED bulbs. They now light up 80 percent of the city, which stands out for its solar energy generation and for programs that prioritize children, coordinating and combining educational, health and social action policies. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The Federal University of Roraima (UFRR) is also building a 908-panel plant, to be inaugurated by March 2023, with the capacity to generate 20 percent of the electricity consumed on its three campuses.

“The main objective is to save energy costs, and the goal is to expand to cover 100 percent of consumption. But it will also be useful for electrical engineering studies,” Emanuel Tishcer, UFRR’s head of infrastructure, told IPS.

The training of specialists in renewable sources, research into more efficient and cheaper panels, the comparison of technologies and innovations all become more accessible with the availability of an operating solar power plant, which serves the university’s electrical energy laboratory.

Edinho Macuxi, general coordinator of the Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR), the largest organization of native peoples in the state, said “the great objective (of solar energy) is to prove that Roraima and Brazil do not need new hydroelectric plants.”

The Bem Querer (Portuguese for “good will”) plant on the Branco River, Roraima’s main river, “will have direct impacts on nine indigenous territories” and will also affect other nearby indigenous areas if it is built, as the central government intends, he told IPS.

That is why the CIR is involved in three projects – two solar energy and a wind energy study – in territories assigned to different indigenous ethnic groups, he said.

A view of the Branco River, some five kilometers upstream of the point where the Brazilian government plans to build the Bem Querer hydroelectric power plant. Because the river has little gradient on the central plains of the northern state of Roraima, the reservoir would flood an extensive area, including part of the capital Boa Vista, which has 436,000 inhabitants. This has triggered heavy opposition to the project, by the local indigenous population as well. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The government’s hydroelectric plans, which currently prioritize Bem Querer, but include other uses of local rivers, have sparked a renewed debate on energy alternatives in Roraima, which has an installed electricity capacity of only 300 megawatts, since it has almost no industry.

From 2001 to 2019, Roraima relied on electricity from neighboring Venezuela, generated by the Guri hydroelectric plant in eastern Venezuela, the deterioration of which caused a growing shortage over the last decade, until the supply completely ran out in 2019, two years before the end of the contract.

Diesel thermoelectric plants had to be reactivated and new plants had to be built, including one using natural gas transported by truck from the Amazon jungle municipality of Silves, some 1,000 kilometers away, in order to guarantee a steady supply of electricity that the people of Roraima did not have until then.

It is costly electricity, but its subsidized price is one of the lowest in Brazil. The subsidy drives up the cost of electric power in the rest of the country. That is why there is nationwide pressure for the construction of a 715-kilometer transmission line between Manaus, capital of the state of Amazonas, also in the north, and Boa Vista.

With this transmission line, Roraima will cease to be the only Brazilian state outside the national grid, and local advocates believe it will be indispensable for a secure supply of electricity, a long-desired goal.

The three members of the board of the Roraima Renewable Energy Forum, Conceição Escobar (L), Ciro Campos and Rosilene Maia (R), which discusses with the local society the energy alternatives that would make it possible to avoid the construction of the Bem Querer hydroelectric plant and the environmental and social impacts of the reservoir. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

To discuss this and other alternatives, a group of stakeholders created the Roraima Alternative Energies Forum in September 2019, to promote dialogue between all sectors, in search of “the strategic construction of solutions to make the use of renewable energies viable in the state.”

“Our focus is energy security. The Forum is focused on photovoltaic sources and distributed generation. But it seeks a variety of renewable energies, including biomass,” said Conceição Escobar, one of the Forum’s coordinators and president of the Brazilian Association of Electrical Engineers in Roraima.

“There is an opportunity for everyone to be involved in the discussion. The construction of transmission lines and hydroelectric plants takes a long time, we have perhaps ten years to develop alternatives,” she told IPS.

“I am against Bem Querer, but the government of Roraima supports it. The Forum listens to all parties, it does not want to impose solutions. We want to study the feasibility of combined sources, with solar, biomass and wind, and encourage the use of garbage,” said biologist Rosilene Maia, who also forms part of the three-member board of the Forum.

A view of houses, a water tank, a pump and a Warao meeting center in Janoko, a community that is home to 22 families of this Venezuelan indigenous people who migrated to Brazil. Together they acquired 13.4 hectares in Cantá, a municipality in the northern border state of Roraima, and with that land they have begun a process of insertion and autonomy in the host country. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
BOA VISTA, Brazil , Dec 7 2022 (IPS)

A group of Warao families are, through their own efforts, paving the way for the integration of indigenous Venezuelans in Brazil, five years after the start of the wave of their migration to the border state of Roraima.

“It’s a model to follow,” said Gilmara Ribeiro, an anthropologist with the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), linked to the Catholic Church, which since 2017 has been helping indigenous immigrants from Venezuela, most of whom have refugee status.

Fifteen families acquired a 1340 square meter plot of land in the municipality of Cantá, population 20,000, and joined seven other families to form the Warao community of Janoko, inaugurated in May 2021. “Janoko” means house in their native language, while “Warao” means people of the water or of the canoe.

Makeshift dwellings made of wood or still under construction make up the village in which the Venezuelan indigenous people are trying to rebuild a little of the community life they had in the Orinoco delta on the Atlantic ocean, their ancestral land in the impoverished northeastern Venezuelan state of Delta Amacuro.

They are now creating a community like their old ones, in a wooded area 30 kilometers from Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima, population 436,000.

The vast majority are Waraos, but there are also a few families of the Kariña people, who come from several northern Venezuelan states. Many of them traveled the 825 kilometers that separate the Orinoco delta from the Brazilian border of Roraima, in an almost straight line to the south, partly on foot and partly in buses or by hitchhiking.

Pintolandia ceased to be one of the shelters of the Brazilian Army’s Operation Welcome and the UNHCR and since March has become an unofficial camp for 312 Venezuelan indigenous people, lacking food and services, on the outskirts of Boa Vista, capital of the state of Roraima, in the extreme north of Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Janoko is the dream that Euligio Baez and Jeremias Fuentes, “aidamos” or leaders in the Warao language, want to imitate in Pintolandia, where they were hosted by the Brazilian Army’s Operation Welcome with the support of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Precarious, unsanitary camp

Pintolandia, in a neighborhood on the west side of Boa Vista, has now become a precarious, unsanitary camp where 312 indigenous Venezuelans live. It was an official shelter in somewhat better conditions until March, when Operation Welcome decided to transfer the Venezuelan natives to another camp, Tuaranoko.

The population of the camp has continued to grow with the arrival of new migrants and it has become an irregular occupied zone, because almost half of its nearly 600 refugees refused to relocate and remain in the facility, a multi-sports stadium, where the indigenous people set up their tents and traditional woven “chinchorros” or hammocks.

“The new shelter is very far from the schools, and the children there have stopped studying. The 46 children here are still going to school. That was the first reason we refused to go,” Baez explained to IPS in a building without walls in Pintolandia, where health professionals from Doctors Without Borders provide care to the people in the camp.

In addition, Operation Welcome “does not respect our customs, does not consult us when making decisions” and does not allow anyone to enter the camp, he explained.

Euligio Baez, one of the “aidamos” or leaders, in the Warao language, of Pintolandia, on the outskirts of the Brazilian city of Boa Vista, is opposed to the relocation of members of the Venezuelan Warao people to a new shelter, because it would take the children away from their schools, without offering possibilities of economic and social insertion for indigenous immigrants and refugees in Brazilian society. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

This is the case even if they are relatives or people from the organizations that help the refugees, such as CIMI and the Indigenous Council of Roraima, an organization made up of 261 communities from 10 indigenous peoples from the state.

Roraima is the Brazilian state with the highest proportion of indigenous people, 11 percent of the total population, who occupy 46 percent of its surface area in lands reserved for their communities.

Indigenous Venezuelans complain of threats and pressure to force them to move to the new shelter. Since September, they have been suspended from receiving food, which continues to be provided in Tuaranoko.

They collect aluminum cans, cardboard and other recyclable materials, and receive occasional help from social organizations and individuals, to have an income that allows them to eat and survive, according to Baez.

Leany Torres (R) and her daughter stand in front of the house in the Warao community of Janoko, where she is one of the ”aidamos” or leaders, in Warao, on this collectively acquired land in the state of Roraima, in the extreme north of Brazil. Her husband, Francisco Flores, is now building his father-in-law’s house next to theirs. The indigenous Venezuelan Warao people live in extended families that can exceed 100 members. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

No jobs or economic inclusion

“I’ve been here for six years, and nothing has been done to offer us an alternative for a better future, to support our projects. Those in charge know that we want land, they know our ideas and the anthropologists’ assessment of the situation,” Fuentes, a 32-year-old father of three, complained to IPS.

“A piece of land is essential. We are farmers,” he added.

“We want land to build a house, to grow food and plants for our traditional medicine, to raise chickens and pigs. A piece of land is the best solution for us,” said Baez, 38, who has seven children, after an eighth child died in Boa Vista.

The criticisms voiced by both leaders are strongly directed at the UNHCR, which assumed more direct management of the reception of Venezuelans, in view of the relative withdrawal of the Brazilian Army.

Operation Welcome and the UNHCR justified the relocation due to “irreparable infrastructure problems” affecting water and hygiene in the old shelters. And they argue that there was sufficient consultation with the Venezuelan indigenous people themselves before the move.

Diolinda Tempo, one of the few Venezuelan Kariña people in this majority Warao community, settled in the Cantá municipality in northern Brazil, where she produces casabe, a crunchy, thin, circular bread made from cassava flour, which she makes with a small mill invented by her father, Diomar Tempo. His cassava is the family’s source of income. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

“Operation Welcome played a positive role in its initial assistance, offering documentation and food to Venezuelans arriving in Roraima, but it does not help people integrate in the broader community. There are almost no public policies to provide work and income alternatives” for the immigrants, said Gilmara Ribeiro in an interview with IPS at the local headquarters of the Catholic Social Pastoral.

But a good part of the responsibility falls on the municipal and state governments, “which have been totally absent” from an issue that directly affects their territories, she said.

The chaos has been overcome, but not the exclusion

Even so, the situation today is calmer and more stable than it was five or six years ago, when a wave of immigration hit Roraima, with many Venezuelans living on the streets and a rise in violence.

At that time, it was the civil society, indigenous, human rights and migrant and refugee organizations that mitigated the effects of the wave of Venezuelans fleeing hunger and alleged political persecution.

The meeting center is fitted with solar panels that provide electricity to the Janoko community of 22 Venezuelan families of Warao indigenous people. As the batteries store little energy and two of the eight are damaged, the electricity only lasts until 8 PM. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Francisco Flores, a 26-year-old Warao Indian, lived on the streets of Paracaima, a city of 20,000 people on the Venezuelan border, for the first few months after his arrival in Brazil three years ago, before being taken into a shelter.

At that time a policeman approached him, suspicious of his intentions. He then ordered him to leave using the Portuguese word “embora”, but with the local pronunciation which leaves out the first syllable. For the Warao people, “bora” is a plant that provides a fiber used in handicrafts. So Flores answered “I don’t have any bora” and the policeman attacked him with pepper spray.

It was not until his second year of living in the shelter that Flores managed to get a job in Boa Vista that has enabled him to save some money to build, on his days off, his house and that of his father-in-law in the Warao community of Janoko, where his wife, Leany Torres, 32, is an aidamo and lives with her daughter, niece, mother and father.

Janoko is home to 68 people from 22 families, 15 of whom have the right to the land, which, divided, means just 89.3 square meters for each family. There is little left over to grow cassava, fruit trees and vegetables, but the indigenous people manage to feed themselves and survive.

Their beaded handicrafts, made by Torres and her mother, or vegetable fiber baskets, a specialty of William Centeno, a 48-year-old father of three, are a source of income.

Diolimar Tempo, a 38-year-old Kariña indigenous mother of three, who was a primary school teacher in Venezuela, earns some money making “casabe”, a thin, crunchy circular cake made from cassava flour. Her father, Diomar Tempo, 58, invented the little machine that grinds the cassava to make the flour.

The mothers are pleased that their children attend the schools in the city of Cantá, where the local government provides a bus to transport the students.

They are pioneers in recovering some features of their way of life among the 8200 indigenous Venezuelans registered as immigrants in Brazil, 10 percent of whom are recognized as refugees, according to UNHCR figures.

A view of the new Caucaia landfill, near Fortaleza, capital of the state of Ceará in northeastern Brazil, which receives about 5,000 tons of garbage a day. It already produces biogas, but will do so on a larger scale in a few years. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
FORTALEZA, Brazil, Oct 7 2022 (IPS)

Garbage that has accumulated since 1991 in the two landfills in the municipality of Caucaia has become a biomethane deposit that supplies industrial and commercial companies, thermoelectric plants and homes in Ceará, a state in northeastern Brazil.

The GNR Fortaleza plant extracts biogas from 700 wells installed in the landfills and refines it to obtain what it calls renewable natural gas – which gives the company its name – as opposed to fossil natural gas.

The plant, with a total area of 73 hectares, is located between two open-air landfills that resemble small plateaus in Caucaia, a municipality about 15 kilometers from the state capital Fortaleza, whose outskirts it forms part of, and produces about 100,000 cubic meters of biogas per day.

In addition to the climate benefit of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, biomethane today costs 30 percent less than its fossil equivalent, said Thales Motta, director of GNR Fortaleza as representative of Ecometano, a Rio de Janeiro-based company specializing in the use of biomass gases.

“It is a good business” because its price is adjusted according to national inflation and is not subject to exchange rate fluctuations and international hydrocarbon prices, as is the case with fossil gas, he told IPS.

Ecometano partnered with Marquise Ambiental, a company that manages landfills locally and in other parts of Brazil, to create the GNR in Caucaia.

Another decisive collaboration came from the state-owned Ceará Gas Company (Cegás), which agreed to incorporate biomethane into its natural gas distribution network, right from the start, in 2018, when the new fuel cost 30 percent more than fossil natural gas and faced misgivings about its quality and stability of supply, Motta said.

The agreement allows for the direct injection of biomethane into the Cegás grid and a share of around 15 percent of the consumption of the distributor’s 24,000 customers.

Industry is the main consumer, accounting for 46.26 percent of the total, followed by thermal power plants and motor vehicles. Residential consumption amounts to just 0.73 percent. Cegás prioritizes large consumers.

Ecometano is a pioneer in the production of biomethane from waste. It started in 2014 with a smaller plant, with a capacity for 14,000 cubic meters per day, GNR Dos Arcos, located in São Pedro da Aldeia, a coastal city of 108,000 people 140 kilometers from Rio de Janeiro.

In Caucaia, a municipality of 370,000 people near the coast of Ceará, the new landfill, in operation since 2019, receives 5,000 tons of garbage daily from Greater Fortaleza and its 4.2 million inhabitants.

The old landfill, which opened in 1991 and is now closed, is still the main source of biogas. But production is in continuous decline, unlike the new one, which is growing with the daily influx of garbage brought in by hundreds of trucks.

GNR Fortaleza’s experience has encouraged the dissemination of similar plants in metropolitan regions and large cities, due to the profitability of the business and because reducing methane emissions is key to mitigating the climate crisis.

Methane is at least 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, the gas with the highest emissions, in terms of global warming. The 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) on climate change, held in Glasgow, Scotland in November 2021, set a goal of cutting methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030.

View of the port of Pecém, in the state of Ceará in northeastern Brazil, with its container yard and the bridge leading to the docks where the ships dock, in the background. Minerals, oil and gas, steel, cement and wind blades are some of the products imported or exported through what is the closest Brazilian port to Europe. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
FORTALEZA, Brazil , Sep 15 2022 (IPS)

Brazil could become a world leader in the production of green hydrogen, and the northeastern state of Ceará has anticipated this future role by making the port of Pecém, with its export processing zone, a hub for this energy source.

The government of Ceará has already signed 22 memorandums of understanding with companies interested in participating in the so-called “green hydrogen hub,” which promises to attract a flood of investment to the Pecém Industrial and Port Complex.

“If 30 to 50 percent of these projects are effectively implemented, it will be a success and will transform the economy of Ceará,” predicted engineer and administrator Francisco Maia Júnior, secretary of Economic Development and Labor (Sedet) in the government of this state in Brazil’s Northeast region.

The lever will be demand from “countries lacking clean energy,” especially the European Union, pressured by its climate targets and now by reduced supplies of Russian oil and gas, in reaction to Western economic sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

Ceará has special advantages because of its huge wind energy potential, both onshore and offshore, in addition to abundant solar energy.

Hydrogen is produced as a fuel through the process of electrolysis, which consumes a large amount of electricity, and in order for it to be green, the electricity generation must be clean.

The state also has Pecém, a port built in 1995 with an industrial zone and an export zone, which is the closest to Europe of all of Brazil’s Atlantic ports.

Water, the key input from which the hydrogen in oxygen is broken down, will be reused treated wastewater from the metropolitan region of Fortaleza, capital of Ceará, 55 kilometers from the port. “It is cheaper than desalinating seawater,” Maia told IPS in his office at the regional government headquarters.

Fortaleza has the first large-scale desalination plant in Brazil, which is the source of 12 percent of the water consumed in this city of 2.7 million people.

Francisco Maia Júnior, Secretary of Economic Development and Labor of the Ceará state government, sits in his office in Fortaleza, the state capital. He believes that demand from the European Union will fuel the production of green hydrogen in Pecém, an industrial and port complex in this northeastern state of Brazil, which has great clean energy potential to produce it. CREDIT: Sedet Communication

Wind and solar potential

“Ceará is extremely privileged in renewable energies,” electrical engineer Jurandir Picanço Júnior, an experienced energy consultant for the Federation of Industries of Ceará (Fiec) and former president of the state-owned Ceará Energy Company, which was later privatized and acquired by Enel, the Italian electricity consortium, told IPS.

Wind and solar generation potential in the state was double the electricity supply in 2018, according to the Wind and Solar Atlas of Ceará, prepared in 2019 by Fiec together with the governmental Ceará Development Agency and the Brazilian Micro and Small Business Support Service.

Moreover, the two sources complement each other, with wind power growing at night and dropping in the hours around midday, exactly when solar power is most productive, said Picanço at Fiec headquarters, showing superimposed graphs of the daily generation of both sources.

The Northeast is the Brazilian region where wind power plants have multiplied the most, and their supply sometimes exceeds regional consumption. The local winds “are uniform, they do not blow in gusts” that affect other areas in the world where they can be stronger, said Maia. They are also “unidirectional,” said Picanço.

“The International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) has recognized the Northeast as the most competitive region for green hydrogen,” said Picanço, forecasting Brazil’s leadership in production of the fuel by 2050. “Brazil is still hesitating in this area, but Ceará is not,” he said.

Duna Uribe is commercial director of the Industrial and Port Complex of Pecém, in northeastern Brazil. She studied in the Netherlands and negotiated the participation of the port of Rotterdam as a partner in Pecém, with 30 percent of the capital. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Having Pecém, a port through which 22 million tons a year pass, and its neighboring special economic zone (SEZ), with benefits such as tax reductions, enhances the competitiveness of Brazil’s hydrogen.

The port will have structures for storing hydrogen in the form of ammonia, which requires very low temperatures, with companies specialized in its transport and electrical installations with plugs for refrigerated containers, all factors that save investments, said Duna Uribe, commercial director of the Pecém Complex.

Link with Rotterdam

In addition, Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Europe’s largest port, has been a partner in Pecém, a state-owned company of Ceará, since 2018, with 30 percent of the shares. That brings credibility and attracts investments to the Brazilian port, Maia said.

This partnership is due in particular to Uribe, a young administrator with a master’s degree in Maritime Economics and Logistics from Erasmus University in the Netherlands, who worked at the Port of Rotterdam.

The complex currently generates about 55,000 direct and indirect jobs, 7,000 of which are in the port, where some 3,000 people work directly in port activities and in companies that operate there.

These wind blades were manufactured in the industrial zone of the Pecém Complex, in northeastern Brazil. Local production of green hydrogen will require a great deal of electricity to be generated by wind and solar plants. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Pecém was born in 1995 with an initial focus on maritime transportation and two basic projects: a private steel industry to be installed in the SEZ and a state-owned oil refinery, which did not work out.

But the complex has always had an energy vocation, with four thermoelectric power plants, two coal-fired and two natural gas-fired, as well as a wind blade factory and two cement plants.

Social effects

“The port was good because it gave jobs to many people here who used to grow beans, sugarcane, bananas, and today they no longer have land to farm,” Zefinha Bezerra de Souza, 76, who has lived in the town of Pecém since 1961, told IPS.

One of her sons is still fishing. The port did not affect fishing, which is done far out at sea, she said.

One of the first to start working at the port was Terezinha Ferreira da Silva, 54. She started working for the Andrade Gutierrez construction company in 1997, in charge of the port’s initial works, and was later hired by the Complex’s administrator, where she is in charge of receiving documents and is a telephone operator.

Zefinha Bezerra de Souza (right) recognizes the good jobs offered by the Pecém Industrial and Port Complex for the residents of the small town of Pecém. They have stopped growing beans and sugarcane because the land has become more expensive, but the fishermen continue to fish, like her son, married to Marcia da Silva, seated to her left. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

“I was earning very well, I was able to build my house” in the town of Pecém, she said. The town, a few kilometers from the port, had 2,700 inhabitants according to the official 2010 census and twice as many people living in the surrounding rural area.

The “hydrogen hub” will start to become a reality in December, when the private company Energias de Portugal, from that European country, inaugurates a pilot hydrogen plant in the SEZ.

The wealth generated by the hub will initially be concentrated in Pecém, but will then radiate throughout the Northeast, because it will require numerous wind and solar energy plants to be installed in the region’s interior, Uribe told IPS in Fortaleza.

The installation of offshore wind farms is planned, but in the future. This activity has not yet been regulated and there will be a need for power transmission lines and training of technicians, she explained.

Brazil could lead in the production of green hydrogen in a few decades, due to the possibility of generating high volumes of wind and solar energy at low cost and because it has the port of Pecém, with the best conditions for exporting to Europe, according to Jurandir Picanço, energy consultant for the Federation of Industries of Ceará, the northeastern state of the country where it is located. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Hydrogen culture

Adaptations in local education, with changes at the university, are picking up speed. Since 2018, the state-owned Federal University of Ceará has had a Technological Park (Partec).

A hotel that was built on the university campus to host fans for the 2014 World Cup has been transformed from a white elephant into a green hydrogen research center, said Fernando Nunes, director-president of Partec.

Encouraging practical research and the emergence of new technology companies is one of its tasks, which are gaining new horizons with hydrogen.

It is necessary to train technicians even in the interior, because in the future hydrogen, initially intended for export, will be disseminated in the domestic market, “with mini-plants, when the cost comes down to reasonable levels,” Nunes told IPS.

“Energy will be the redemption of the Northeast, especially Ceará, where we already generate more electricity than we consume,” he said.

The promotion of hydrogen in Ceará is being carried out in a unique way, by a Working Group made up of the state government, represented by Sedet and the Secretariat of Environment, the Federation of Industries, the Federal University and the Pecém Complex.

Thales Motta, director of GNR Fortaleza, stands in front of the biomethane plant located in northeastern Brazil, the development of which required overcoming prejudices, mistrust and misinformation to open up the market for gas generated from garbage. Now biomethane is expanding, making use of landfills and agricultural biomass. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
FORTALEZA, Brazil , Sep 5 2022 (IPS)

The increasing productivity with which humankind generates waste has gained at least one sustainable counterpart: the extraction of biogas from landfills, a growing activity in Brazil.

"There was a great deal of prejudice even among engineers, skepticism in the gas companies. We had to present analyses and quality tests that were more rigorous than the ones required for fossil fuel gas. But we broke down the barrier of discredit and opened a new market, proving that it is a safe, stable gas with predictable prices.” -- Thales Motta
Two small plateaus stand out in the landscape on the outskirts of Caucaia, one of the 19 municipalities that make up the metropolitan region of Fortaleza, capital of the state of Ceará in the Northeast of the country.

Although they look similar, one of the hills receives about 5,000 tons per day of solid waste collected in the metropolitan region of 4.2 million inhabitants. The other, the old sanitary landfill which began to operate in 1991, is already closed, but it is the one that generates more gas.

“We are pioneers in the production of biomethane from garbage,” said Thales Motta, director of Fortaleza Renewable Natural Gas (GNR), a partnership between the private companies Ecometano, of the MDC renewable energy and natural gas group, and Marquise Ambiental, of Fortaleza, which manages the Caucaia landfills.

Biomethane is the by-product of biogas refining that removes other gases, such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide.

GNR Fortaleza produces about 100,000 cubic meters per day of this gas, which is sold to the state-owned Ceará Gas Company (Cegás), which mixes it with natural gas in its pipelines.

“We supply 15 percent of the gas distributed by Cegás, which trusted the quality of our biomethane,” Motta said during IPS’s visit to the GNR plant, inaugurated in December 2017.

This labyrinth of pipes collect biogas from the landfill and refine it to produce biomethane with 95 percent purity. The renewable gas is mixed with natural gas for industrial use, in vehicles and thermoelectric plants, as well as in homes and businesses in the metropolitan region of Fortaleza, in northeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Initial difficulties

Ecometano’s pioneering activity is due to another plant, Dos Arcos, established in 2014 in São Pedro da Aldeia, a coastal city of 108,000 inhabitants, 140 kilometers from Rio de Janeiro. Its capacity is limited to 14,000 cubic meters per day.

“There was no regulation for biomethane then and the National Agency of Petroleum, Natural Gas and Biofuels denied us authorization to sell it,” said Motta, an electrical engineer. There were losses; the sales were made directly to a limited number of customers, such as supermarkets.

But the company persevered and the regulation came out in 2017, shortly before the start of GNR Fortaleza’s operations.

“There was a great deal of prejudice even among engineers, skepticism in the gas companies. We had to present analyses and quality tests that were more rigorous than the ones required for fossil fuel gas,” said the plant manager.

“But we broke down the barrier of discredit and opened a new market, proving that it is a safe, stable gas with predictable prices,” he added.

A view of the new Caucaia landfill, near Fortaleza, capital of the state of Ceará in northeastern Brazil, which receives about 5,000 tons of garbage a day. It already produces biogas, but will do so on a larger scale in a few years. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Advantageous costs

At the beginning, biomethane cost 30 percent more, but today it is 30 percent cheaper than natural gas, in view of the rise in fossil fuels, he pointed out. Its price depends on internal factors, such as inflation, and is not subject to unpredictable oil prices on the international market or exchange rate fluctuations, he stressed.

“Biomethane competes with fossil gas on an advantageous footing today. But even if oil becomes cheaper, the market is predisposed to betting on biomethane” because of environmental issues, he said.

“Cegás decided to distribute biomethane because it considers it strategic to diversify its mix with a cleaner, renewable and sustainable gas, thus contributing to reducing pollution and improving the environment,” the company’s president, Hugo de Figueiredo Junior, told IPS.

“It is also an opportunity to expand suppliers, competition and conditions to offer better prices to the end consumer,” he added.

Cegás, in which the state of Ceará is a majority shareholder, was a pioneer within Brazil in the injection of biomethane into its network, starting in May 2018.

The nearly 15 percent proportion of biomethane in the total volume constitutes “one of the highest percentages of renewable gas injected into the grid by a distributor in the world,” Figueiredo said.

That proportion may expand in the future, but biomethane faces several challenges, he added.

There is a need to disseminate existing technological solutions and facilitate access to them, expand knowledge about potential uses of green gases, and improve regulation and processes for the collection and disposal of solid waste and wastewater, he said.

The old landfill, now covered, still generates biogas that is converted to biomethane by refining, in Caucaia in northeastern Brazil. The dark lake is leachate, a highly polluting waste liquid that is treated before being discarded by sprinkling it on the soil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Expansion

In terms of production, GNR Fortaleza is now the second largest biomethane plant in Brazil. It is surpassed by Gas Verde, from Seropédica, a town near Rio de Janeiro, which has been producing 120,000 cubic meters per day since 2019.

Many interested parties visit GNR, which has become a reference point for gas generated from waste because it has developed process technologies that make it possible to integrate equipment from different national and international suppliers, “with its own codes that are open” to anyone, said Motta.

Currently, many companies that extract biogas from landfills for electricity generation are preparing to convert their plants to biomethane production, he said.

“We receive visits here from universities and groups of interested parties. We have to build an auditorium for lectures. There was no laboratory for biomethane analysis in the Northeast. Now we have one and research on this gas is mushrooming,” Motta said.

But it is necessary to take a broader view, he acknowledged. Landfills are limited. A minimum of 2,000 tons of waste per day is needed to make a biomethane plant viable, he estimated. Only large cities with at least one million inhabitants generate that much solid waste.

“We have to look for other kinds of biomass,” he said.

Hundreds of trucks travel the roads transporting garbage to the Caucaia landfill, some 20 kilometers from Fortaleza, the capital of the state of Ceará in Brazil’s Northeast region. About 5,000 tons of garbage are produced daily from the metropolitan region, which has 4.2 million inhabitants. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

This process is already underway, especially in the South and Southeast regions of Brazil, where largescale agricultural production offers a large volume of waste. Sugarcane is the main source of biomass, as it is also planted to produce ethanol, whose consumption in vehicles is on par with that of gasoline.

Livestock manure, especially from pigs, drives the production of biogas for electricity generation, and a growing proportion goes towards conversion into biomethane, especially for use in vehicles.

“Biomethane is a suitable fuel for the energy transition, has more predictable prices (than fossil fuels) and can be produced in regions far from the existing natural gas network,” which in Brazil is concentrated along the eastern coast, Figueiredo, the president of Cegás, said from the company’s headquarters in Fortaleza.

But not having a pipeline nearby can frustrate large projects, Motta said. He gave the example of a sugar agribusiness company that could produce 30,000 cubic meters of methane a day. As this is double its own consumption and the nearest big city is 90 kilometers away, the project was unfeasible.

Harnessing gas from garbage, and from biomass in general, has become an urgent necessity in the face of the climate emergency. Methane contributes more intensely to the greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide, the most prevalent greenhouse gas, which is used to gauge threats to the climate.

Brazil and other countries pledged to reduce methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030, as a crucial step towards keeping global warming to a maximum of two degrees Celsius by 2050.

GNR Fortaleza, located in Caucaia, a city of some 370,000 inhabitants 15 kilometers from Fortaleza, plays an environmental role. But in terms of employment, it generates only 32 direct jobs and an uncertain number of indirect jobs, including outsourced services, temporary consultants and suppliers of certain equipment.

Cegás serves only 24,000 gas consumers in Greater Fortaleza. According to its data, industry accounts for 46.26 percent of consumption, thermoelectric plants for 30 percent and motor vehicles for 22.71 percent. There is little left – just 0.73 percent for households and 1.22 percent for commerce.

Iêda de Oliveira is the director of Eletra, a pioneer in the production of electric and hybrid buses in Brazil. In July, the company inaugurated a new plant for the production of 1,800 of these buses per year, relying on the expansion of this market in Brazil and Latin America. CREDIT: Courtesy of Eletra

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 19 2022 (IPS)

Brazil celebrated 100,000 electric vehicles in circulation in late July, but this is a drop in the ocean compared to the 46 million combustion vehicles registered in the country and in contrast with the pace of the phasing out of oil in the world’s automotive industry.

The lag is due to several factors, but one is the progress achieved in Brazil by biofuels, especially ethanol, which in its best years, such as 2019, surpassed domestic gasoline consumption.

Much of this consumption is due to the addition of 27 percent ethanol in Brazilian gasoline, a blend that helps reduce urban air pollution. Most of it is provided by fuel made from sugarcane.

Also contributing to the success of biofuels is the “flex car” that has been produced in Brazil since 2003, with engines that consume both fuels in a mixture of any proportion. The consumer chooses gasoline or ethanol according to convenience, generally because of the price difference.

There is a consensus that ethanol makes sense to buy if it costs less than 70 percent of the price of gasoline, because in general its consumption per kilometer driven is 30 percent higher. But some nationalists always choose ethanol, as a genuinely national product.

Thus, the transition to electric vehicles will cost Brazil not only the replacement of the entire fuel production and distribution infrastructure with electricity, but also a probable drastic reduction in its sugarcane industry, which generates one million direct and indirect jobs.

In terms of gas stations alone, for example, Brazil has more than 42,000 distributed throughout its vast territory, the largest in Latin America.

The Brazilian automotive industry, which ranks ninth in the world in terms of production, does not yet produce fully electric vehicles. Its option, for now, are hybrids, which have combustion and electric engines.

In June, of the 4,073 electrified vehicles that joined the national fleet, 73 percent were hybrids – ethanol (44 percent) and gasoline (four percent) – while the so-called plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) accounted for 25 percent and have batteries that are also recharged at specific points.

In the first two cases, the two engines provide propulsion or only the electric one, powered by combustion as electricity generator.

Only two of the 13 assembly plants in Brazil produce hybrids. Fully electric cars, with only batteries charged at plugs, are all imported. They accounted for 27 percent of electrified vehicles registered in Brazil in June.

Adalberto Maluf, president of the Brazilian Electric Vehicle Association, fears that the lack of a national electric mobility policy will affect the competitiveness of the Brazilian automotive industry. He decided to resign from his corporate post to run for Congress, for the Green Party. CREDIT: Courtesy of Adalberto Maluf

Brazil’s hesitation

The industrial sector advocates a gradual transition, which would include greater development and use of biofuels and hybrid vehicles, to avoid or at least delay the end of a sector that represents 20 percent of Brazil’s industrial product.

Arguments such as pollution caused by the production and disposal of batteries undermine support for electrification to combat the climate crisis.

Greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation, a negative factor in countries that depend on fossil fuels, especially coal, do not affect electric mobility in Brazil, where renewable sources account for 85 percent of the electricity mix.

Batteries are also a barrier, as is the higher cost of electric vehicles. But technological advances are expected to make them cheaper and Brazil can benefit from domestic production, if the feasibility of a large lithium mine in the state of Minas Gerais is confirmed, as well as advantages due to the abundance of iron, nickel and niobium, other components, in the country.

Brazil’s reluctance is reflected in the lack of an “electromobility policy,” complained the president of the Brazilian Electric Vehicle Association (ABVE), Adalberto Maluf, at a Jul. 29 debate on the subject in São Paulo.

Without public incentive policies, Brazil could lose international competitiveness and get left behind by the global trend, he lamented.

Maluf, who was also director of Marketing, Sustainability and New Businesses at the Chinese company BYD in Brazil, left his corporate position on Aug. 15 to become a candidate for the lower house of Congress in the October elections for the Green Party. He promises to fight to reduce transportation pollution.

Global progress

The world produced 6.6 million new electrified cars in 2021, more than double the previous year and nearly nine percent of total motor vehicle sales, according to the International Energy Agency.

And the global trend is to go to 100 percent electric or battery-powered vehicles (BVE), rather than hybrids.

Meanwhile Brazil only incorporated 20,427 new electric vehicles during the first half of this year, out of a total of 918,000 cars, trucks, buses and commercial vans.

The automotive sector is facing a decline in production in the last two years, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its peak occurred in 2013 with 3.7 million units produced that year.

The annual total has dropped since then, and has remained below three million since 2015. This year, 2.34 million vehicles with four or more wheels are expected to be produced.

Around the world, the accelerated advance of electrification is confirmed especially in the European Union, which decided to abolish the sale of combustion cars as of 2035. Norway, which is not a member of the EU, set that goal for 2025, viable since these new vehicles reached two-thirds of sales in the country in 2021.

China is also experiencing an electromobility boom, with three million electric vehicles sold last year, or 15 percent of all motor vehicles produced in the country.

In June 2017 the Ministry of Mines and Energy received the first electric vehicle made by Itaipu, the giant hydroelectric power plant shared by Brazil and Paraguay, as an incentive for the electrification of transportation. But little has been done since then for the dissemination of electric vehicles in the country. CREDIT: Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil

Buses reduce the lag

The high price of electric cars, the low investment capacity in infrastructure, the technology gap and the small scale of the market, among other factors, prevent developing countries in the South from following the trend of rich or emerging markets such as China.

But the advance of electric buses helps mitigate that disadvantage, at least in Latin America.

Brazil has the advantage of having companies that produce and export these vehicles which play a key role in mobility in large cities, in addition to a huge market. Its bus fleet exceeds 670,000 units nationwide, which will have to be replaced, since only a few hundred are electric, which is facilitated by the fact that many cities have made electromobility the goal of public transportation.

São Paulo, for example, aims to have 2,600 electric buses in service by 2024 and to eliminate all fuel-powered passenger transport by 2030. Around 15,000 buses serve Brazil’s largest city, a metropolis of 20 million people.

Several companies presented their new public transport vehicles at the Latin American Transport Fair (LatBus), held Aug. 9-11 in São Paulo.

This is the case of Marcopolo, the largest bus body manufacturer in Brazil, which exhibited the Attivi, its first 100 percent electric model for Brazilian cities. The company has already exported more than 350 buses to Latin American countries such as Argentina and Colombia, and Asian countries such as India.

Eletra, which considers itself a “national leader in sustainable transportation technology”, also presented its e-Bus buses in different sizes – 12.5 and 15 meters – fully electric buses that can travel 250 kilometers without recharging the batteries.

The company announced the inauguration of a new industrial plant in São Bernardo do Campo – basically the capital of the Brazilian automotive industry near São Paulo – with an annual capacity to produce 1,800 electric and hybrid buses, and with 1,200 employees.

View of a bridge in severe disrepair on the BR-319 highway, in the heart of the Amazon, which the Brazilian government plans to repave along the 405-kilometer central section, out of a total of 885 kilometers, because it has deteriorated to the point that is impassable for much of the year. Those who venture along it take three times the normal amount of time to drive the entire length, with the risk of seriously damaging their vehicles. CREDIT: Tarmo Tamming/Flickr

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 9 2022 (IPS)

The mandatory initial permit granted by Brazil’s environmental authority for the repaving of the BR-319 highway, in the heart of the Amazon jungle, intensified the alarm over the possible irreversible destruction of the rainforest.

The 885-kilometer highway is the only overland route to Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas with a population of 2.25 million in south-central Brazil. The road runs to another Amazon rainforest city, Porto Velho, capital of the state of Rondônia, population 550,000."Restrictions arose that limited the public hearings to evaluate the studies as early as 2021, and so far there has been no solution to these problems. In addition, the participation of affected populations was limited due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the difficulties in attendance, especially for indigenous people." -- Carlos Durigan

The highway emerged as part of the plans of the 1964-1985 military dictatorship to integrate the Amazon rainforest with the rest of the country, through several highways crossing the then almost unpopulated jungle and the promotion of massive internal migration from other regions.

Due to heavy rains and frequent flooding many sections of the road and a number of bridges have fallen into disrepair. Twelve years after its inauguration in 1976, BR-319 was recognized as a largely impassable road, undermined by neglect.

Local interests tried to repave the road and obtained the support of the central government from the beginning of this century.

However, in 2008 and 2009, the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) rejected three environmental impact studies, whose approval is essential in Brazil for projects that affect the environment and that have a social impact.

But a fourth study, presented in June 2021 by the National Department of Transport Infrastructure, was approved and the required initial permit was granted by IBAMA, despite criticism from environmentalists.

In recent years IBAMA’s credibility has suffered due to the openly anti-environmental far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro, which weakened the environmental agency by cutting its budget and appointing officials lacking the necessary qualifications.

The Brazilian army always deploys members of its engineer brigade to repair roads in remote areas, such as the Amazon rainforest. But in the case of the BR-319 highway between Manaus and Porto Velho, millions of dollars in investments and costly maintenance services are necessary, which prevent its concession to private companies. CREDIT: Brazilian Army

Doomed project

“Restrictions arose that limited the public hearings to evaluate the studies as early as 2021, and so far there has been no solution to these problems. In addition, the participation of affected populations was limited due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the difficulties in attendance, especially for indigenous people,” said environmentalist Carlos Durigan.

The environmental impacts assessed were limited to the vicinity of the road, without considering the entire area of influence of the construction work, the director of WCS Brazil, the national affiliate of the U.S.-based Wildlife Conservation Society, told IPS by telephone from Manaus.

Moreover, no prior and informed consultation was held with the indigenous peoples and traditional communities that will be affected, a requirement under Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO), he said. This incompliance is likely to lead to lawsuits.

The initial permit was obtained under promises of greater protection, inspection and oversight of protected areas – not very credible at a time of weak public authority in environmental questions, with low budgets and reduced human resources, said Durigan, a geographer from southeastern Brazil who has lived in the Amazon rainforest for two decades.

These and other criticisms form part of the evaluation carried out by the BR-319 Observatory, a coalition of 12 social organizations involved in activities in the road’s area of influence. The 14-point review identifies irregularities in the permit granted by IBAMA and the violated rights of the affected population.

The proponents of the BR-319 highway tried to avoid the requirement of impact studies under the argument that it is only a matter of repaving an existing road, with no new impacts. But the courts recognized it as a complete reconstruction.

In fact, of the 885 kilometers, 405 kilometers will have to be repaved and bridges and animal crossings will have to be rebuilt. The remaining 480 kilometers – the two stretches near Manaus and Porto Velho – are already passable.

But the rains and floods that have occurred since last year have broken down the asphalt on many stretches near Manaus, leaving large cracks and holes. Even without repaving, many people venture to travel along the BR-319 in cars, buses and trucks. But it takes two or three days to drive, and often causes damage to vehicles.

One of the potholes in the BR-319 highway, where the asphalt laid in the 1970s has disappeared. Inaugurated in 1976, the Amazon artery became impassable a decade later and attempts to repave it have so far failed. CREDIT: Tarmo Tamming/Flickr

More deforestation

Environmentalists fear that deforestation, illegal occupation of public lands and the invasion of indigenous lands, which are already occurring along nearly 200 kilometers of the southern section, will spread along the entire highway and its surrounding areas.

This region close to Porto Velho is the area where deforestation in the Amazon has grown the most in recent years.

A usable BR-319 would spread environmental crimes, forest fires and violence generated by land disputes in the middle section of the highway, activists warn.

In fact, 80 percent of Amazon deforestation occurs along the highways that are the arteries leading to the settlement of the rainforest, along with smaller roads branching off from the highways, environmentalists say.

Such effects are already well-known along other Amazonian highways in areas that are more populated and deforested than the territory between Manaus and Porto Velho, bathed by the Madeira and Purus rivers, two of the major tributaries of the Amazon, both of which have their headwaters in Peru. The Madeira basin also extends through much of central and northern Bolivia.

A stretch of the BR-319 highway with an ironic sign pointing to the nearby town of Realidade (Reality). The 885-kilometer road that runs between the Amazonian Madeira and Purus rivers requires high maintenance costs due to frequent flooding, since most of it is located on land that floods in the rainy season. CREDIT: Alberto César Araújo/Amazonia Real

Doubtful economic feasibility

BR-319 faces another uncertainty, which is economic viability. It crosses what is at least for now a sparsely populated area, except for Manaus. The cost of repaving is not small, as the effort includes many bridges and earthworks to stabilize land that floods during the rainy season along many stretches, even though the road is located on higher ground between the Madeira and Purus rivers.

The highway also needs continuous upkeep, as is already the case in the stretch near Manaus, where the necessary repairs have not yet been completed after flooding caused by heavy rains that lasted from October 2021 until well into this year, Durigan pointed out.

Even so, the demand for the repaving of the central section of the highway is very popular, enjoying almost consensus support, the activist acknowledged. The argument in favor of the road is that Manaus is isolated by land, and depends on air or river transport to connect with the rest of Brazil and to be able to export its industrial production.

Since the 1960s, Manaus has had an industrial park and a free trade zone, supported by large subsidies that are regularly extended and will remain in force at least until 2073. These benefits shore up the electronics, motorcycle and beverage industries in the city, despite its remote location and distance from the main domestic markets.

In addition to a reduction in the city’s isolation, the population of Manaus hopes to see a drop in food prices, thanks to a workable road that would allow better access to products from Rondônia, an Amazonian state where agriculture and cattle raising have been developed.

But the beneficial effect of agriculture 900 kilometers away is doubtful. Other Amazonian cities, such as Belém, capital of the eastern Amazon jungle state of Pará, also pay dearly for their food, particularly fresh produce, because they have not developed horticulture.

New anti-Amazon wave

Along with the repaving of BR-319, Brazil’s Amazon rainforest faces other threats from infrastructure projects.

Another resurrected plan is a road through a conserved forest area on the border between Brazil and Peru. It would cross the biodiversity-rich Serra do Divisor National Park.

This plan also looks unfeasible because of its questionable economic viability and due to the severe environmental restrictions it would face.

Three railways are also planned for exports from Mato Grosso, the southeastern Amazonian state that is Brazil’s largest producer of soybeans, corn and cotton, and small and medium-sized hydroelectric plants are projected, especially in the states of Rondônia and Roraima, the latter on the border with Venezuela.

In addition to resistance from environmentalists and indigenous peoples, these projects now face a new stumbling block, or a new counter-argument: climate change, said Sergio Guimarães, coordinator of the Infrastructure Working Group, a network of 47 social organizations.

This is a variable that requires at least a review of all these projects, he told IPS by telephone from Cuiabá, capital of Mato Grosso.

Students protest in Porto Alegre, a city in southern Brazil, against budget cuts in education. Black students, generally the poorest, suffer the most from the deterioration of schools, the reduction of scholarships, the shrinking of school meal programs and the loss of opportunities to study. CREDIT: CPERS- Fotos Públicas

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 8 2022 (IPS)

The battle against racism and inequality will be a long one in Brazil, because a prejudice against the intellectual capacity of blacks is a problem rooted in the national culture, and even in the minds of Afro-Brazilians themselves, as well as highlighted in the country’s official history.

The basic idea spread is that Brazil is the creation of its Portuguese colonizers, especially with regard to everything that requires brains, lamented Luciana da Cruz Brito, professor of history at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB).

Few recognize Machado de Assis, considered the greatest Brazilian writer, and Mario de Andrade, another great writer and leader of the modernist movement of a century ago, as black.

“Most believe that the Rebouças were white, whose last name is on a Rio de Janeiro tunnel and avenues in São Paulo and Porto Alegre, which pay homage to them,” Brito told IPS by telephone from Cachoeira, a city of 33,000 inhabitants in the state of Bahia, where the UFRB’s Center for Arts, Humanities and Literature is located.

The brothers André and Antonio Rebouças were the first black engineers in Brazil, responsible for the construction of several ports, railroads and highways. The former was also prominent in the Paraguayan War or the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870, which united Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay against Paraguay) and in the movement for the abolition of slavery.

Brazil was the last Western country to put an end to slavery, by a law signed by Princess Isabel de Bourbon e Bragança, daughter of Emperor Pedro II, on May 13, 1888. The Brazilian monarchy would fall 18 months later, to a military coup that proclaimed the country a republic.

Highlighting the step taken by the princess as a decisive and even unique measure is part of the whitening of the history of Latin America’s largest and most populous country.

This official history seeks to conceal or downplay the role of abolitionists and of the black movement, which celebrates Black Consciousness Day every Nov. 20, the date of the assassination of the hero of the black struggles, Zumbi, in 1695.

Ignoring black history

White historiography, in which indigenous and black people are not counted as full subjects, is a great barrier to the struggle against racism, and to reducing Brazil’s notorious inequality, Brito said, recalling the conclusions of another black woman historian, Beatriz Nascimento, who was shot dead in Rio de Janeiro in 1995, at the age of 52.

From abolition to the first decades of the 20th century, the Brazilian elite deployed a campaign of “white supremacy, which considered blacks an obstacle to the vision of European nationhood and the mixing of races a sabotage to Europeanization,” she said.

The whitening policy included the promotion of European immigration to replace slave labor in the coffee harvest and other agricultural and industrial activities.

Black participation in the most productive agricultural sectors, in industrialization and the emergence of a national bourgeoisie, with the rise of artisans to entrepreneurs, was ignored, and this strengthened their exclusion, wrote Joel Rufino dos Santos, a historian and writer who died in 2015, in his book “El Saber del negro” (The Knowledge of Blacks).

But the whitewashing of history, with the systematic erasure of black knowledge and talent in the construction of the nation, is “a perverse and effective policy” in neutralizing anti-racism efforts and will therefore prolong the problem, said Brito.

Brazil’s history ignores blacks even though they make up 56 percent of the population. Among other forms of discrimination, it limits their participation to brute, dehumanized labor, destroys self-esteem and hinders the progress of people of African descent by spreading the belief that blacks are intellectually less capable. CREDIT: Courtesy of Luciana Brito

Epistemicide

“It destroys self-esteem and instills in the minds of black students the message that they are not capable of learning, of being creative. It’s a barrier to learning, children go to school out of obligation, not to learn,” she said.

It is “epistemicide,” said Natalia Alves, a history teacher who volunteers at Educafro (Education and Citizenship of Afrodescendants and the Destitute), a non-governmental network of educational centers that facilitate the inclusion of the poor, especially blacks, in universities, through scholarships and preparatory courses.

Epistemicide is the systematic destruction of rival forms of knowledge, or the suppression or death of forms of knowledge of peoples considered marginal by the colonial or dominant culture.

Blacks are treated as “abject objects” and the fact that the first universities were founded in Africa is ignored, as is the fact that the arrival of enslaved Africans contributed to Brazil’s agricultural development and to the gold mining boom that enriched the current state of Minas Gerais, she told IPS by e-mail from Rio de Janeiro.

The gold boom in southern Minas Gerais, which began at the end of the 17th century and peaked in the following century, owes a great deal to people from Africa. This golden period saw the birth of historic cities such as Ouro Preto, initially Vila Rica and today a tourist center whose ancient churches give a central place to sculptures of Antonio Francisco Lisboa alias Aleijadinho, a black man.

The Portuguese colonizers did not know much about mining and metallurgy, so they brought slaves with knowledge of these activities from the Gold Coast, an extensive area along the coasts of present-day Benin, Ghana, Nigeria and Togo, Laurentino Gomes wrote in the second volume of his trilogy “Slavery”.

Gomes is a journalist who became a highly successful writer of books on Brazilian history.

Brazil’s official history erases the intellectual contributions of people of African descent to the construction of the country, condemning them to precarious jobs and marginalization in Brazilian society, according to Natalia Alves, a volunteer history teacher at Educafro, a non-governmental network of centers that facilitate access to university for black and poor people. CREDIT: Courtesy of Natalia Alves

Black protagonists made invisible

There are many examples of the intellectual, technical or artistic protagonism of Afro-descendants who are largely invisible or neglected. This is the case of important black women writers, such as Carolina Maria de Jesus, who recounted her life in a favela or shantytown in the 1960s, and Conceição Evaristo, both now belatedly recognized, according to Alves.

In addition, the teaching of the history of African and indigenous cultures in primary and secondary schools, as required by a 2008 law, is not implemented as it should be, and the media “reinforce stigmas” by reporting on police massacres in the favelas, which occur frequently in Rio de Janeiro, she said. Poverty ends up becoming the culprit.

The advances achieved by Afro-descendants and the poor include university entrance quotas started by the State University of Rio de Janeiro in 2000 and made mandatory nationwide by a 2012 law.

This type of affirmative action, aimed at reducing inequalities, is effective, according to data and studies.

In the United States, where affirmative action measures began to be adopted in the 1970s, blacks have reached the presidency – Barack Obama (2009-2017) – and the position of secretary of state – Colin Powell (2001-2005) and Condoleezza Rice (2005-2009) – in addition to achieving prominence in film, music and sports.

“The civil rights movement exposed U.S. racism to the world in the 1950s and 1960s, then quotas produced that number of prominent blacks, even though they are a minority,” just 13 percent of the U.S. population, stressed Brito, who specialized in the study of slavery in Brazil and the United States.

In Brazil, Afro-descendants (including blacks and people of mixed-race) make up 56 percent of the country’s population of 214 million, according to the official census. But they are still a minority (38 percent) in the universities and have the worst indicators in poverty, unemployment and murders, totally disproportionate to their share of the population.

However, the country adopted university quotas for blacks and the poor four decades after the United States. The results should emerge in a few more decades, the professor hopes.

But “what does a black body raised to the power structure actually change, if it does not change the structure of racism, which continues to provoke violence and where recent murders of young black men sparked the massive ‘Black Lives Matter (#Blacklivesmatter)’ protests?” asked Alves.

The 50 percent quotas in public universities for high school students from public schools, where the majority are black, do not take into account the reality of areas such as the Recôncavo region of Bahia, where 80 percent of the population is black, said Professor Brito.

In addition, the budget cuts imposed on them by the current far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro have reduced scholarships and resources, mainly to the detriment of poor students, she stressed.

The confluence of the waters with the distinct colors of the pollution of each one: darker waters reflect the urban sewage of the Arrudas River, while brown reflects erosion coming from the upper Velhas River, a natural effect or product of mining visible in the city of Belo Horizonte, in southern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
BELO HORIZONTE, Brazil, Jul 27 2022 (IPS)

Torrential water in the streets and none coming out of the taps are two disasters that plague Brazil’s metropolises, especially those located along the upper stretches of rivers, such as Belo Horizonte, capital of the southeastern state of Minas Gerais.

Floods have become routine, fuelled by the hilly topography, paved-over streams and land-surface impermeabilization in this city of 2.5 million people.

In January and February, as happens every year, torrential rains flooded the roads and swept away cars, furniture, sometimes people, and flooded houses on the valley bottoms, where the streams used to flow freely but are now buried and running in culverts under streets and avenues.

The drinking water supply has remained steady overall, but in 2015 and 2021 the city was on the verge of water rationing due to droughts that began in the previous year. However, some neighborhoods have complained about dry water taps.

About 70 percent of the water consumed in Belo Horizonte comes from the Velhas River basin, whose headwaters are some 100 kilometers south of the city. The supply depends on rainfall upstream and there are no reservoirs to accumulate water.

That is why caring for the headwaters of the rivers and streams, located in the surroundings of Ouro Preto, a historical city that was at the center of Brazil’s 18th century gold rush, and of neighboring Itabirito, is vital for Belo Horizonte.

These cities are still involved in mining, although the industry there is now dominated by iron ore. They are part of the so-called Iron Quadrangle, made up of 25 municipalities that account for the production of almost half of Brazil’s iron ore.

Iron ore mining, in addition to consuming abundant water and polluting rivers, poses a threat of major environmental and human disasters. Two tailings dams collapsed in the Quadrangle, in Mariana in 2015 and in Brumadinho in 2019, killing 19 and 270 people, respectively.

In Brumadinho, the toxic mudflow reached the Paraopeba River, which supplied 15 percent of the inhabitants of Belo Horizonte. Fortunately, three reservoirs on tributaries of the Paraopeba that were not affected are the source of water for most of the metropolitan region, comprising 34 municipalities with a total combined population of six million.

Frederico Leite, Itabirito’s environmental secretary, and his deputy Julio Carvalho, a forestry engineer, in addition to negotiating environmental measures with the mining companies, have been working on cleaning up the Itabirito River, which crosses the city, and on creating a number of small catchments disseminated around the countryside aimed at reducing erosion and retaining water in the soil.

These micro-catchments are “barraginhas” or wide pits dug on gently sloping land to slow down the runoff of rainwater that causes erosion, and “caixas secas,” smaller but deeper pits dug next to roads to collect runoff that damages roadways and clogs up streams with sediment.

Sedimentation is a major problem in the Velhas River, reducing the depth of the river and the quality of its earth-colored waters.

In Ouro Preto, Ronald Guerra, a former secretary of the environment who is an activist in the basin committees, proposes the construction of a succession of small dams to retain water and revitalize forests.

In Belo Horizonte, the battle is against floodwaters and sewage that pollute the watercourses.

“The goal is to once again be able to swim, fish and play in the Onça River by 2025,” like people did 70 years ago, dreams Itamar de Paula Santos, a community leader in the Ribeiro de Abreu neighborhood, one of the most affected by the river’s floods, since it is located on its lowest stretch.

The construction of riverside linear parks and the resettling of residents in nearby areas safe from floods are among the actions that united the city government and community leaders such as Santos and, in other neighborhoods, Maria José Zeferino and Paulo de Freitas. In addition to the environmental benefits, the parks are recreational areas and allow people healthy access to the river.

Apolo Heringer, a physician and university professor, has been fighting since the 1990s to “renaturalize” the Velhas River basin. To this end, he created the Manuelzão Project, a university project inspired by a well-known local literary character.

Its strategy is to concentrate efforts on a 30-kilometer stretch of the Arrudas and Onça streams, which cross Belo Horizonte, and the Velhas River between the mouths of the two streams.

Eighty percent of the urban pollution in the basin is concentrated there and eliminating it would allow “bringing back the fish and swimming” in the 800 kilometers of its waters.

The large Citizen Action warehouse in downtown Rio de Janeiro is filled with food donated by people in solidarity for distribution to poor and hunger-stricken communities. There are 33.1 million Brazilians suffering from hunger, according to a survey by a network of researchers on the subject. CREDIT: Tânia Rêgo /Agência Brasil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 5 2022 (IPS)

A campaign against hunger, a problem that affects 15.5 percent of the Brazilian population, seeks to mobilize society once again in search of urgent solutions, inspired by a mass movement that took off in the country in 1993.

“Now it’s more difficult, hunger has spread throughout the country, in cities where there was none, it has expanded,” said Rodrigo Afonso, executive director of Citizen Action, one of the social organizations spearheading the campaign.

“Besides, society is anesthetized with so many tragedies, exhausted after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, so many losses,” he lamented in an interview with IPS."Now it's more difficult, hunger has spread throughout the country, in cities where there was none, it has expanded." -- Rodrigo Afonso

And we cannot count on the current government, which in addition to deactivating policies that had been strengthening food security, adopted negative measures, the activist added, saying that for now they are looking towards civil society and companies.

“Brazil feeds one billion people in the world, we provide food security for one-sixth of the world’s population,” President Jair Bolsonaro exaggerated in his speech at the Summit of the Americas on Jun. 10 in Los Angeles, California.

But according to Brazilian agricultural researchers, who made a simple calculation based on the country’s growing grain production, Brazil’s food exports feed 800 million people.

If Brazil accounts for 10 percent of the world’s grain production, about 270 million tons this year, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply, then it feeds 10 percent of humanity.

The country is the world’s largest producer of soybeans, coffee and sugar, as well as the largest exporter of meat.

A green sea of soy is the landscape in vast areas of Brazil, especially in the midwest and southern regions of the country. They are held up as the “success” of Brazilian agriculture, which, according to President Jair Bolsonaro, feeds one billion people around the world. But paradoxically, 33.1 million Brazilians suffer from hunger. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Food for other countries, shortages at home

But the production boasted of by political leaders and large agricultural producers is basically destined for export and livestock feed. Brazilians consume only a small portion of the corn and an even smaller portion of the soybeans the country produces – most of it is exported or used for animal feed.

At the same time, Brazil is a net importer of wheat and beans, key products in the diet of the country’s inhabitants. And the production of rice, another staple, just barely meets domestic demand.

Bolsonaro and his far-right government, closely allied with export agriculture, seek to defend a sector that faces international criticism, due to its association with deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, harassment and mistreatment of indigenous peoples and the overuse of agrochemicals.

The hunger faced by 33.1 million Brazilians – 15.5 percent of the population – as reported by the non-governmental Brazilian Network for Research on Food and Nutritional Sovereignty and Security (Penssan), further tarnishes the image of this country, a major food producer.

Penssan, headed by researchers from universities and other public institutions, but open to all interested parties, released its second National Survey on Food Insecurity in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Jun. 8.

The study based on data collected between November 2021 and April 2022 pointed to a 73 percent increase over the 19.1 million hungry people reported in the first edition, published in late 2020.

In other words, in just over a year of pandemic, the number of people suffering from severe food insecurity or frequent food deprivation increased by 14 million: from nine to 15.5 percent of the Brazilian population, today estimated at 214 million.

The crisis especially affects people in the North and Northeast (the poorest regions), blacks, families headed by women and with children under 10 years of age, and rural and local populations that also suffer from water insecurity. Inequalities have intensified.

Wearing a T-shirt reading “Hunger, the greatest violence”, Herbert de Souza, Betinho (C), is honored as a symbol of the Brazilian fight against hunger. He led a massive campaign starting in 1993 and unleashed a process that allowed Brazil to be removed from the FAO hunger map in 2014. But the country returned to the map in 2018 and hunger worsened with the pandemic and the government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro in 2021. CREDIT: Facebook

Reviving the movement against hunger

To face this new emergency situation, Citizen Action called a National Meeting against Hunger, which brought together representatives of social movements, non-governmental organizations and food security councils that operate in the Brazilian states, from Jun. 20 to 23 in Rio de Janeiro.

The meeting approved a letter addressed to the public with a proposal for ten priority measures, ranging from an increase in the national minimum wage to a fair tax reform, the resumption of agrarian reform and the demarcation of indigenous lands, interrupted under the current government, and the restoration of food security policies also abolished under the Bolsonaro administration.

These demands will serve as the basis for the new anti-hunger campaign that will be officially launched in the coming weeks, Afonso announced.

The present outlook is due to the economic crisis Brazil has been suffering since 2015 and the pandemic, aggravated as “a product of recent government decisions, which dismantled food security policies and imposed new contrary measures,” the executive director of Citizen Action told IPS.

The Bolsonaro administration has not raised the minimum wage, for example, merely adjusting it each year to keep up with the official inflation rate. The current inflation rate of 11.73 percent accumulated in the 12 months up to May reduces the purchasing power of the minimum wage month by month.

The minimum wage, set at 1,212 reais (233 dollars) a month for this year, is no longer enough to cover the cost of the basic basket of food and hygiene products for a family of four in the southern city of São Paulo, which currently costs 1,226 reais, according to the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies.

Bolsonaro replaced the Bolsa Familia program with Auxilio Brasil, a stipend of 400 reais (77 dollars) – double the previous amount – to 18 million families, in an attempt to win votes among the poor, a sector in which he is highly unpopular according to polls for the October presidential elections.

But there are “almost three million very poor families” still excluded from the program, who are going hungry, Afonso stressed.

Citizen Action is the non-governmental organization heir to the massive movement unleashed in 1993 by sociologist Herbert de Souza, known as Betinho, which awakened the public to the extent of hunger in the country and mobilized the solidarity of millions of people in municipal, factory, school, neighborhood and community committees.

The campaign, called Citizen Action against Hunger and Poverty and for Life, triggered a process that culminated in the creation of a national food security system, governmental but with broad participation by society in councils at the national, state and municipal levels.

“We still have regional and local committees in all 26 Brazilian states” seeking to collect food donations and mobilize the population to prioritize the fight against hunger, Afonso said.

Many companies support the campaign that will also try to mobilize political leaders, delivering the letter approved at the Meeting against Hunger to all presidential candidates in the October elections, announced the activist, confident in a new awakening of society to the problem, despite the current adverse circumstances.

President Jair Bolsonaro launched the sale of shares of Eletrobras, the largest company in the electricity sector in Brazil, which will be privatized through its capitalization. The State will remain as a minority partner, in a privatization process approved by Congress, conditional on the construction of gas thermoelectric power plants in the interior of the country, far from gas fields and pipelines. CREDIT: Alan Santos/PR-Public Photos

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 21 2022 (IPS)

Brazil has abundant low-cost energy, but by the time it reaches the consumer it is one of the most expensive in the world. This contradiction hinders the country’s human and economic development and the “solutions” found have actually aggravated the problem.

The rise of hydrocarbon prices on the international market, intensified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, unleashed a battle by the government to curb energy prices, as the rising costs hurt the administration’s hopes for reelection in the October elections. Lower taxes were the chosen formula.

“It is positive, it mitigates the problem, but it does not improve energy efficiency,” said Paulo Pedrosa, president of the Association of Large Industrial Energy Consumers and Free Consumers (ABRACE), whose members are responsible for the consumption of 40 percent of the electricity and 42 percent of the natural gas used in Brazil.

Now that the debate on the subject has been sparked, the opportunity should be used to bring about structural changes, aimed at “removing from energy the costs of public policies, of many extra costs that should not be in the electricity bill,” he argued.

Energy is expensive in Brazil due to numerous subsidies, charges, taxes and various contributions that drive up prices, especially the cost of electricity. They account for half of the total cost paid by the consumer, according to ABRACE.

This is what puts the cost of energy in Brazil among the two or three most expensive in the world, along with Germany and Colombia, according to the International Energy Agency, even though the country is an oil exporter and 60 percent of its electricity comes from an abundant, cheap source: water.

The Itaipu binational hydroelectric power plant, shared with Paraguay, was the last large, low-cost plant to be located close to major consumer markets. Inaugurated in 1984 on the Paraná River, on the border with Paraguay and close to Argentina, its installed capacity is 14,000 megawatts. Brazil’s hydroelectric potential since then has been limited to rivers in the Amazon rainforest, with more expensive construction costs and the need for long transmission lines to large consumers. CREDIT: Itaipu Binacional

Industry suffers the consequences

This paradox reduces the competitiveness of the national economy, especially in energy-intensive industries, and hinders growth and human development, said Pedrosa.

As a result, the deindustrialization that Brazil has been suffering for at least three decades has accelerated.

The situation “has worsened in the last 10 years, when decision-making has been captured by particular interests in the industry’s chain, politicians and local economies,” he said in a telephone interview with IPS from Brasilia.

The Court of Accounts, responsible for public expenditure oversight, identified 16 types of subsidies included in the monthly bill that electricity distributors pass on to consumers.

All consumers are charged for the cost of fossil fuels to generate electricity in remote areas of the Amazon, for the losses suffered by distribution companies due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and even for subsidies to give polluting coal-fired power plants a longer lifespan, until 2040.

“Irrigated agriculture receives the subsidy, it does not pay for part of its consumption under the pretext of producing food. But what is the point of subsidizing the production of soy, most of which is destined for export?” asked Roberto Kishinami, head of energy questions at the non-governmental Climate and Society Institute.

Navy Admiral Bento Albuquerque was removed from his post as minister of mines and energy by President Jair Bolsonaro on May 11, 2022 for failing to impose fuel price containment on state-owned Petrobras. Bolsonaro is trying to prevent the oil hike from affecting his popularity and his slim chances of reelection in October. CREDIT: Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil

Social policy

Some subsidies could be justified because of their social purpose, but it shouldn’t be energy that should be taxed, but the national budget, he argued. “An income transfer program like the Bolsa Familia would be better,” he said.

Kishinami was referring to the program that since 2004 provides a subsidy of about 80 dollars a month to poor families, which was renamed Auxilio Brasil by the administration of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.

“Lowering the price of energy is also a social policy,” said Pedrosa. “Brazil has a vocation to produce cheap and clean energy, something that the world values more and more every day, and wasting this advantage harms everyone, not only industry,” he argued.

On Jun. 14, ABRACE released a study on “The impacts of electricity and natural gas prices on growth and economic development”, commissioned from the economic consultancy Ex Ante.

If a “competitive price” for electricity were achieved, with a reduction of 23 to 34 percent for industries that vary in terms of energy consumption, Brazil could raise its annual economic growth from the expected 1.7 to 4.8 percent on average over the next 10 years, and generate 6.74 million additional jobs, according to the study.

The country could thus move up 10 positions in the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Human Development Index ranking, from 84th place in 2019 to just under Mexico, which ranked 74th.

The study is aimed at broadening and guiding the energy debate, which is in the interest of the whole country, not just the industry and politicians, Pedrosa said.

In this South American country of 214 million people, energy represents 17.1 percent of the total cost of living for families, and an even higher proportion among the poor. This includes direct spending on electricity, gas and other fuel.

It also takes into account the cost of energy embedded in the goods and services consumed by the family, or indirect energy consumption. Bread, for example, contains 27.2 percent of energy in its final price, milk and meat 33.3 percent and school notebooks 35.9 percent.

In a family’s basic food basket, the study estimated the share of energy in the total cost at 23 percent.

In other words, rising energy prices cost everyone different amounts, depending on their consumption of goods and services. This is also the case for companies. The construction industry spends 14 times more on energy included in supplies and machinery than in the plant where it operates.

The timing is opportune for the debate on energy prices and their social and economic effects, because Brazil will elect its president, state governors and national and state legislators in October.

Another reason is that the rise in oil and gas prices provoked a strong reaction from the government and pro-government parliamentary leaders. Bolsonaro has tried to blame the state-owned Petrobras oil giant for increasing its prices according to international prices, a rule adopted by the company with the endorsement of the government, its majority partner, since 2017.

The Itá Hydroelectric Power Plant, on the Uruguay River in southern Brazil, is also one of the last low-cost plants due to its proximity to the consumer market. It is a concrete face rock-fill embankment dam, a low operational cost structure, with the reservoir at the top of the mountain, which was favored by the topography. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Legislators of chaos

On Jun. 15, Congress approved a law that caps the maximum merchandise circulation tax charged by state governments on fuel, energy, mass transit and telecommunications, considered essential services, at 17 percent.

This tax varied greatly among the 26 Brazilian states and the Federal District, from 25 to 34 percent, for example, on gasoline, and from 12 to 25 percent on diesel, the most important fuel for the transportation of cargo.

The same legislators who are now seeking to curb energy prices, with the risk of generating serious fiscal problems for the states, with ineffective measures, according to analysts, passed several laws in recent years that incorporate undue costs in energy.

The privatization of Eletrobrás, the largest company in the sector in Brazil, was approved conditional upon the construction of natural gas thermoelectric power plants that would produce a total of eight gigawatts of power. The costs will be high because areas were chosen far from the natural gas fields and without gas pipelines for the plants.

Pedrosa and Kishinami believe the measures were taken with the elections in mind and do not correct the tangle of errors and expenses accumulated in Brazil’s energy system. Both are betting on Bill 414, already approved in the Senate and pending in the Chamber of Deputies, which would reform the sector.

It will be the first step in separating infrastructure from electricity sales and establishing a system of competition, with the supply of different types of energy from a variety of sources, renewable or not, Kishinami told IPS in Rio de Janeiro.

The confluence of the waters with the distinct colors of the pollution of each one: darker waters reflect the urban sewage of the Arrudas River, while brown reflects erosion coming from the upper Velhas River, a natural effect or product of mining visible in the city of Belo Horizonte, in southern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 7 2022 (IPS)

Acaba Mundo has fallen into oblivion, despite its apocalyptic name – which roughly translates as World’s End – and historical importance as an urban waterway. It is a typical victim of Brazil’s metropolises, which were turned into cemeteries of streams, with their flooded neighborhoods and filthy rivers.

The Acaba Mundo stream disappeared under the asphalt and concrete of Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais in southeast Brazil. It was the main source of water for the first inhabitants of the city founded in 1897 and the first watercourse in the city to be culverted and hidden underground.

Interventions on the riverbed began a century ago, with modifications to adjust it to the geometric layout of the streets and canalizations, and ended with it being completely covered over, except for its headwaters, in the 1970s, geographer Alessandro Borsagli, a professor and researcher who specializes in water issues, told IPS.

It became invisible, like practically all the streams that flow into the Arrudas River, the axis of the main watershed of the planned city of Belo Horizonte, whose limits were exceeded decades ago by urban sprawl and which now has 2.5 million inhabitants.

The water is still dirty when it is returned to the Onça River after passing through the Wastewater Treatment Plant in the city of Belo Horizonte, in southern Brazil. Much remains to be decontaminated, as well as the Velhas River that it flows into. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Forgotten

The existence of the Acaba Mundo stream has also been erased from people’s memories. But its waters still run in clogged culverts under streets and avenues, including the city’s main avenue, Afonso Pena.

The city government does not even mention it in the presentation of the America Rene Giannetti Municipal Park, a large popular space for tourism and nature conservation in the center of the city, which was originally crossed by the stream before it was diverted by canals to another sub-basin.

Only elderly residents such as Carmela Pezzuti, who lived in Belo Horizonte for a few months in 1939, when she was six years old, still remember – as she told IPS – that the park then took its name from Acaba Mundo, when the stream still existed aboveground.

Today, the so-called Dry Bridge is still there, under which the now hidden and forgotten stream used to flow.

“This reflects the history of Belo Horizonte, of increasing interventions in the watercourses and ‘hydrophobia’ in response to the stench from the streams, which were used as sewage outfalls and turned into sources of diseases,” in addition to the increasingly frequent floods, said Borsagli.

Apolo Heringer, a physician and environmentalist who has raised awareness and mobilized local residents in defense of the Velhas River and its watershed with the Manuelzão Project, a university project named after an important literary figure in the culture of the state of Minas Gerais, in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Business vs streams

Covering up the streams and expanding the underground channels became a demand of society in general, in addition to responding to the interests of real estate businesses that have treated the watercourses as obstacles to the construction of new housing, he said.

The transportation sector, from the automotive industry to bus companies, also pushed for the conversion of riverbeds and their banks into avenues, as has been done since automobiles took over the cities.

“The urban mobility model adopted is incompatible with watercourses,” urban architect Elisa Marques, a researcher and activist on water issues, told IPS. “Avenues are built on the valley bottoms, the riverbeds are blocked and the soil becomes more impermeable. Improving public transport would reduce the space for cars and return it to the waters.”

A residential neighborhood in northern Belo Horizonte, with its distinctive dips and rises that accelerate torrents caused by rainfall, which flood the valleys. The steeper slopes of the Curral mountain range, in the south of this southern Brazilian city, aggravate water disasters. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Floods

The increasing impermeabilization of the soil, due to urban expansion and suppression of vegetation, makes the channels, no matter how much they are enlarged, unable to absorb the increased flow of torrents in the rainiest periods, usually in December and January, said Borsagli.

The topography of Belo Horizonte favors the existence of hundreds of fast-flowing streams and minor watercourses, due to the steep slopes.

The Curral mountain range, where the main tributaries of the Arrudas River rise, which cross the most urbanized part of the city, exceeds 1,400 meters above sea level, while the Arrudas is about 800 meters above sea level.

“It is not known for sure why the Acaba Mundo stream is so named, whether it is because its source is far from the center of the city like the end of the world or because of the destructive force of its torrent,” explained the geographer, author of the book “Invisible Rivers of the Mining Metropolis”.

Flooding worsened as the city grew, especially from the 1940s onwards, and interventions that replaced the streambeds with channels aggravated the problem, according to Borsagli. He explained that channelizing a stream almost always increases the flow that floods the watershed below.

Currently, the most severe flooding continues to be seen along some parts of the Arrudas River, but it has become more frequent in Belo Horizonte’s other basin, that of the Onça River (the Portuguese name for jaguar), in the northern part of the city, whose population has grown more recently and is poorer.

In general, Brazilian cities lack efficient drainage systems. The governmental National Sanitation Information System found that in 2020 only 45.3 percent of the 4107 municipalities that participated in its assessment – out of a national total of 5570 – have exclusive rainwater drainage systems. In the rest the rainwater is mixed with wastewater.

This shortfall exacerbates the recurrent water tragedies. São Paulo also suffers annual flooding in several neighborhoods. And on the outskirts of Recife, in the Northeast, torrential rains in the last days of May left at least 127 dead and 9,000 people affected.

The primacy of automobiles over public transport put pressure on the banks of urban rivers because of streets that invade the space of the water and make the soil impermeable with asphalt, aggravating the floods that recur every year in Brazil’s major cities, according to urban architect Elisa Marques. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Pollution

In addition to the failure of stormwater drainage, there is also the pollution of water resources. For decades Belo Horizonte used the streams as sewage channels, with little treatment of the drainage, spreading filth and disease.

The situation in Belo Horizonte improved with the construction of the Arrudas River Wastewater Treatment Plant (ETE) in 2001 and the Onça Wastewater Treatment Plant in 2006, but it is still insufficient, said Apolo Heringer, a physician, environmentalist and retired professor from the Federal University of Minas Gerais.

Heringer, who was a political exile during the 1964-1985 military dictatorship, founded the Manuelzão Project at the university in 1997, with the aim of cleaning up and revitalizing the Velhas River, the source of half the water consumed in the areas on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte and the recipient of the rivers that cross the capital, the Arrudas and the Onça.

The ETEs respond in part to the strategy advocated by the environmentalist and his project of concentrating efforts where they are most productive.

“Along 30 to 40 kilometers of the Velhas River and the final stretches of the Arrudas and Onça rivers, 80 percent of the pollution produced by 80 percent of the population of the outlying neighborhoods is concentrated, both from sewage and garbage. It is the epicenter of pollution,” Heringer told IPS.

Focusing efforts in this area, which makes up only 20 percent of the city, would practically result in the decontamination of the Velhas River basin, which extends for 800 kilometers and flows into the São Francisco, one of the largest national rivers that crosses a large part of the semiarid Northeast region.

But the goal of being able to swim, fish and boat in the Velhas River requires 100 percent wastewater treatment, and the collection and proper management of all garbage so that the liquid runoff does not go into the rivers. This means it is still a distant dream, the expert acknowledged.

The treatment of sewage by the Minas Gerais Sanitation Company (Copasa) is still incomplete; the water that is returned to the rivers still contains impurities, the environmentalist lamented.

ETE Arrudas removes the main pollutants and complies with national legislation, as shown by laboratory tests. “It is possible to visually verify the difference in quality of the treated sewage in relation to the raw sewage,” Copasa replied to questions from IPS on the matter.

However, in the Onça River ETE, the water returned to the river does not appear to be clean.

Adequate maternal care during pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period is essential to curbing the high maternal mortality rates in Latin America, which stopped falling due to women's health care problems during the COVID pandemic. CREDIT: Government of Tigre / Argentina

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 27 2022 (IPS)

Brazil had the dubious distinction of champion of maternal mortality in Latin America during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a 77 percent increase in such deaths between 2019 and 2021.

A total of 1,575 women died in childbirth or in the following six weeks in the year prior to the pandemic in Latin America’s largest and most populous country, with a population of 214 million. Two years later the total had climbed to 2,787, according to preliminary data from the Health Ministry’s Mortality Information System.

In Mexico, the second-most populated country in the region, with 129 million inhabitants, the increase was 49 percent, to 1,036 maternal deaths in 2021. And in Peru, a country of 33 million people, the total rose by 63 percent to 493 maternal deaths.

In Colombia, recent data are not available. But authorities acknowledge that in 2021 COVID-19 became the leading cause of maternal deaths, as it was in Mexico.

Brazil is the extreme example of multiple mistakes and of stubborn denialism that led to many avoidable deaths, particularly of pregnant women, according to experts and women’s rights activists on the occasion of the International Day of Action for Women’s Health, celebrated May 28.

In Latin America maternal mortality remains a major problem.

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the regional office of the World Health Organization (WHO), states that “maternal mortality is unacceptably high” and that they are “mostly preventable” deaths, which especially affect pregnant women in rural areas.

These levels, the agency adds, will delay reaching target 3.1 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): to reduce the global maternal mortality ratio to less than 70 per 100,000 live births by 2030.

A woman takes part in a care program for pregnant women in a low-income area of the northern state of Pará, Brazil. PAHO warned that the disruption of health services caused by COVID drove up maternal mortality rates in Latin America and the Caribbean. CREDIT: UNFPA

Something smells rotten

“Inadequate prenatal and obstetric care,” largely due to inadequate medical training in these areas, is the cause of the tragedy in Brazil, said physician and epidemiologist Daphne Rattner, a professor at the University of Brasilia and president of the Network for the Humanization of Childbirth.

“Hypertensive syndrome is the main cause of death in Brazil, while in the world it is hemorrhage. In other words, there is some failure in a simple diagnosis like hypertension and in managing it during pregnancy and childbirth,” she said in an interview with IPS from Brasilia.

Of the 38,919 maternal deaths between 1996 and 2018 in Brazil, 8,186 were due to hypertension and 5,160 to hemorrhage, according to a Health Ministry report. These are direct obstetric causes, which accounted for just over two-thirds of the deaths. The rest had indirect causes, pre-existing conditions that complicate childbirth, such as diabetes, cancer or heart disease.

An excess of cesarean sections is another factor in mortality. It is “an epidemic” of 1.6 million operations per year, the Health Ministry acknowledges. This is equivalent to about 56 percent of the total number of deliveries. The proportion reaches 85 percent in private hospitals and stands at 40 percent in public services, well above the 10 percent rate recommended by the WHO.

“They don’t practice obstetrics, they practice surgery, they don’t know how to provide clinical care, and the result is more maternal deaths,” Rattner lamented.

And the pandemic made the situation more tragic.

Black women protest to demand respect for their rights in Brazil. Black women are the greatest victims of maternal mortality caused by COVID-19 in the country. They account for almost twice the number of deaths of white mothers, according to a study by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, the leading national health research institution. CREDIT: Fernando Frazão / Agência Brasil

The stork doesn’t come anymore

Brazil missed the target of reducing maternal mortality by 75 percent by 2015, from 1990 levels, but it was moving in that direction. The maternal mortality ratio (MMR) per 100,000 live births in the country fell from 143 to 60, a 58 percent drop.

The Stork Network, a government strategy adopted in 2011 to improve assistance to pregnant women and the infrastructure of maternity hospitals, humanize childbirth, ensure family planning and better care for children, helped bring the MMR down.

But COVID-19 and the government’s response to it caused a setback of at least two decades in Brazil’s maternal mortality rate.

Coronavirus killed more than 2,000 pregnant and postpartum women in the last two years and there are at least 383 other deaths from severe acute respiratory syndrome that may have been caused by COVID-19, according to the Feminist Health Network, an activist movement that has been fighting for sexual and reproductive rights since 1991.

The way the government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro acted “was a maternal genocide, not just a disaster,” said Vania Nequer Soares, a nurse with a PhD in public health who is a member of the Feminist Health Network.

The government’s denialism and its response to the pandemic aggravated mortality in general, which already exceeds 666,000 deaths, as well as maternal mortality. Health authorities took more than a year to recognize that pregnant women were a high-risk group for COVID-19, made it difficult for them to receive intensive care and delayed their vaccination, Soares said.

To make matters worse, they decided to dismantle the Stork Network, whose public policies had promising results, and adopted new rules of “obstetric violence” included in the brand new Maternal and Child Care Network (Rami), which concentrates all power in doctors and hospitals, to the detriment of other actors and dialogue, she told IPS by telephone from Lisbon.

Miriam Toaquiza, a teenage mother, and her newborn daughter, Jennifer, are photographed at a hospital in Ecuador. Latin America is second in the world in teen pregnancy, one of the causes of the high maternal mortality rates in the region. CREDIT: Gonzalo Ortiz/IPS

Undernotification and negligence

But the numbers of maternal deaths are probably higher. Brazil was slow to begin using COVID-19 diagnostic tests and did not test widely. And because clinical identification of the new disease was doubtful, many mothers probably died without the correct diagnosis, especially in the first year of the pandemic, Rattner argued.

A study published this month in the scientific journal The Lancet Regional Health – Americas, with accounts from the families of 25 pregnant women who died of COVID-19, revealed three practices that condemned many women to death on the verge of childbirth.

First, doctors refused to hospitalize or better examine those who complained, for example, of difficulty breathing. They attributed it to late pregnancy and delayed a diagnosis that could have saved at least one life.

In other cases, health centers turned away pregnant women because they were dedicated to the COVID-19 emergency, arguing that they could not accept pregnant women because of the risk of infecting them. And in maternity wards, pregnant women were turned away because of the risk that they could bring in coronavirus and affect other women.

Finally, pregnant women who managed to be accepted in hospitals were denied intensive care, under the argument of protecting the baby’s life. In other words, the choice was made to save the child, to the detriment of the mothers, without consulting the families.

This was confirmed by the fact that all 25 pregnant women died, but 19 babies survived. Four families told the health professionals that they wanted the mother to be saved, even arguing that she could have other children in the future, but this proved to be in vain.

The study by three researchers from the Anis Institute of Bioethics, Human Rights and Gender, based in Brasilia, corroborates the complaint of the Feminist Health Network that 20 percent of the pregnant and postpartum women did not have access to intensive care and 32.3 percent were not put on ventilators.

Women must be given protagonism, so that “they can take ownership of the process of motherhood, including childbirth,” said Ligia Cardieri, a sociologist who is executive coordinator of the Feminist Health Network.

Fewer mechanical interventions, a reduction of c-sections that increase risks, including anesthetics, and greater involvement of nurses and other maternal health actors are other recommendations to avoid so many maternal deaths, she told IPS from Curitiba, capital of the southern state of Paraná.

In other Latin American countries, pregnant women with COVID-19 suffered a similar lack of attention and problems.

Nearly a third of them were not given intensive care or respiratory support during the pandemic, revealed a study of 447 pregnant women from eight countries, including five from South America, two from Central America and one from the Caribbean, according to PAHO data.

The study, published in The Lancet Regional Health – Americas, is from PAHO’s Latin American Center for Perinatology/Women’s Health and Reproductive Health (CLAP/WR).

A mountainous landscape in the area of the headwaters of the Velhas River, where "barraginhas", the Portuguese name for holes dug like lunar craters in the hills and slopes, prevent erosion by swallowing a large amount of soil that sediments the upper reaches of the river, in the southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
BELO HORIZONTE/ITABIRITO, Brazil , May 19 2022 (IPS)

The southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais owes its name to the main economic activity throughout its history: mining – of gold since the 17th century and later iron ore, which took on an industrial scale with massive exports in the 20th century.

The so-called Iron Quadrangle, a mountainous area of some 7,000 square kilometers in the center of the state, concentrates the state’s minerals and mining activity, long questioned by environmentalists, who have been impotent in the face of the industry’s economic clout.

But the threat of water shortages in Greater Belo Horizonte, population six million, along with two horrific mining accidents, reduced the disparity of forces between the two sides. Now environmentalists can refer to actual statistics and events, not just ecological arguments.

Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state, experienced an unprecedented water crisis in 2014 and 2015, during a drought that affected the entire southeast of Brazil.

“For the first time we experienced shortages here that only the semi-arid north of the state was familiar with,” said Marcelo da Fonseca, general director of the Mining Institute of Water Management (Igam).

On Jan. 25, 2019, a tailings dam broke in Brumadinho, 35 kilometers from Belo Horizonte as the crow flies. The tragedy killed 270 people and toxic sludge contaminated more than 300 kilometers of the Paraopeba River, which provided 15 percent of the water for the Greater Belo Horizonte region (known as RMBH), whose supply has not yet recovered.

On Nov. 5, 2015, a similar accident had claimed 19 lives in Mariana, 75 kilometers from Belo Horizonte, and silted up more than 600 kilometers of the Doce River on its way to the Atlantic Ocean. (The river, whose waters run eastward, do not supply the RMBH.)

Two years of drought, in 2014 and 2015, frightened the population of Greater Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state of Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil. For the first time the threat of water shortages was felt, said the director general of the Minas Gerais Water Management Institute, Marcelo da Fonseca. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Mining hazards

Minas Gerais has more than 700 mining tailings dams. The latest data from the State Environmental Foundation (Feam) show 33 in different degrees of emergency, four of which are at level three – high risk and mandatory evacuation of endangered residents – and nine at level 2 – recommended evacuation.

“We are hostages of the mining companies, they occupy the territory and make other economies unviable,” said Camila Alterthum, one of the founders and coordinators of the Cresce Institute and an activist with the Fechos, Eu Cuido movement, promoted by the Rio de las Velhas Watershed Committee.

Fechos is the name of an Ecological Station, a 603-hectare integral conservation area belonging to the municipality of Nova Lima, but bordering Belo Horizonte.

“There are mountains here that recharge the Cauê aquifer, which supplies more than 200,000 inhabitants of southern Belo Horizonte and a neighborhood in Nova Lima,” an adjoining municipality, said Alterthum, who lives in Vale do Sol, a neighborhood adjacent to Fechos.

Activist Camila Alterthum is opposed to mining, which she says is a permanent threat to the destruction of nature and water sources. She is fighting to expand the Fechos Ecological Station, whose forests contribute to the water supply for more than 200,000 inhabitants of Belo Horizonte, in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Her movement presented to the Minas Gerais state legislature a bill to expand Fechos by 222 hectares, to provide more water and preserve local biodiversity.

But Vale, Brazil’s largest mining company, aims to expand its two local mines in that area.

In order to acquire the land, it is offering double the number of hectares for conservation, a counterproposal rejected by the movement because it would not meet the environmental objectives and most of it is an area that the company must preserve by law anyway.

A fiercer battle was unleashed by the decision of the Minas Gerais government’s State Environmental Policy Council, which has a majority of business and government representatives, to approve on Apr. 30 a project by the Taquaril company to extract iron ore from the Curral mountain range.

Forestry engineer Julio Carvalho, of the Itabirito municipal government, stands next to a “barraginha” on a private rural property, whose owners joined the municipal effort to contain soil loss and river sedimentation in this area of southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

This mountain range is the most prominent landscape feature of Belo Horizonte, in addition to being important in terms of water and environmental aspects for the capital, although it is located on its border, on the side of the municipality of Nova Lima. The mining threat triggered a huge outcry from environmentalists, artists and society in general.

Droughts and erosion

There are other threats to the RMBH’s water supply. “We are very close to the springs, so we depend on the rains that fall here,” Fonseca told IPS at Igam headquarters in Belo Horizonte.

Two consecutive years of drought have seriously jeopardized the water supply.

Two basins supply the six million inhabitants of the 34 municipalities making up Greater Belo Horizonte.

The Velhas River accounts for 49 percent of the water supply and the Paraopeba River for 51 percent, according to Sergio Neves, superintendent of the Metropolitan Business Unit of the Minas Gerais Sanitation Company (Copasa), which serves most of the state.

The Paraopeba River stopped supplying water after the 2019 accident, but its basin has two important reservoirs in the tributaries. The one on the Manso River, for example, supplies 34 percent of the RMBH.

The phenomenon of “voçorocas” (gullies) is repeated in several parts of Itabirito and Ouro Preto, the municipalities where the Velhas river basin originates, in southeastern Brazil. The soil is vulnerable to erosion and measures to mitigate the damage are finally beginning to proliferate in a region dominated by iron ore mining. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The Velhas River only has a small hydroelectric power plant reservoir, with a capacity of 9.28 megawatts, but it is generating only four megawatts. It is run-of-river, that is, it does not store enough water to regulate the flow or compensate for low water levels.

In addition, sedimentation has greatly reduced its storage capacity since it began to operate in 1907. The soil upstream is vulnerable to erosion and has been affected by urban and agricultural expansion, local roads and various types of mining, not only of iron ore, which aggravate the sedimentation of the rivers, said Fonseca.

Decentralized solutions

The municipal government of Itabirito, which shares the headwaters of the Velhas basin with Ouro Preto, the gold capital in the 18th century, is promoting several actions mentioned by Fonseca to mitigate erosion and feed the aquifers that sustain the flow of the rivers.

Businessman and environmentalist Ronaldo Guerra stands on his farm where he promotes ecotourism and exhibits his proposal for a succession of small dams as a mechanism for storing water on the surface and in the water table, strengthening the forests and the hydrographic basin in a mining region of southeastern Brazil where there is growing concern about the water supply. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

It is intriguing to see craters in some rural properties in Itabirito, especially on hills or gently sloping land.

They are “barraginhas”, explained Julio Carvalho, a forestry engineer and employee of the Municipal Secretariat of Environment and Sustainable Development. They are micro-dams, holes dug to slow down the runoff of rainwater that causes erosion.

This system prevents a large part of the sediment from flowing into the rivers, as well as the phenomenon of “voçorocas” (gullies, in Portuguese), products of intense erosion that abound in several parts of Itabirito and Ouro Preto, municipalities where the first tributaries of the Velhas are born.

As these are generally private lands, the municipal government obtains financing to evaluate the properties, design the interventions and put them out to bid, in agreement with the committees that oversee the watersheds, Carvalho told IPS.

The municipality of Itabirito is the “water tank” of Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state of Minas Gerais, in southeastern Brazil. The municipal government is promoting programs aimed at revitalizing the watershed that supplies nearly half of the six million inhabitants of Greater Belo Horizonte, explains Frederico Leite, environmental secretary of the municipality, which depends on mining activity. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

For country roads, which generate a great deal of erosion in the undulating topography, “dry boxes” are used, as well as small holes in the banks to retain the torrents or at least curb their speed, he said.

Other “mechanical land use and conservation practices” include recovering water sources through reforestation and fencing to prevent animals from invading water sources and trampling the surrounding areas.

Itabirito is also seeking to dredge the river of the same name, which crosses the city, to reduce sedimentation, which was aggravated by flooding in January, when the water level in the river rose unusually high.

Environmental education, a program of payments for environmental services and the expansion of conservation areas, in the city as well, are the plans implemented by Felipe Leite, secretary of environment and sustainable development of Itabirito since 2019.

“We want to create a culture of environmental preservation,” partly because “Itabirito is the water tank of Belo Horizonte,” he told IPS.

The municipal government chose to cooperate with the mining industry, especially with the Ferro Puro company, which decided to pave a road and reforest it with flowers as part of a tourism project.

In São Bartolomeu, a town in the municipality of Ouro Preto, Ronald Guerra, an ecotourism entrepreneur, proposes a succession of small dams and reservoirs as a way of retaining water, feeding the water table and preventing erosion.

On his 120-hectare farm, half of which is recognized as a Private Natural Heritage Reserve –a private initiative conservation effort – he has 13 small dams and raises fish for his restaurant and sport fishing.

The son of a doctor from Belo Horizonte, he opted for rural life and agroecology from a young age. He was secretary of environment of Ouro Preto and today he is an activist in several watershed committees, non-governmental organizations and efforts for the promotion of local culture.

Pollution from urban sewage is visible in the Onça (jaguar, in Portuguese) River, near its mouth, seen here from the entrance bridge in the Ribeiro de Abreu neighborhood that suffers frequent flooding when it rains heavily in Belo Horizonte, capital of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
BELO HORIZONTE, Brazil, May 17 2022 (IPS)

“We do everything through parties, we don’t want power, we don’t want to take over the role of the State, but we don’t just protest and complain,” said Itamar de Paula Santos, a member of the United Community Council for Ribeiro de Abreu (Comupra), in this southeastern Brazilian city.

Ribeiro de Abreu is one of the neighborhoods most affected by recurrent flooding in Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais, as it is located on the right bank of the Onça (jaguar, in Portuguese) River, on the lower stretch, into which the water drains from a 212 square kilometer basin made up of numerous streams.

Cleaning up the river and preventing its waters from continuing to flood homes requires actions that also produce social benefits.

“We have so far removed 736 families who were living in high-risk situations, on the riverbank,” Santos told IPS in the same place where precarious and frequently flooded shacks gave way to the Community Riverside Park (Parque Ciliar, in Portuguese), which has a garden, soccer field, children’s playground and fruit trees.

The project, begun by local residents together with Comupra and the local government in 2015 and gradually implemented since then, aims to extend the community park 5.5 kilometers upstream through several neighborhoods by 2025.

This includes doubling the number of families resettled, cleaning up the Onça basin and its nine beaches, three islands and three waterfalls, preserving nature and developing urban agriculture, and creating areas for sports and cultural activities. All with participatory management and execution.

Itamar de Paula Santos, an activist with the United Community Council for Ribeiro de Abreu, longs to go back to swimming and fishing in the Onça River, as he did in his childhood. But its waters, polluted by urban waste, often flood the riverside neighborhoods in the rainy season as the river flows through the city of Belo Horizonte, in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Displaced within the same neighborhood

The families removed from the flood-prone riverbank now live mostly in safe housing in the same Ribeiro de Abreu neighborhood, which had 16,000 inhabitants at the 2010 census, but is now estimated to be home to 20,000 people.

The Belo Horizonte city government has a rule to resettle families from risky areas in places no more than three kilometers from where they used to live, Ricardo Aroeira, director of Water Management of the Municipal Secretariat of Works and Infrastructure, told IPS.

That is the case of Dirce Santana Soares, 55, who now lives with her son, her mother and four other family members in a five-bedroom house, with a yard where she grows a variety of fruit trees and vegetables.

“It’s the best thing that could have happened to us,” she said. Five years ago she lived next to the river, which flooded her shack, almost always in the wee hours of the morning, every year during the rainiest months in Belo Horizonte – December and January.

“We had bunk beds and we piled everything we wanted to save on top of them. Then we built a second floor on the house, leaving the first floor to the mud,” she told IPS. “But I didn’t want to leave the neighborhood where I had been living for 34 years.”

She was lucky. After receiving the compensation for leaving her riverside shack, an acquaintance sold her their current home, at a low price, with long-term interest-free installments.

View of a beach on the Onça River, which the movement for clean rivers wants to recuperate as a recreational area for the local population in the city of Belo Horizonte, in southeastern Brazil. At this spot, the Onça River receives the waters of the Isidoro stream. There are another eight beaches to be restored as well. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Bad luck

Soares, who is now a domestic worker, had a daycare center that started losing money in the face of the increased offer of free nursery schools by the local government, and the COVID-19 pandemic over the last two years.

Itamar Santos, a 64-year-old father of three, has also lived in the neighborhood for almost four decades. Before that, he worked as a mechanical lathe operator in other cities and for three years in Carajás, the large iron ore mine in the eastern Amazon, 1,600 km north of Belo Horizonte.

In 1983, in Carajás, he lost his right leg when he fell into a 12-meter well. “It was night-time, and there was no electricity, just dark jungle,” he explained. After the first painful impact, he learned to live with his disability and regained the joy of living, with a specially adapted car.

He became an activist and among his achievements were free bus tickets for paraplegics and a gymnasium for multiple sports. “Creating conditions that enable the disabled to leave their homes is therapeutic,” he told IPS.

View of a community garden that local residents in the Ribeiro de Abreu neighborhood cultivate on the banks of the Onça River. Some 140 families who suffered annual flooding were resettled and now live in safe housing in the same part of Belo Horizonte, a metropolis in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

But the cause that impassions him today is the river, which in January has a heavy flow due to the heavy rains that month, but dries up in September, in the dry season.

“Let the Onça drink clean water” is the slogan of a movement also promoted by Santos, to emphasize the protection and recovery of the thousands of springs that supply the river and its tributary streams.

Every year since 2008, this movement, driven by Comupra, organizes meetings for reflection and debate on the revitalization of the river in riverside venues in different neighborhoods in the basin.

The festivities are also repeated annually, or more often. Carnival brings joy to the local population on the beaches or squares along the banks of the Onça River, and giant Christmas trees are set up for the communities to come out and celebrate the holidays.

The basin, or more precisely sub-basin, of the Onça River comprises the northern half of the territory and the population of Belo Horizonte, which totals 2.5 million inhabitants. The south, which is richer, is where the Arrudas River is located.

Both emerge in the neighboring municipality to the west, Contagem, and flow east into the Das Velhas River, the main source of water for the six million inhabitants of Greater Belo Horizonte. As they cross heavily populated areas, they are the main polluters of the Velhas basin.

Major floods in the provincial capital occur mainly in the Onça sub-basin. The steep topography of Belo Horizonte makes the soil more impermeable, leading to more disasters.

Maria José Zeferino, a retired teacher from neighboring schools, at the Our Lady of Mercy Park, which was built to clean up a stream from urban pollution that was spreading diarrhea and parasites among the students of three nearby schools, in Belo Horizonte, a city in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Other riverbank parks

The Belo Horizonte city government has been working on drainage plans for years and has been implementing the Program for the Environmental Recovery of the Valley and Creek Bottoms since 2001.

In April it published the Technical Instruction for the Elaboration of Drainage Studies and Projects, under the general coordination of Aroeira.

Since the end of the last century there has been a “paradigm shift,” said Aroeira. Channeling watercourses used to be the norm, but this “merely shifted the site of the floods.” Now the aim is to contain the torrents and to give new value to rivers, integrating them into the urban landscape, cleaning them up and at the same time improving the quality of life of the riverside populations, he explained.

The construction of long, narrow linear parks, which combines the clean-up of rivers or streams with environmental preservation, riverside reforestation and services for the local population, is one of the “structural” measures that can be seen in Belo Horizonte.

The participation of students and teachers from three neighboring schools stood out in the implementation in 2008 of the Nossa Senhora da Piedad Park in the Aarão Reis neighborhood, home to 8,300 inhabitants in 2010, near the lower section of the Onça River.

Cleaning up the creek that gives the park its name was the major environmental and sanitary measure.

“Sewage from the entire neighborhood contaminated the stream and caused widespread illnesses among the children, such as diarrhea, verminosis (parasites in the bronchial tubes) and nausea,” Maria José Zeferino, a retired art teacher at one of the local schools, told IPS.

The medicinal herb garden in the Primer de Mayo Ecological Park was a demand of the local population in the southern Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte. Creation of the park included the clean-up of a polluted stream and provides a gathering and recreational area for local residents. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The park, which belongs to the municipality, has an area of 58,000 square meters, a pond, three courts for different sports, a skateboarding area and a paved walkway for the elderly. A total of 143 families and one farm received compensation to vacate the area, leaving many fruit trees behind.

“A clean river was our dream. And the goal of the next stage is to have swimming, fishing and boating in the city’s streams,” said Zeferino.

The Primer de Mayo Ecological Park, in the neighborhood of the same name with 2,421 inhabitants according to the 2010 census, was built during the revitalization of the stream of the same name, covering 33,700 square meters along a winding terrain. The novelty is a medicinal herb garden, a demand of the local population.

“We discovered 70 springs here that feed the stream that runs into the Onça River,” said Paulo Carvalho de Freitas, an active member of the Community Commission that supports the municipal management of the park and carries out educational activities there.

“My fight for the future is to remove much of the concrete with which the park was built, which waterproofs the soil and goes against one of the objectives of the project,” which was inaugurated in 2008, said Freitas.

Students eat lunch in the cafeteria of the João Caffaro Municipal School in Itaboraí, in southeastern Brazil. Schoolchildren returned to eating vegetables and drinking natural fruit juices when the school canteens and the supply of family farming products to the National School Feeding Program resumed in April this year, after an interruption brought about by the COVID pandemic. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
ITABORAÍ, Brazil , Apr 27 2022 (IPS)

“I like lettuce, but not tomatoes and cucumbers,” said nine-year-old Paulo Henrique da Silva de Jesus, a third grader at the João Baptista Caffaro Municipal School in the southeastern Brazilian city of Itaboraí.

He and Tainá Cassia Faria, a 13-year-old fifth grader, both dislike yams (Dioscorea spp., a popular tuber), but say they love the food the school serves them. “We eat everything, we don’t leave anything on our plates,” they said in the cafeteria of the public primary school. Noodles, beans and meat are their favorites.

“Today we have cake!” said another excited schoolboy.

This year it has been possible to offer “a greater variety of quality foods, incorporating fruits and vegetables,” with the full reinstatement of the National School Feeding Program (PNAE), said Deise Lessa, the school’s principal since 2011 and a teacher for 35 years in this municipality located about 50 kilometers from Rio de Janeiro.“Many children have their only full meal of the day at school, given the poverty and unemployment affecting the local population.” -- Mauricilio Rodrigues

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the schools in this South American country closed their doors from March 2020 until the gradual return of students to the classrooms began in mid-2021, along with the return of school meals, which ensure adequate nutrition for a large part of Brazil’s poor children.

“The PNAE is fundamental in school life. Many children have their only full meal of the day at school, given the poverty and unemployment affecting the local population,” said Mauricilio Rodrigues, Itaboraí’s secretary of education since the current municipal authorities took office in January 2021.

“Eighty percent of the students in our schools are from low-income families,” he noted during the day that IPS spent at the same primary schools in Itaboraí that we visited in 2015, to check on the post-pandemic school feeding situation.

Two changes were evident at João Caffaro. One was the use of masks by schoolchildren in the classrooms, which are only removed in the dining room and outdoor playground, despite the fact that in the state of Rio de Janeiro, where the municipality is located, masks are no longer mandatory.

Another is that in the dining room, as a measure to curb the spread of the disease, the multicolored tablecloths of the past have disappeared, and now the tables are bare and disinfected before each group of children comes in. Furthermore, the groups are limited in size and are spread throughout the large space which in the past was crowded with schoolchildren. In addition, we were not allowed to enter the kitchen this time, for health reasons.

Lunch is a feast for the children at the João Caffaro Municipal School. They are served food that they rarely have in a single meal at home, with meats, assorted vegetables, fruits, natural juices and even cakes for dessert. The meals are a guarantee of good nutrition that was only partially alleviated by food distribution when schools were closed during the peak of the pandemic, in 2020 and much of 2021. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Alliance between schools and family agriculture

“Many children never miss class because of the lunch we serve,” said the principal of the municipal school with a student body of 450, located in the Engenho Velho neighborhood, where most of the population lives in poverty, in this city of 245,000 inhabitants.

School meals, as an initiative of the Brazilian government, began to be served in the 1940s, when few people went to school. They evolved with the democratization of education, especially after the 1988 national constitution recognized the right of primary school students to a food supplement provided by the government.

To carry out the program, the municipal and state governments receive funds from the National Education Development Fund (FNDE), administered by the Ministry of Education.

In 2009, a new law established a requirement with positive effects on child nutrition and local economies: that a minimum of 30 percent of PNAE purchases in each municipality must be of products from local family farms.

This is what makes it possible for elementary school students in Itaboraí to eat fresh vegetables and a variety of fruits. Banana, orange, tangerine, guava, cassava, pumpkin, sweet potato, lettuce and kale are the most purchased foods from local farmers, said Ana Beatriz Garcia, coordinator of school food programs in the prefecture.

Lunch is a feast for the children at the João Caffaro Municipal School. They are served food that they rarely have in a single meal at home, with meats, assorted vegetables, fruits, natural juices and even cakes for dessert. The meals are a guarantee of good nutrition that was only partially alleviated by food distribution when schools were closed during the peak of the pandemic, in 2020 and much of 2021. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Interruption due to the pandemic

That was not possible in 2020, when schools were closed because of the pandemic and students took classes online throughout the country. An attempt was made to alleviate the closure of school cafeterias by distributing basic food baskets to students’ families, but it was not the same. Perishable fresh produce could not be included.

On-site classes in Itaboraí were partially resumed as of June 2021, with each group divided into two halves that took turns in the classrooms every two days. Thus, regular purchases from family farmers could not be resumed either.

But the mayor’s office promoted fairs in schools, where families could pick up fresh food for home consumption, replacing school meals, said Lessa, the principal of the João Caffaro school.

In this country of 214 million people, most children attend primary and secondary school either in the morning or the afternoon. These public school students are served two meals, lunch and a snack. Children in other schools attend for the entire day, and are served four meals: breakfast, lunch and two snacks.

“Despite the difficulties, we met the goal set by the PNAE, acquiring 36 percent of the food served to students from family agriculture,” said Secretary of Education Rodrigues. This year they expect to reach between 35 and 40 percent during the February to December school year.

“The biggest difficulty is the logistics of getting the food to the network of schools,” he said. There are four or five trucks or vans that carry the meals every day, operated in a joint effort by the municipal secretariats of Education and Agriculture.

Two teachers and several elementary school students work in the vegetable garden at the Jueza Patricia Acioli Full-Time School in the city of Itaboraí, in southeastern Brazil. The aim is both educational and nutritional, to foment the consumption of vegetables and fruits when schoolchildren grow them with their own hands. CREDIT: Secom/Itaboraí

Itaboraí has 35,000 students in its 92 public nursery and elementary schools, in addition to adult education. They include children of preschool age, four and five years old, and first to fifth graders.

In Brazil, the municipalities are responsible for the first five of the nine years of basic education. The states are responsible for the last four years of primary school and the three years of secondary school. They are also required to provide meals in their schools, although compliance is less strict.

To plan purchases, design the menu and provide orientation for the schools, the Itaboraí Municipal Department of Education has a central team of 13 nutritionists, in addition to a nutritionist in each school.

“We have to be flexible in the plans, each product has its harvest time and can be scarce because of too much or too little rain, or can be ready early as is happening with the persimmon harvest this year,” said Larissa de Brito, one of the chief nutritionists.

“That’s why we are in constant dialogue with the farmers,” she added.

“Our relationship with the farmers has improved, because we visit them at the beginning of the year and now accept purchases from individual producers, whereas before purchases were only arranged through their associations,” explained coordinator Garcia.

Alcir Coração, an 81-year-old family farmer, stands next to an orange grove on his farm, where he harvests fruit that he sells to the Itaboraí municipal government for school meals. He lost his entire harvest in 2020 and part of it in 2021, because of the COVID pandemic that forced schools to be closed in Brazil. But this year he expects to do even better than the good sales of the pre-pandemic years. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Recuperating markets

The municipality of Itaboraí is 11 percent rural, and the rural population makes up only 1.2 percent of the total. But there are many family farms, encouraged by the proximity of large markets. Oranges are the star product, due to their renowned quality.

Alcir Coração is the 81-year-old president of the Association of Family Farmers of Itaboraí and Neighboring Municipalities (Agrifami), which has relied on the PNAE since 2009, when the program decided to make family farmers suppliers of at least 30 percent of its purchases.

“This will turn out well,” he predicted at the time. So he decided to expand his production, especially of oranges, on his 10 hectares of land, divided into two farms of 6.5 and 3.5 hectares in size, 10 kilometers from the town of Itaboraí.

He enlisted the support of his 41-year-old son-in-law, Marcio da Veiga, as a partner in the undertaking.

“In 2020 we harvested 3000 kilos of oranges and lost everything, waiting for the demand from the schools that did not arrive,” lamented Coração. In 2021 the loss was smaller; the PNAE orders “arrived late,” but they eventually did.

“This year started well,” with a call for purchases as early as April. It was never done so early and also doubled the limit for the annual sale of each farmer in relation to last year, raised to 40,000 reais (8,600 dollars at the current exchange rate), he said, visibly pleased.

He and his son-in-law produce different varieties of oranges, called selecta, natal and lima, as well as tangerines and lemons. “Lemons are harvested all year round, but their price is low, oranges yield more income,” Da Veiga said, explaining why they decided to expand their orange groves.

From a young age, students grow vegetables for their own lunches at the Patricia Acioli School. As it is a full-day school, where students attend for eight hours, they receive four meals: breakfast, lunch and two snacks. CREDIT: Secom/Itaboraí

Gardening as education

In 2021, some public schools in Itaboraí also started to grow some of their own vegetables. At the Juiza Patrícia Acioli Municipal School, the 265 students plant and harvest lettuce, carrots, kale, cabbages, eggplants and other vegetables.

The aim is educational, to help students learn what the land has to offer, how food is produced and what healthy eating is, school principal Alessandra Wenderroschi told IPS.

“By taking part in growing the food with their own hands, students have more motivation to eat vegetables, even arugula,” she said. It is a “valuable educational activity,” she added.

A group of domestic workers gather at their union headquarters in Rio de Janeiro for a class on the law that sets out the rights and obligations of domestic work in Brazil. Learning about the law helps these women defend their rights and combat the vulnerability many of them of them face in the solitude of their employers’ homes. CREDIT: Courtesy of STDRJ

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 20 2022 (IPS)

The Theater of the Oppressed helped her become aware of the triple discrimination suffered by black women in Brazil and the means to confront it, such as the Rio de Janeiro Domestic Workers Union, which she has chaired since 2018.

Maria Izabel Monteiro, 55, came to work in Rio de Janeiro when she was still a teenager, from Campos dos Goitacazes, a city of half a million inhabitants located 280 kilometers away. She has had jobs in commerce and industry, but for most of her life she has worked in other people’s homes.

She began by taking care of a sick elderly woman in Ipanema, an affluent neighborhood next to the beach of the same name. She replaced a white nurse who ate breakfast with the family. But she, the new black caregiver, did not have a place at her employers’ table.

Monteiro believes that all the prejudices of Brazilian society are concentrated in their most acute form against domestic workers, especially if they are black women. They suffer triple discrimination, for being poor black women.

This reality is often addressed by the group Marias do Brasil, created by domestic workers, which adopted the techniques of the Theater of the Oppressed, a method created by Brazilian playwright Augusto Boal (1931-2009), which turns spectators into actors to act out everyday situations and raise awareness.

“It’s pedagogical theater, not therapeutic,” said the trade unionist and actress, who works miracles to juggle her weekly shift at the union, the theater and her work as a domestic.

Monteiro lives in Duque de Caxias, a town of 930,000 near Rio de Janeiro, from where she spoke to IPS. It takes her about an hour by train and subway to get to the house where she works and to the union headquarters, near the city center, and transportation costs her about 10 dollars a day.

Sometimes she and the union directors sleep in the organization’s office to save time and the cost of transportation.

The union has 2,000 registered members, although a smaller number are active. Even though the members are women, the name of the union still uses the masculine form of the word “domesticos” rather than the feminine “domesticas” because it was founded in 1989 before gender-inclusive language came into use in Portuguese. However, the women are thinking of changing the name, as similar unions have done in other parts of the country.

Roseli Gomes do Nascimento suffers frequent acts of discrimination for being a black woman who lives in a poor neighborhood, the Rocinha favela, which sits on a hill between two of Rio de Janeiro’s wealthiest neighborhoods. CREDIT: Courtesy of RG Nascimento

Racist and anti-poor violence

Roseli Gomes do Nascimento, 60, frequently suffers acts of racism and anti-poor discrimination living in Rocinha, the largest favela or shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, which sits on a hill between two wealthy neighborhoods: São Conrado and Gávea.

A taxi driver, for example, once refused to take her from São Conrado to Copacabana, a middle-class neighborhood known for its famous beach. “He said he didn’t drive that route, but he clearly expressed his prejudice that the poor can’t afford to use cabs,” Gomes told IPS, to illustrate the aporophobia – rejection of the poor – with which she lives on a daily basis.

Being followed around by security guards in shops or being denied entry to the buildings where her employers live, until someone talks to the doormen, are other forms of hostility and prejudice faced by Gomes, who currently works as a nanny taking care of a child three days a week.

Her neighbors in Rocinha, whose population is estimated at 70,000 to 150,000, are victims of constant racist violence, “but few complain to the police,” lamented Gomes, who is now determined to speak out against the discrimination she suffers.

Racism has been a crime under Brazilian law for more than 70 years, but the law is almost never enforced.

However, several scandals involving black people tortured and killed apparently because of their skin color, and anti-racist campaigns, have made more people question the impunity surrounding racism.

The Theater of the Oppressed, a method that turns ordinary people into actors to dramatize and comprehend their own situations, helped Maria Izabel Monteiro become a social activist and president of the Domestic Workers Union of Rio de Janeiro. CREDIT: Courtesy of MI Monteiro

Unfair labor relations

Monteiro says labor relations are the greatest reflection of the oppression of black women, a lingering legacy of slavery, which was not abolished in Brazil until 1888.

The Consolidation of Labor Laws, approved in 1942 and containing many of the rights still in force today in Brazil, excluded domestic and rural workers, the very sectors where female labor is abundant.

Women account for 92 percent of domestic workers in Brazil, and black women account for two thirds. A total of 6.3 million people were employed in domestic work in 2019, prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to official data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.

More than two thirds of female domestic workers are informally employed, which facilitated massive layoffs during the pandemic. They lost 1.5 million jobs, according to Hildete Pereira de Melo, a specialist in gender and economics and professor at the Fluminense Federal University, located in a city near Rio.

As a result, the overall unemployment rate in late 2021 stood at 11.1 percent, compared to 16.8 percent for women and 19.8 percent for black women, according to the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies.

In 1972, a new law recognized some labor rights for women, which were consolidated and expanded by the constitution adopted in 1988. But the real breakthrough only occurred in 2013, with the approval of a constitutional amendment that established rights for domestic workers such as minimum wage, Christmas bonus, vacation days, maximum working day of eight hours and maternity leave.

In other words, they were granted almost the entire list of rights in effect under the labor legislation at the time.

But part of these conquests were lost in 2017, when Congress made labor laws more flexible, for example making it possible to pay domestic workers strictly according to the hours worked, under a new “intermittent work” contract treating them as casual workers, effectively cutting their pay, although it did maintain their rights, Monteiro said.

The Domestic Workers’ Union of Rio de Janeiro organizes talks with specialists and debates on labor rights issues with interested women. On this occasion, they were given orientation on the specific regulations for domestic work. CREDIT: Courtesy of STDRJ

Harassment and violence

Her union assists many women workers, most frequently helping them report rights violations. “But the first part of the complaint is emotional, not labor-related. We offer psychological support, and that’s where my experience in the theater has helped me out,” she said.

Harassment is the most frequent problem reported. Employers pressure domestics to get them to resign, instead of firing them, to avoid paying greater social benefits.

“Things disappear and suspicion is raised about the domestic worker, money is left lying around in visible places, as a trap to accuse them of theft, doubts are cast on what the employees say, with insistent questions such as ‘are you sure?’” Monteiro described.

The domestics feel unprotected, “they are on their own, facing their employers,” generally the husband and wife, and sometimes other family members, she said. For this reason, the union provides a lawyer and seeks a direct dialogue with the employers.

Black women occupy the last rung in terms of remuneration for work, in a ranking in which white men are first, followed by white women and black men. Black men earn more than black women, even though the latter have more schooling on average in Brazil, said researcher Pereira de Melo.

In other words, “the reward for education is higher for men than for women – inequity that rests on policies that Brazilian society should discuss,” she said.

In addition, black women account for 65.9 percent of the victims of obstetric violence and 68.8 percent of all women murdered by men, according to the Patricia Galvão Institute, dedicated to feminist-oriented communication.

This is much higher than the black proportion of the Brazilian population, which is 56 percent of the 214 million inhabitants of this South American country.

Black women comprised 66 percent of the 3,737 women murdered in 2019, according to the Atlas of Violence drawn up by the Brazilian Forum for Public Safety, a non-governmental organization of researchers, police and representatives of the justice system.

Faces of a group of domestic workers in Brazil, during a meeting of one of their unions – a reflection that they are mostly black and poor. They have been fighting for decades for their labor recognition and rights. Today they are organized in 22 unions in states or municipalities and, since 1997, they have a national federation that represents them. CREDIT: Trabalhadoras Domésticas/Flickr

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 24 2022 (IPS)

“Woman, poor, black and illiterate” – most domestic workers suffer quadruple discrimination in Brazil, which made them more vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic, says one of their leaders, Gloria Rejane Santos.

President of the Paraíba Domestic Workers’ Union for the past 12 years, she found herself out of work after coronavirus appeared on the scene.

Of the 6.2 million domestic service jobs in Brazil in 2019, 1.5 million were lost in 2020, estimated Hildete Pereira de Melo, an economics professor at the Federal Fluminense University who has been researching gender and economics for four decades.

Vaccination against COVID-19, which began in January 2021, made it possible to recover only part of the lost jobs.

Paraíba is one of the nine states of the Northeast, Brazil’s poorest region, which is home to 4.06 million of the country’s 214 million inhabitants.

In its largest inland city, Campina Grande, population 415,000, police and labor inspectors freed a woman on Feb. 2 who was working in a home under slavery-like conditions including overwork, unhealthy conditions, rarely being allowed to leave the workplace, and no labor rights.

Helping her colleagues and combating discrimination against domestic workers, who are overwhelmingly black women, is the mission of Gloria Rejane Santos, president of the Domestic Workers Union of Paraíba, a state in Brazil’s poor Northeast region. CREDIT: Courtesy of Santos

Lingering slavery

“The pandemic aggravated the continuation of slavery,” Santos told IPS from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba, a city of 825,000 inhabitants, where two cases of slave labor were discovered and are still under investigation, she said.

Modern-day slavery in Brazil tends to be a more rural phenomenon. There were 1937 workers rescued from slavery conditions in 2021, almost all of them in the countryside of the Brazilian hinterland.

“Many employers demanded that their domestics stay at work all the time,” fearing that they would bring coronavirus back and forth to their homes. “The day laborers who could not accept it, we lost our jobs,” Santos said, referring to live-out domestic workers.

The pandemic thus created conditions for a return to work without time limits, without time off, and with a greater violation of labor rights, which have never been well-respected in domestic work.

The domestic labor market has changed since the 1980s. Live-in maids who worked an unlimited number of days have disappeared, as have domestics who work exclusively for one employer with a monthly salary.

There was an increase in the number of domestics who lived in their own homes and were hired for a limited number of days, who were more autonomous, in a process that accompanied advances in society, with new technologies and new habits, such as eating out more frequently, Melo noted. In addition, homes have become smaller and have lost the “maid’s room,” she said in an interview with IPS in Rio de Janeiro.

Domestic workers from Paraíba, a state in the Northeast region of Brazil, hold a protest organized by their union demanding respect for their rights and compliance with the laws that regulate their activity in the country. CREDIT: STDP

Female and informal

But informal employment is predominant. Nearly 70 percent of domestic workers do not have an employment contract. As a result, they do not have legal rights and are subject to the employer’s discretion, which has facilitated dismissals during the pandemic.

Their vulnerability is aggravated by the fact that 92 percent are women and 66 percent are black women, according to data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics in 2019, the year before the outbreak of the COVID pandemic.

Domestic workers’ trade unions have included the feminine form of the word “workers” – trabalhadoras – in their names, recognizing the overwhelming majority of women in the sector.

Santos, despite presiding over the union, was left without regular work as a day laborer throughout the pandemic, as were “more than half of the domestic workers in Paraíba,” she estimated.

Getting by

Work in the trade unions is voluntary. It only offers limited per diem income from a few sponsored projects, generally for the training of female workers, but “lately we don’t even get that,” lamented the 64-year-old trade unionist, who has six grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

In the last two years she has survived on food basket donations and the emergency aid that the government granted to the poorest of the poor, worth 600 reais (about 115 dollars) in 2020, reduced by half during 2021, when it was only made available for a few months.

“I managed to get it after much struggle, with the support of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, because I was registered as a town councilor, although I was an unelected candidate,” said Santos.

She attributes her decision to accept the presidency of the union to her “vocation”. “I am the daughter of a domestic worker, I suffered a lot watching my mother work hard for scraps of food, some clothes or shoes,” she said.

When she became a trade union leader at the age of 52, she decided to go back to school, and completed primary and middle school. Going to school with adolescents was very difficult, she said, as she was rejected as an “old woman”, especially when it came to group projects.

She then attended an adult education course for high school, where everything went well. But she did not make it into university, where she wanted to pursue a degree in social work. She has channeled that inclination at least partly into her union work.

During the pandemic, the union carried out a permanent campaign to collect food and aid for unemployed members. “We provided assistance to more than 400 families” at the João Pessoa headquarters and the subheadquarters in Campina Grande, she said.

The pandemic forced Roseli Nascimento to replace beef in her diet with chicken, eggs and legumes. A live-out domestic worker in Rio de Janeiro, she lost four of the five days she worked weekly in 2020 and only regained them in mid-2021, when her employers felt protected by the widespread vaccination against COVID-19. CREDIT: Courtesy of Nascimento

Rights

But her main ambition is to “fight discrimination and make society recognize the value of domestic work.” She pointed out that she receives almost daily complaints of mistreatment and other conflicts from her colleagues. In these cases she receives help from a lawyer who has been working with the union on a pro bono basis since 2019.

To illustrate, she cited the case of “a maid who came to the union in tears” after she was accused of having stolen one hundred reais (19 dollars) from her employers. She was saved by a phone call from a son of the family, who confessed to taking the money without telling his parents.

The marginalization suffered by domestic workers in Paraíba is probably stronger than in other states because in that state “90 percent of them are black women,” said Santos.

“I am black, poor and the daughter of a domestic, but since I have an active voice, I decided to use it for the collective good,” she said.

Roseli Gomes do Nascimento, a 60-year-old resident of Rocinha, one of the large, famous favelas or shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro, had slightly better luck than Santos. Also a live-out domestic worker, of the five days she worked during the week, she lost four at the start of the pandemic.

It was not until the middle of the following year that she was able to return to work five days a week, when a good part of the Brazilian population was vaccinated against COVID. Only one supportive employer had kept her continuously employed and even paid her for her day of work during three months in which, for health safety reasons, she stayed away from her employer’s home.

That small income and 115 dollars a month in emergency government assistance for one quarter of 2020 and a fourth of that for nine months of the following year were barely enough to survive on. She lives alone, as her two daughters are now on their own, with her six cats. “I used to have nine, but I gave three away,” she told IPS.

A drastic reduction in beef consumption, sometimes replaced by less expensive chicken and eggs, and a diet with more fruits and vegetables, as well as fewer outings, helped her to live on a reduced budget, with the advantage of losing “about eight kilos, without even dieting.”

Legislators and trade unionists celebrate the first anniversary of the constitutional amendment establishing the rights of domestic workers in Brazil on Apr. 2, 2014. CREDIT: José Cruz/Agência Brasil

Context

Domestic work employed 75.6 million workers, or 4.5 percent of all wage earners around the world, according to a 2021 report by the International Labor Organization (ILO).

Latin America accounted for 18 percent of these workers and Brazil for nine percent, a much higher proportion than the size of the population, which represented 7.4 percent of the total in the case of Latin America and 2.7 percent in the case of Brazil.

In other words, the region has a higher proportion of paid domestic work, a product of its history and slavery, noted economist Melo. Only 20 percent of Brazil’s 60 million families hire domestic workers, a privilege of the upper-middle and upper classes.

Brazil has become the world’s leading exporter of beef in recent years. It has more cattle than its 214 million human inhabitants. But this leads to serious environmental damage: deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, as cattle drive the illegal appropriation and possession of deforested public lands. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 14 2022 (IPS)

With its accelerated growth agriculture has emerged as a key sector of Brazil’s economy, but it is failing on its own to spread prosperity and reduce poverty and inequality, with industry in decline.

However, it can do so by bringing in foreign exchange with its large exports and thus create macroeconomic conditions for pro-poor social policies, argues Carlos Guanziroli, a professor at the Fluminense Federal University.

Brazil used to be a food importer, producing only about 50 million tons of grains in 1980. Thirty years later the harvest was three times bigger and in 2020 it reached more than 250 million tons, the economist noted.

The fivefold increase in the harvest in 40 years was due to a strong growth in productivity, since the sown area expanded by only 60 percent, from 40 to 64 million hectares, according to the Agriculture Ministry’s National Supply Company.

The country became the world’s largest producer and exporter of soybeans, meat, sugar, orange juice and, long before that, coffee. Agribusiness exports reached 120.6 billion dollars in 2021 and led to a sectoral surplus of 105.1 billion dollars, which more than offset the industrial deficit.

Soybean is the main symbol of the success of agribusiness in Brazil, whose landscape has been stained with its monotonous crops. In four decades, agricultural research has achieved high soy productivity in the hot lands of the Cerrado, the Brazilian savannah. Flat land suitable for mechanization, with regular rainfall and the possibility of planting corn or cotton after the soybean harvest are the advantages of tropical agriculture in Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Economic cycles

Brazil achieved this agricultural strength in the midst of dizzying economic, demographic and political upheavals in the country over the last 100 years.

The 20th century industrialization drive, which picked up speed after World War II and continued until the 1980s, was apparently set to give rise to a new industrial powerhouse, the “Great Brazil” announced by the 1964-1985 military dictatorship’s propaganda.

But industry stalled since the 1980s, with its share of GDP declining in the following decades, while agriculture took off.

In the 1990s, a previously neglected sector, family farming, gained a more clearly defined identity, thanks to promotion policies. Guanziroli, then a researcher at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), contributed to this process.

Industrialization accelerated the urbanization of the population. Only 36 percent of Brazilians lived in cities in 1950. By 1980 the proportion had climbed to 67 percent and in 2010, when the last national census was carried out, it stood at 84 percent, according to data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), which puts the current population of Brazil at 214 million.

In other words, during the following cycle of strong agricultural expansion and industrial stagnation the tendency towards urbanization was maintained. Mechanization, extensive monocultures and the high concentration of land ownership are some of the reasons for the massive rural exodus.

But agriculture involves an extensive chain, which includes manufacturers of tractors, harvesters and other machinery, chemical inputs, packaging, as well as activities such as transportation and other services, said Guanziroli.

“This chain accounts for 22 percent of GDP and 28 percent of all jobs” in Brazil, he stressed in an interview with IPS in Rio de Janeiro.

Farmer Alison Oliveira stands among his organic crops on the small farm he works with his wife near the town of Alta Floresta, on the edge of Brazil’s Amazon region. Sustainable family farming is a barrier against deforestation and soybean monoculture. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Family farming

Family agriculture, which comprises 3.9 million farms with more than 10 million employed workers in Brazil, according to the 2017 agricultural census conducted by IBGE, is a sector which stands to experience major social and economic benefits from public policies.

“It is more labor-intensive and responds to trends towards local consumption and organic production, which are more evident in developed countries, especially in Europe,” said Rafael Cagnin, an economist at the Institute for Industrial Development Studies, promoted by the sector.

In addition to providing employment for families and potential employees, family farming enhances food security and boosts the local economy.

The activity is defined not by the size of the property or what it produces, but by the predominance of family labor, which must not be surpassed by hired workers, said Guanziroli.

Studies and proposals of researchers on the subject, especially in the 1990s, “sought to avoid simplifications, such as saying that family farmers were all poor and only produced food,” he said.

A misconception that is widespread – not only in Brazil – is that family farming is responsible for the production of 70 percent of the country’s food, Guanziroli said. He clarified that this is correct with regard to beans and cassava, but not to food production as a whole.

“This is a lie used for political means that affects dialogue and public policies, rhetoric that is not based on serious evidence,” he argued.

Studies estimated the share of family farms in total agricultural production at 38 percent in 1996 and 36 percent in 2006, according to IBGE census data. In 2017 the proportion dropped to 28 percent because of a prolonged drought that began in 2012 in the semi-arid Northeast region, which concentrates almost half of the country’s family farms.

A farmer harvests lettuce in Santa Maria de Jetibá, a mountainous agricultural municipality, the main supplier of horticultural products for school meals in the city of Vitoria, in southeastern Brazil. The synergy between family farming and school meals programs strengthens local production in the country. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Long-range policies

In Brazil, the recognition and clear definition of family farming benefited from good statistics from IBGE, a factor absent in many countries.

But studies on the subject and the proposals of researchers taken up by the government face hurdles, due to “ideological issues and the antagonism with agribusiness which has worn the issue down,” lamented Guanziroli.

“The idea was to clearly define family farming in order to promote projects and policies, such as credit,” he explained. It is an activity that is part of the agricultural business, integrated into the marketing chain, and inputs.

In spite of everything, the researcher assesses the balance of the last 30 years as positive. “Family farming has been consolidated, it has irreversible policies giving it a solid structure,” he said.

The best example is the National Program for the Strengthening of Family Agriculture (Pronaf), created in 1995, which continues to guarantee credits with low interest rates and favorable payment conditions. Not even the current far-right government, hostile to peasant farmers, has dared to abolish the program.

What is most lacking is technical assistance, “which never reached family farmers in those 30 years. We tried a thousand formulas, old institutions, non-governmental organizations, but we were unable to mobilize agronomists,” said Guanziroli.

Pig farmer Anelio Tomazzoni stands among biodigesters that convert the manure from his 38,000 hogs into biogas, in the southern state of Santa Catarina, Brazil’s main pork exporter. Energy production is a new aspect of agriculture and livestock farming in Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Agriculture and industry

Nevertheless, he believes that Brazil’s competitiveness lies in agriculture. “In industry we fell behind, it is difficult to compete with Asia,” he said. Some services, such as digital platforms, can be an alternative, but they require a long-term effort in education, in which Brazil is lagging.

But Cagnin told IPS from São Paulo that “Resuming Brazil’s economic and social development does not seem possible without progress in industry, following the example of other countries, especially the more complex ones.”

It is the sector that “generates and disseminates the most innovations in a capitalist economy, the one that builds bridges between other activities, adds value to agricultural or mineral products and promotes more sophisticated services,” he argued.

The economist, who specializes in industrial development, recognizes that Brazil’s political conflicts and educational shortcomings hinder progress in the midst of “technological transformations,” productive reorganization and new labor relations.

But industry is also indispensable because of the numerous serious risks facing the “agriculture of the future,” such as the climate crisis, changes in consumption and the directions that the large Chinese market will take, he maintained.

Everything points to the wisdom of not limiting the economy to a few export products, as Brazil is doing, and to seeking “synergies between industry and agriculture,” instead of excluding other sectors, he argued.

In Raposos, a Brazilian city of 16,500 inhabitants, two-thirds of the homes were flooded by the rising waters of the Das Velhas River. The city grew on both banks of the river, between hills, which led to recurrent flooding. CREDIT: Das Velas River CBH

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 2 2022 (IPS)

People living in Jardim Pantanal, a low-income neighborhood on the east side of the Brazilian megalopolis of São Paulo, suffer floods every southern hemisphere summer. Many residents remember the three months their streets and homes were under water in late 2009 and early 2010.

The community is an extreme case of irregular occupation of land on a low bank of the Tietê River, which crosses the southern city. But it is a “structured neighborhood, with brick houses, some of which are two stories tall” to enable residents to avoid the water, said Igor Pantoja, mobilization advisor of Rede Nossa São Paulo, a social organization working for “a just and sustainable city”.

Flooding also occurs in other poor and not-so-poor neighborhoods in São Paulo and other Brazilian metropolises.

In January torrential rains hit the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, capital of the southern state of Minas Gerais, where multiple floods especially affected the cities in the upper reaches of the basin of the Das Velhas River, the source of the region’s water.

In one of the most affected cities, Raposos, two-thirds of the 16,500 inhabitants had to leave their homes when the river rose more than 2.5 meters in the second week of January. At least 12 people died as a result of the rains in outlying neighborhoods.

“When the cities expanded the rivers and streams were ignored, and were only used as a place to dump waste and sewage. Flood-prone areas were occupied, settled by the poor, pressured by economic necessity, and the rich, (fleeing the city) because of their fears,” said Ronald Guerra, a member of the Das Velhas River Basin Committee (CBH).

Guerra, a rural tourism entrepreneur in the town of São Bartolomeu, in the historic municipality of Ouro Preto, listed deforestation, unregulated urbanization and mining as the major factors in the degradation of the watershed and sedimentation of the rivers, which especially threaten the downstream population.

Mining tailings dams pose a particularly serious risk for the basin that supplies water to 60 percent of the six million inhabitants of neighborhoods on the outskirts of São Paulo.

Three years ago one of the dams burst in a neighboring municipality, Brumadinho, leaving 264 dead and six missing, as well as silting and poisoning another river, the Paraopebas.

“Floods and landslides are not the fault of the river itself. There was human action that resulted in the elimination of vegetation and the occupation of slopes,” Guerra told IPS by telephone from São Bartolomeu.

The streets were transformed into veritable rivers during days of heavy rains in the Brazilian city of Raposos, in the upper part of the Das Velhas River basin, 30 kilometers upstream from Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais, with a population of 2.5 million. CREDIT: Das Velhas River CBH

Putting pressure on the government

“The State failed to play its role as regulator of land occupation, it let people occupy the banks of the rivers, without implementing a serious housing policy,” said Marcus Vinicius Polignano, secretary of the Das Velhas River CBH. “Today we have a chaotic situation that is entrenched. The great challenge is how to rebuild the cities.”

“We have to seek 21st century solutions that take the climate crisis into consideration, and we have to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past as we are doing,” he said in a telephone interview with IPS from Belo Horizonte.

The Das Velhas River CBH and other social movements successfully pushed for inclusion in the new Belo Horizonte Master Plan, in force since February 2020, of the directive that watercourses will no longer be channeled and that the valley bottoms will be cared for, to avoid new “scheduled floods,” the activist celebrated.

“Respecting natural infrastructure, seeking harmony with nature, allowing rivers to flow, not committing the stupidity of boxing them in could be a good route to take,” he said.

The Basin Committee mobilizes the local population, seeks to “change mentalities” and pressures decision-makers to adopt more adequate water policies. “We also propose better alternatives” to avoid new disasters, said Polignano, a physician with a master’s degree in epidemiology and a doctorate in social pediatrics.

It did not rain an exceptional amount in January, according to the expert, who said the problem was that the rainfall of an entire month fell in just 10 days. However, the damage caused by repeated urban floods can be mitigated by “open-minded” management, he argued.

In Belo Horizonte, capital of the southern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, home to 2.5 million people, torrential rains in January 2022 destroyed streets and flooded some neighborhoods, in a repeat of disasters that are becoming more frequent every year. CREDIT: Das Velhas River CBH

Rescuing nature

“Multifunctional nature-based solutions” are proposed by urban landscaper Cecilia Polacow Herzog, a graduate professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.

Creating a “rain garden” with diversified plants in a limited area to retain and infiltrate water is one aspect of her proposal that has recently drawn attention.

However, “it’s not only that, but everything that absorbs rain and promotes biodiversity, without which there is no soil to infiltrate and replenish the water table,” Herzog said in an interview with IPS by telephone from Lisbon, where she is currently based.

“Renaturalize,” or bring nature back to the cities, is her slogan. Parks of all sizes, small or large gardens; we must “turn gray infrastructure into green,” she said.

This requires “a systemic view,” understanding the city as a large complex system in which things have multiple effects and functions.

Diversified tree planting, for example, “makes the soil more alive, sequesters carbon and reduces pollution and noise, improves habitat for other species, produces fruit, attracts bees that pollinate, birds and fish that eat the fruit, and with more fish aquatic life expands,” she explained.

“A park represents more water, less heat, more recreation and social cohesion, it encourages urban agriculture,” Herzog added.

But she does not ignore the hurdles: “real estate interests, politicians keen on getting votes, the automobile industry that wants asphalt and waterproofing, together with the oil industry.”

Cities are not prepared for torrential rains and will require time to adapt to the climate crisis, she said.

Building the city by destroying nature results in chaotic floods when it rains with any intensity, as happens almost every year in the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte, warned Marcus Vinicius Polignano, secretary of the Das Velhas River Basin Committee, which supplies water to most of the local inhabitants. CREDIT: Das Velhas River CBH

Millions at risk

Brazil had 8.26 million people at risk of landslides and floods in 825 municipalities, according to a study by the National Center for Natural Disaster Monitoring and Alerts (Cemaden), of the Ministry of Science and Technology, based on data from the 2010 census conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.

Cemaden was created in February 2011 after landslides caused by heavy rains in towns in the hills near Rio de Janeiro left 947 people dead and nearly 300 missing, according to the Center.

In fact, the data indicate that 4.3 percent of the Brazilian population at that time faced a threat of flooding. If this proportion remains steady, 9.2 million people out of a current population of 214 million are now at risk, although there may have been an increase, given that there are now more extreme events.

The two metropolitan regions whose undulating topography tends to increase the danger, those of São Paulo and Belo Horizonte, show a higher proportion of people at risk in the study: 7.3 percent and 16.4 percent, respectively.

The Territorial Risk Areas Base (Bater) methodology is “robust and makes it possible to update the data” when a new census is carried out in Brazil, which should occur in the second half of 2022, after it was postponed in 2020 and 2021, said Regina Alvalá, deputy director of Cemaden and coordinator of the study.

“Torrential rains do not have repercussions if they fall in uninhabited areas, but rather because of their social impact,” which is why the risks are growing, given global warming, more frequent extreme events and the concentration of the population in large cities, the cartographic engineer with a doctorate in meteorology told IPS by telephone from the southern city of São José dos Campos, where Cemaden is based.

The biodigester and part of the biogas plant of the Cocal company, surrounded by a sugarcane plantation on all sides, in the municipality of Narandiba, in the west of the southern Brazilian state of São Paulo, where sugarcane has replaced cattle ranching as the main economic activity. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
NARANDIBA, Brazil, Dec 22 2021 (IPS)

Nothing is wasted from sugarcane, one can conclude from the biomethane production process at the Cocal plant, a Brazilian company that produces sugar, ethanol, electricity and other by-products from sugarcane agro-industrial waste.

Biomethane, equivalent to natural gas, which is methane of fossil origin, is the result of a long chain starting with the planting of sugarcane, originally intended for the production of sugar and spirits.

The sugarcane crop vastly expanded after Brazil decided to replace part of its gasoline with ethanol, in the face of rising oil prices in the 1970s.

Excess waste caused environmental disasters until companies were able to make use of it: bagasse as a source of thermal and electrical energy, for example. The vinasse and other wastes served as fertilizers, but they were imperfect because they contained organic material and consequently emitted polluting gases.

Cocal decided to produce biogas starting in 2021, subjecting vinasse and cachaza (sugarcane filter cake) to biodigestion in a plant built near its sugar mill and distillery, in the municipality of Narandiba, in the west of the state of São Paulo.

The decomposition of organic material inside the closed environment of biodigesters produces biogas, a mixture of gases. The extraction of these gases converts the waste into cleaner and more efficient fertilizers.

Biogas, on the other hand, can generate heat and electricity by burning it. But Cocal intends to refine most of it, i.e. to separate biomethane, a powerful fuel, from other gases, such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, which have industrial uses.

The biomethane from Cocal will be distributed through a pipeline to three nearby cities – Narandiba, Pirapozinho and Presidente Prudente – which have a combined total of 264,000 inhabitants. The project is a pioneer in supplying local gas to an inland region without access to natural gas, which in Brazil comes from offshore hydrocarbon deposits and has limited distribution due to the scarcity of pipelines.

It may, therefore, inspire similar projects, especially in the interior of the state of São Paulo, which concentrates more than half of the sugar and ethanol produced in Brazil, in more than 150 plants.

That is why biogas, which can generate electricity or biomethane, earned the nickname “pre-salt caipira”, referring to the large hydrocarbon deposits discovered since 2006 under an offshore pre-salt layer in national waters and a Brazilian term that is used to refer to inhabitants of rural, remote areas in the country.

Environmental reasons and local demand led Cocal, owner of two sugar and ethanol plants, to produce biomethane, said André Gustavo Alves da Silva, the company’s Commercial and New Products Director.

In addition, biogas is flexible and can be used for electricity generation or biomethane production, depending on market conditions. This reduces business risks, Alves argued.

The biodigester and part of the biogas plant of the Cocal company, surrounded by a sugarcane plantation on all sides, in the municipality of Narandiba, in the west of the southern Brazilian state of São Paulo, where sugarcane has replaced cattle ranching as the main economic activity. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
NARANDIBA, Brazil , Dec 20 2021 (IPS)

First came sugar. For four centuries, it was the main sugarcane product in Brazil. But since the 1970s sugarcane has grown and diversified as a source of energy: ethanol, electricity and biogas.

“Sugarcane is the green oil,” said André Alves da Silva, commercial and new products director of Cocal, as the company Comércio Indústria Canaã Açúcar e Álcool Ltda. is better known, which started large-scale production of biomethane, i.e. refined biogas, a renewable and clean equivalent of natural gas.

“We have a biofactory here,” he told IPS in an interview in the Cocal plant in Narandiba, a municipality located in the west of the southern state of São Paulo.

Referring to the plant whose scientific name is Saccharum officinarum as “sugarcane” has become obsolete in this region.

In addition to sugar and ethanol, electricity is generated from sugarcane bagasse, and biogas and other by-products are also created, such as biofertilizers, carbon dioxide gas and dried yeast, leftovers from alcohol fermentation, which, when processed, serve as protein-rich animal feed.

Biomethane in place of gas

The big novelty is biomethane, produced since June, as the starting point of a project that will bring gas to three closely grouped cities: Narandiba, Pirapozinho and Presidente Prudente, with a combined population of 264,000 people.

GasBrasiliano, a company of the state-owned oil conglomerate Petrobras, will be in charge of distribution and is building a 65-kilometer gas pipeline, which is scheduled to be inaugurated in June 2022.

“It is our first biomethane project, the first among many,” Alex Gasparetto, director-president of the distributor that holds the concession for piped gas in the west and north of São Paulo state, an area encompassing 375 municipalities and 9.2 million inhabitants, told IPS.

São Paulo, the richest and most populated state in Brazil, home to 46 million of the 214 million inhabitants of this enormous country, accounts for more than half of the national sugarcane production, in more than 150 agroindustrial sugar or ethanol plants next to sugarcane plantations, most of them in the GasBrasiliano concession area.

Sugarcane is the “green oil”, says André Alves da Silva, commercial and new products director of Cocal, an agroindustrial company located in Narandiba, in southern Brazil, which uses almost everything from sugarcane to produce electricity, biogas, biomethane, biofertilizers, yeast as animal feed and other gases, in addition to sugar and ethanol. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

“The potential is huge, sugarcane biomethane can replace all the diesel and liquefied petroleum gas (for cooking) consumed in the state, a privileged situation,” said Alessandro Gardemann, president of the Brazilian Biogas Association (ABiogás).

“Cocal is a demonstration project, which goes from sugarcane cultivation to the final consumer with the supply of biomethane for the entire year,” he told IPS by telephone from Londrina, a city in the southern state of Paraná where his technology services company, Geo Biogas & Tech, which promoted biogas in the sugar-energy sector, is headquartered.

Solution for seasonal limitations

Geo’s technological contribution was decisive for the Cocal biomethane project to take off. It has long been known how to make biogas from vinasse, but this liquid residue from the ethanol (or alcohol) distillery can only be used during harvest season, generally from April to November.

The vinasse is bulky and smelly, impossible to store for many days in the ponds built to collect it before it is put into the horizontal biodigesters where the organic material is broken down in an anaerobic process that produces biogas.

To ensure a year-round supply, Geo adapted a German technology to incorporate into biodigestion another waste product, cachaça or filter cake, a dark sludge resulting from the processing of sugarcane juice to make sugar. Cachaça, for Brazilians, is the name for sugarcane brandy.

A treatment process that removes impurities and part of the moisture converts this waste, which used to be discarded, into raw material for biogas. It has “10 times more organic matter than vinasse,” which is why it is more productive, Eduardo Baptista, supervisor of industrial production at the Cocal biogas plant, told IPS.

A sea of sugarcane plantations flood Narandiba and its neighboring municipalities in the southern state of São Paulo, where the agroindustrial company Cocal grows it as the raw material for its biofactory for energy, fuels and agricultural inputs. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

This innovation made it possible to overcome seasonality, as it is stored in four open-air tanks next to the two vertical biodigesters, specifically for the cachaça. “During the harvest, we use the vinasse and between harvests, the cachaça,” avoiding interruptions in the production of biomethane, explained Alves, the company’s commercial director.

A second factor in favor of the project, he said, was that there is local demand for gas that could not be met by the GasBrasiliano pipeline, whose nearest point is more than 100 km from Presidente Prudente, the main city in the region, with a population of 230,000.

Extending the existing network to this limited market would not be economically viable, but a 65-kilometer gas pipeline from Cocal is, said Gasparetto, GasBrasiliano’s director-president.

The third factor is environmental. With biomethane, Cocal seeks to reduce the greenhouse gases emitted in its ethanol production. Replacing diesel with green gas decarbonizes the activity by 95 percent. Additional reductions can be obtained with the new fuel in trucks and agricultural equipment, an alternative that is currently being tested.

In addition, the waste from which the biogas is extracted is converted into clean biofertilizers, which emit 75 percent less carbon than chemical fertilizers, said Cocal’s commercial director.

Lastly, the decision was also based on the dual use of biogas: electricity or biomethane.

“Having two options reduces the risks,” the proportions can be modified according to demand and prices, Alves said. Currently, 53 percent of the biogas is refined into biomethane and 47 percent is used for electricity generation.

The vinasse pond at the Cocal plant, in the Brazilian municipality of Narandiba, feeds the biodigesters that produce biogas, later purified and refined for use in electricity generation or conversion into biomethane, a renewable and clean fuel equivalent to natural gas. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Cocal has also been generating energy by burning bagasse since 2002. Today it can supply electricity to a city of 730,000 inhabitants, the company reports.

Social contributions

For all this energy production, Cocal has two industrial units, each with its own sugarcane fields around it. The first was installed in 1980 in Paraguaçu Paulista, 135 kilometers from Narandiba.

It employs a total of 5,500 workers in 22 municipalities and has 125,000 hectares planted to sugarcane, mostly on land leased under 20-year contracts, according to Alves. The harvest reached 8.7 million tons of cane last year.

Narandiba currently has about 6500 inhabitants, after 2000 arrived, attracted by the local operation of Cocal, inaugurated in 2008, said the town’s mayor, Itamar dos Santos Silva, who estimated at 600 the direct and indirect employees of the sugar and alcohol plant a year ago – almost 10 percent of the population.

The municipality, which had stagnated when cattle ranching dominated its economy in the last decades of the last century, has prospered again. “Sugarcane totally changed the social and economic situation in the region,” the mayor said in a meeting with IPS in his office.

Deposits of cachaça or filter cake, a residue from sugar production, proved advantageous in the generation of biogas at Cocal’s two plants in western São Paulo state, in southern Brazil. The reason is that the residue contains a lot of organic material and is available when there is a lack of vinasse between sugarcane harvests. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

In addition to offering more jobs, Cocal pays even the lowest-earning employees double what a ranch worker used to earn, he said. With the rise in purchasing power, “every day a new house is built in Narandiba” and commerce and the demand for schools, health services and recreation has grown, Dos Santos Silva said.

Tax revenue also increased, but it lagged behind the immediate demands created by the influx of new residents, lamented the mayor, whose plans include attracting industry and stepping up the training of young people for the new supply of technical jobs in the sugarcane agro-industry.

Environmental sustainability was the main motive for Liane, a company that makes food products such as biscuits and pasta, to sign the first contract for the purchase of biomethane distributed by GasBrasiliano in Presidente Prudente.

Biomethane does not pollute like fossil fuels and probably has lower costs than “the natural gas that comes to us by truck from far away,” Mauricio Calvo, Liane’s industrial director, told IPS by telephone from the company’s headquarters.

Initially, biomethane will go to companies, fuel stations, shopping malls, hotels and large restaurants, i.e. large consumers.

The supply of piped gas to households remains a long-term goal, Gasparetto told IPS by telephone from GasBrasiliano’s headquarters in Araraquara, a town 280 kilometers from São Paulo.

Long staircases, like the ones in this section of the Pavão-Pavãozinho favela, are the daily slog of residents of the steep hillside slums of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – a symbol of Latin America's urban inequalities. CREDIT: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 8 2021 (IPS)

The Brazilian megalopolis of São Paulo recorded 932 flooded premises on Feb. 10, 2020. The Mexican city of Tula de Allende was under water for 48 hours in September 2021. In Lima it almost never rains, but the rivers in the Peruvian capital overflowed in 2017 and left several outlying municipalities covered with mud.

Floods have become increasingly frequent in large Latin American cities, probably due to the effects of global warming and also to local factors, such as the extensive areas of concrete and asphalt that have replaced vegetation.

Extreme weather events are aggravating inequality “in a Latin America that has the most inequitable societies in the world,” said engineer Manuel Rodríguez, professor emeritus at the Universidad de los Andes who served as Colombia’s first minister of environment and sustainable development (1993-1996).

“The poorest of the poor live in shantytowns and slums in the areas most vulnerable to environmental risks, on undevelopable land along riverbanks or in the foothills,” where they are tragically affected by floods and landslides, he told IPS by telephone from Bogotá."There is a spatial inequality that results from the low-density expansion model of cities, which pushes low-income families to the periphery, makes access to public transportation difficult and requires long commutes." -- Pablo Lazo

This is especially important in Latin America, the world’s most urban region, where one in five people live in cities.

Thus, in addition to the 932 points of flooding reported to the fire department on Feb. 10, 2020, São Paulo also suffered 166 landslides that destroyed many houses. No deaths were reported on that day, but torrential rains usually claim lives in Greater São Paulo, which is home to 22 million people.

Brazil’s largest city, which spreads among rolling hills and numerous small valleys, has many neighborhoods that have had to learn to cope with flooding in the rainiest summers. This is due to the 300 streams that crisscross the area, most of which are covered by avenues or enclosed in channels that are unable to contain heavy downpours.

A good part of the 1.28 million inhabitants of the “favelas” or shantytowns of São Paulo, according to the 2010 official census, live on low-lying land, often along streams, without sanitation, and they are the first victims of floods. The poor make up 11 percent of the population of São Paulo proper.

In Rio de Janeiro there are also riverside favelas, but the ones built on hillsides or on the tops of hills that separate the city and some neighborhoods are much better known. The risk in these areas is landslides, which have killed many people.

In Brazil’s second largest city, favelas are home to 1.39 million people, 22 percent of the total population, according to the 2010 census.

“The topography allows them to live close to their jobs” so the choice is “between formal employment or living where housing is cheaper,” said Carolina Guimarães, coordinator of Rede Nossa São Paulo, a non-governmental organization that seeks to promote a “fair, democratic and sustainable” city.

This favela is next to a middle-class neighborhood in São Bernardo do Campo, the former capital of the automobile industry on the outskirts of São Paulo. The industry attracted migrants from other parts of the country who, without the jobs they dreamed of, could only build their precarious houses on occupied land on a hillside. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Lima, which has 10 million inhabitants, and other cities in Peru and Ecuador were victims of El Niño Costero, a climatic phenomenon that warms the waters of the Pacific Ocean but only near these two countries, where it also leads to more intense rainfall.

These and other Andean countries also face the threat of melting glaciers that could deprive the population of the Andes highlands of water, said Rodríguez. In the Caribbean, the biggest threat is hurricanes, which are becoming more frequent and more intense.

Greater poverty, more impacts

In addition to the fact that these phenomena hit the poor harder in Latin America, in the world’s most unequal region the poor have fewer resources to overcome the losses caused by the climate crisis, added the Colombian expert.

“Buying a new refrigerator and other appliances damaged each time it floods costs them much more. Poverty is a cause, driving them to disaster, and also a consequence of the disasters themselves,” said Guimarães, a former knowledge management coordinator at UN Habitat, the UN agency for human settlements.

It is a perverse logic.

The real estate business drives up the costs of the best, safest sites complete with infrastructure and services. There are too many at-risk areas where the poor “build their homes with their own hands,” without the support of a public policy that ensures them housing with “access to the city,” she told IPS by telephone from São Paulo.

“There is a spatial inequality that results from the low-density expansion model of cities, which pushes low-income families to the periphery, makes access to public transportation difficult and requires long commutes,” said Pablo Lazo, director of Urban Development and Accessibility at the World Resources Institute (WRI) in Mexico.

WRI Mexico designed the Urban Inequality Index (UDI), a tool for the formulation of public policies, which initially covers 74 metropolitan areas. It measures the public’s access to formal employment and services such as education, health and transportation, as well as food and culture.

This urbanization model also gives rise to shantytowns in risky areas, “a constant pattern that is repeated in Mexico City, whose eastern neighborhoods are built on hillsides, where water runs off very quickly, fueling landslides,” he said in an interview with IPS via video call from the Mexican capital.

Greater Mexico City is home to nearly 20 million people.

Rodríguez said this precariousness “is a widespread phenomenon in Latin America and the Caribbean, where 25 percent of the urban population lives in informal settlements.” Pushed to the periphery, where land is cheaper, but there are no jobs or public services, nor urbanization, the poor prefer slums near the center, he said.

Each one of hundreds of tents in a Homeless Workers Movement camp in 2017 represents a family that dreamed of obtaining a plot of land in the center of the industrial city of São Bernardo do Campo. The land they occupied had unclear ownership, but the attempt did not pan out. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Making inequality even more glaring

“The covid-19 pandemic laid bare the inequalities,” Lazo stressed.

As an example, he said “there were more deaths on the eastern periphery of Mexico City, where inequality is greater. One factor is distance: it takes five times longer to get to the hospital from the periphery than from the center, so many people don’t even take patients to the hospital.”

In addition, without water for hygiene and hand washing, the disease spreads more readily among the poor.

There is also a disparate power relationship between cities themselves. Tula de Allende, a city of 115,000 inhabitants located 70 kilometers north of the Mexican capital, suffered a major two-day flood in September 2021, not only because of the rains.

Mexico City’s water authorities discharged an excess of rainwater and wastewater into the Tula River that could flood the capital and its outlying neighborhoods, to the detriment of the city downstream, where the river overflow displaced more than 10,000 people and left a hospital without electricity, resulting in the death of 16 patients.

Concerted action is needed. A new governance model based on planning and coordination at a citywide level could be the way forward, said Lazo.

In Rio de Janeiro, Aruan Braga, urban policy coordinator for the Favelas Observatory, told IPS that “building a more equitable and democratic city requires including, in planning, low-income areas that sustain the city in day-to-day life but don’t have the right to participate in decision-making.”

Favelas lining hills are the best-known image of Rio de Janeiro, but there is also a large vulnerable population in low-lying, flood-prone areas. One example is the Maré Complex, where some 130,000 people live in 16 favelas.

On the shores of Guanabara Bay and the Cunha channel, so polluted they are like an open sewer, the complex suffers “floods every year,” said Braga, a sociologist with a master’s degree in development policies, who explained that the Maré Complex was built on a large piece of land reclaimed from mangroves and flood plains.

It was built by settlers relocated from more central favelas or from wealthy and beachside neighborhoods five decades ago, in a wave of “expulsion” from favelas that continues today. Maré also grew because it is next to Avenida Brasil, the main access route to the city center, and because it is home to industrial facilities.

View of a favela on a central hill in Rio de Janeiro, Santa Tereza. The upper part is a middle-class neighborhood of intellectuals and artists. The city’s hillsides are home to many favelas known for their high rates of violent crime. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

New policies for a new model

The four interviewees agreed that public policies are needed to make it possible to start reducing urban inequality in Latin America.

Lazo highlighted the need for mechanisms to control the market’s “greed”, such as a requirement that private housing projects include low-cost units.

“In France that proportion is 50 percent,” he said, to illustrate.

Braga said one good possibility for reducing the housing deficit in Rio de Janeiro would be by allocating empty public buildings to social housing. There are many unused state-owned buildings because the city was the capital of the country until 1960.

Movements seeking community solutions, “social urbanism”, urban agriculture and mobilization of the population for a more equitable and inclusive city point to the future, according to Guimarães.

Her Rede Nossa São Paulo has conducted studies on inequality that pointed to a difference of up to 22.6 years – from 58.3 to 80.9 years – in life expectancy between poor and rich neighborhoods in the city.

Bogota is in the process of organizing its territorial planning and there is talk of the “30-minute city”, following the example of Paris, which seeks to ensure that no one has to walk more than 15 minutes to do everything they need, Rodriguez said, describing a new model in Latin America.

Brazil has a "green future," announced Environment Minister Joaquim Leite and Vice-President Hamilton Mourão, in a videoconference presentation from Brasilia at the Glasgow climate summit, in an attempt to shore up Brazil’s credibility, damaged by Amazon deforestation. The two officials concealed the fact that deforestation in the Amazon rose by 21.9 percent last year. CREDIT: Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil-Fotos Públicas

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 26 2021 (IPS)

For three weeks, the Brazilian government concealed the fact that deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest increased by nearly 22 percent last year, accentuating a trend that threatens to derail efforts to curb global warming.

The report by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) based on the data for the year covering August 2020 to July 2021 is dated Oct. 27, but the government did not release it until Thursday, Nov. 18.

It thus prevented the disaster from further undermining the credibility of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro’s government, already damaged by almost three years of anti-environmental policies and actions, ahead of and during the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the climate change convention, held in Glasgow, Scotland from Oct. 31 to Nov. 13.Brazil had managed to reduce Amazon deforestation since the 2004 total of 27,772 square kilometers. A concerted effort by environmental agencies reduced the total to 4,571 square kilometers in 2012. This shows that it is possible, but it depends on political will and adequate management.

INPE’s Satellite Monitoring of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon Project (Prodes) recorded 13,235 square kilometers of deforestation, 21.97 percent more than in the previous period and almost three times the 2012 total of 4,571 square kilometers.

The so-called Legal Amazon, a region covering 5.01 million square kilometers in Brazil, has already lost about 17 percent of its forest cover. In a similar sized area the forests were degraded, i.e. some species were cut down and biodiversity and biomass were reduced, according to the non-governmental Amazon Institute of People and the Environment (IMAZON).

Carlos Nobre, one of the country’s leading climatologists and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says the world’s largest tropical forest is approaching irreversible degradation in a process of “savannization” (the gradual transition of tropical rainforest into savanna).

The point of no return is a 20 to 25 percent deforestation rate, estimates Nobre, a researcher at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of São Paulo and a member of the Brazilian and U.S. national academies of sciences.

Reaching that point would be a disaster for the planet. Amazon forests and soils store carbon equivalent to five years of global emissions, experts calculate. Forest collapse would release a large part of these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

A similar risk comes from the permafrost, a layer of frozen subsoil beneath the Arctic and Greenland ice, for example, which is beginning to thaw in the face of global warming.

This is another gigantic carbon store that, if released, would seriously undermine the attempt to limit the increase in the Earth’s temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius this century.

The Amazon rainforest, an immense biome spread over eight South American countries plus the territory of French Guiana, is therefore key in the search for solutions to the climate crisis.

Evolution of the deforested area in the Brazilian Amazon since 1988, with its ups and downs and an upward tendency in the last nine years. Policies to crack down on environmental crimes by strengthened public agencies were successful between 2004 and 2012. Graphic: INPE

Brazil, which accounts for 60 percent of the biome, plays a decisive role. And that is why it is the obvious target of the measure announced by the European Commission, which, with the expected approval of the European Parliament, aims to ban the import of agricultural products associated with deforestation or forest degradation.

The Commission, the executive body of the 27-nation European Union, does not distinguish between legal and illegal deforestation. It requires exporters to certify the exemption of their products by means of tracing suppliers.

Brazil is a leading agricultural exporter that is in the sights of environmentalists and leaders who, for commercial or environmental reasons, want to preserve the world’s remaining forests.

The 75 percent increase in Amazon deforestation in the nearly three years of the Bolsonaro administration exacerbates Brazil’s vulnerability to environmentally motivated trade restrictions.

This was the likely reason for a shift in the attitude of the governmental delegation in Glasgow during COP26.

Unexpectedly, Brazil adhered to the commitment to reduce methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030, a measure that affects cattle ranching, which accounts for 71.8 percent of the country’s emissions of this greenhouse gas.

As the world’s largest exporter of beef, which brought in 8.4 billion dollars for two million tons in 2020, Brazil had previously rejected proposals targeting methane, a gas at least 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide in global warming.

Brazil also pledged to eliminate deforestation by 2028, two years ahead of the target, and stopped obstructing agreements such as the carbon market, in a totally different stance from the one it had taken in the previous two years.

The threat of trade barriers and the attempt to improve the government’s international reputation are behind the new attitude. The new ministers of Foreign Affairs, Carlos França, and Environment, Joaquim Leite, in office since April and June, respectively, are trying to mitigate the damage caused by their anti-diplomatic and anti-environmental predecessors.

But the new data on Amazon deforestation and the delay in its disclosure unleashed a new backlash.

President Jair Bolsonaro stated that the Amazon has kept its forests intact since 1500 and does not suffer from fires because it is humid, in a Nov. 15 speech during the Invest Brazil Forum, held in Dubai to attract capital to the country. He made this claim when he already knew that in the last year deforestation had grown by almost 22 percent. CREDIT: Alan Santos/PR-Fotos Públicas

Leite claimed not to have had prior knowledge of the INPE report, difficult to believe from a member of a government known for using fake news and disinformation. He announced that the government would take a “forceful” stance against environmental crimes in the Amazon, commenting on the “unacceptable” new deforestation figures.

Together with the Minister of Justice and Public Security Anderson Torres, who has the Federal Police under his administration, he promised to mobilize the necessary forces to combat illegal deforestation.

The reaction is tardy and of doubtful success, given the contrary stance taken by the president and the deactivation of the environmental bodies by the previous minister, Ricardo Salles, who defended illegal loggers against police action.

The former minister stripped the two institutes executing environmental policy, one for inspection and the other for biodiversity protection and management of conservation units, of resources and specialists. He also appointed unqualified people, such as military police, to command these bodies.

President Bolsonaro abolished councils and other mechanisms for public participation in environmental management, as in other sectors, and encouraged several illegal activities in the Amazon, such as “garimpo” (informal mining) and the invasion of indigenous areas and public lands.

The result could only be an increase in the deforestation and forest fires that spread the destruction in the last two years. The smoke from the “slash-and-burn” clearing technique polluted the air in cities more than 1,000 kilometers away.

Bolsonaro, however, declared on Nov. 15 in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, that fires do not occur in the Amazon due to the humidity of the rainforest and that 90 percent of the region remains “the same as in 1500,” when the Portuguese arrived in Brazil.

His vice-president, General Hamilton Mourão, acknowledged that “deforestation in the Amazon is real, the INPE data leave no doubt.” His unusual disagreement with the president arises from his experience in presiding over the National Council of the Legal Amazon, which proposes and coordinates actions in the region.

Brazil had managed to reduce Amazon deforestation since the 2004 total of 27,772 square kilometers. A concerted effort by environmental agencies reduced the total to 4,571 square kilometers in 2012. This shows that it is possible, but it depends on political will and adequate management.

The biofuel from this mini biogas power plant in the municipality of Entre Rios do Oeste, in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná, is supplied by local pig farmers, who earn extra income while the municipality saves on energy costs for its facilities and public lighting. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 11 2021 (IPS)

The number of victims of serious burns, some fatal, has increased in Brazil. Without money to buy cooking gas, the price of which rose 30 percent this year, many poor families resort to ethanol and people are injured in household accidents.

A larger number of poor Brazilians have returned to using firewood, less explosive but also a cause of accidents and of health-damaging household pollution. It is cheaper in the countryside, while in the cities people burn boards and old furniture, not always as widely available as alcohol or ethanol, which can be purchased at any gas station.

In fact, biofuels, such as wood, ethanol, biodiesel and biogas, have been competing with fossil fuels since the industrial use of coal began in England in the 18th century. Economic and environmental factors influence private and public decision-making with regard to their production and use.

A commitment made by 103 countries at the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) on Climate Change, which is taking place in the Scottish city of Glasgow during the first 12 days of November, to reduce methane emissions from 2020 levels 30 percent by 2030, may now give biofuels a new boost.

Replacing oil, gas and coal with other sources will help contribute to that goal.

“In Brazil, the demand for ethanol was imposed for economic reasons: high oil prices; and energy reasons: the risk of shortages,” said Regis Leal, an aeronautical engineer and specialist in Technological Development at the state-owned National Laboratory of Biorenewables.

Ethanol in the seventies

Ethanol is a fuel produced from sugarcane, corn or any vegetable with a high sucrose content, which is mainly used in motor vehicles. Brazil is the world’s second largest producer of ethanol, after the United States.

The National Alcohol Programme (Proalcohol) was created in Brazil in 1975, two years after the first big oil crisis that more than tripled the price of a barrel of oil. Brazil, which at the time imported more than 80 percent of the crude oil it consumed, lost the momentum of an economy that had grown by more than 10 percent per year between 1968 and 1973.

With alcohol or ethanol replacing gasoline or mixed with it, the aim was to reduce dependence on imported oil, while intensifying the search for hydrocarbon deposits for self-sufficiency, which Brazil only achieved three decades later.

This sugar mill and ethanol distillery are in the southern Brazilian state of São Paulo, much of whose territory has been turned into one large sugarcane field. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

In the United States, the use of ethanol began to be fomented in the 1980s, but for environmental reasons, Leal told IPS in an interview by telephone from Campinas, a city in the interior of the state of São Paulo, near the country’s largest sugar and ethanol-producing area.

In cities located at high altitudes, such as Denver, the capital of the western U.S. state of Colorado, at 1,600 metres above sea level, lower oxygen levels lead to incomplete combustion of petroleum derivatives and, consequently, greater carbon monoxide contamination and health damage, he explained.

Mixing in MTBE (methyl tert-butyl ether), a combination of chemicals, added oxygen, but because it was a highly toxic product it was soon replaced by ethanol, made from corn in the case of the U.S.

In both Brazil and the United States, biofuel production also bolstered or stabilised the price of sugar and corn by absorbing surplus production.

This is an aspect that is misunderstood by those who condemn biofuel production for apparently reducing food production. This is a false dilemma, because it must be analysed on a case-by-case basis, said Suani Coelho, coordinator of the Bioenergy Research Group (GBio) of the Energy and Environment Institute at the University of São Paulo.

“In Tanzania, a FAO (U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation) study evaluated the production of ethanol from manioc. The hypothesis seemed doubtful, also because the energy balance of cassava is not so good. But in Tanzania there is a surplus of the crop that cannot be exported. So it is worth taking advantage of it to make ethanol,” said Coelho, a chemical engineer with a doctorate in energy.

In Brazil, where ethanol is made almost exclusively from the more locally productive sugarcane, corn was incorporated in the industry in 2017, with a distillery in Lucas do Rio Verde, in the state of Mato Grosso, the country’s largest producer of soybeans, corn and cotton.

Lucas do Rio Verde is in the state of Mato Grosso, the region of Brazil with the highest soybean and corn production, which is crowded with agribusiness warehouses and silos. The first corn ethanol distillery was set up there to take advantage of the surplus corn production. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

“Corn is produced there as a second crop, after soybeans, in the same area, in a volume that is not viable for export. So it makes sense to use it for ethanol,” she told IPS by telephone from São Paulo.

Ethanol led to a great improvement in the urban environment.

In Brazil it has already replaced 46 percent of gasoline, according to the sugarcane industry association (Unica), with an annual production of 35 billion litres. It is used as fuel alone in motor vehicles or as a 27 percent blend in gasoline.

The United States produces 50 to 70 percent more than Brazil, depending on the year. Together, they account for about 84 percent of world production, a level of concentration that hinders free international trade in ethanol.

Biofuels or electrification

Coelho and Leal do not agree with the claim that the electrification of transportation tends to hinder the expansion of biofuels to other countries and major producers.

Developing countries do not have the capacity to make large investments to build new infrastructure, such as electric recharging points for vehicles. Moreover, “Brazil is going through a crisis, it is increasing fossil fuel thermoelectric generation, making the energy mix dirtier, and it has no other way to increase the supply of electricity,” argued Coelho.

Leal said the demand for ethanol can grow a great deal. “Any increase in its blend in the United States, which accounts for half of the world’s gasoline consumption, will have a huge impact,” he said.

The ethanol expert also questions the environmental and climatic advantages of electric vehicles, taking into consideration the entire production cycle, transportation, batteries, employment and other aspects.

View of a vast oil palm plantation in Tailandia, a municipality in the state of Pará, in Brazil’s eastern Amazon rainforest. The intent to turn palm oil into biodiesel did not work out, because the oil serves a more attractive market in the food and chemical industries. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Biodiesel was not as successful as ethanol, but it also improved the urban environment and has a future, with some additional effort.

It is produced from vegetable or animal oils, even used, and other fatty materials.

Its main problem is that it is more expensive and therefore cannot compete with diesel fuel in order to replace it, Leal pointed out. Currently the diesel blend has been reduced from 12 to 10 percent, so as not to further drive up the cost of diesel fuel, the price of which is rising worldwide.

Another biofuel, which has been around for a long time but is now expanding, is biogas.

It is not only clean, but actually helps to reduce pollution, since it is the gas generated from garbage, wastewater, agricultural waste and animal excrement, which is no longer released into the air, thus reducing greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

Its use is incipient in Brazil, but it has the potential to replace 70 percent of the diesel fuel consumed in the country, at a lower cost, according to the Brazilian Biogas Association. And big cities and the country’s enormous agricultural sector offer plenty of raw materials.

By means of a simple refining process, biogas is converted into biomethane, equivalent to natural gas and, therefore, a fuel that can even be used to run heavy vehicles. If used for electricity generation, it could meet 36 percent of national demand, the association of companies in the sector estimates.

Small biodigesters produce biogas that could prevent the use of firewood and ethanol, and the resultant accidents and pollution, among poor families, especially in the countryside, noted Coelho.

“Appropriate public policies and low-interest loans for investments” could boost biogas and its environmental benefits, at a time when international financial institutions are cutting financing for coal-fired and other fossil fuel power plants, Leal said.

The two experts stressed that all these biofuels play an important role in making green hydrogen, produced from renewable energy sources, viable and recognised as central to the world’s energy future.

Biofuels have served humanity since its earliest past, not always in a sustainable way. The first was firewood, on which 2.8 billion people in the world still depend, according to an October 2020 World Bank report. But it is environmentally unsound, and leads to deforestation and household pollution.

The oils and resins that illuminated cities and homes in centuries past, before the advent of electricity, were also destructive. Oils extracted from whale blubber and from the eggs of Amazonian turtles are examples, almost driving certain species to extinction.

Many people living on the banks of rivers in the Amazon rainforest live in stilt houses over the water. Water into which garbage and other waste is dumped – the same water that is used for human consumption, with important consequences on their health, whose magnitude was underlined by the Covid pandemic. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RÍO DE JANEIRO, Oct 8 2021 (IPS)

Basic sanitation, a sector that is undervalued because, according to politicians, it does not bring in votes, has gained relevance in Brazil due to the pandemic that has hit the poor especially hard and the drought that threatens millions of people.

Brazil has made very little progress in sewerage construction in the last decade. In 2010, only 45.4 percent of the population had sewer service, a proportion that rose to 54.1 percent in 2019. Access to treated water increased from 81 to 83.7 percent in the same period.

During that time, however, hospitalisations due to waterborne diseases decreased by 54.7 percent, from 603,623 to 273,403, according to the study “Sanitation and Waterborne Diseases” by the Trata Brasil Institute, released on Oct. 5 in the city of São Paulo.

Among children under four, who represent 30 percent of the patients requiring hospital admission, the reduction was slightly more pronounced, 59.1 percent.

“The data make it clear that any improvement in the public’s access to drinking water, collection and treatment of wastewater results in great benefits to public health,” the Institute’s president, Édison Carlos, stated in the report.

Covid-19 has underscored the country’s social and economic inequalities by disproportionately affecting the poor, who for one thing are the least likely to have sewerage services.

This is reflected in the distribution of basic sanitation infrastructure by region in Brazil. In the North, only 12.3 percent of the population was served by a sewer system in 2019, the last year data was available from the governmental National Sanitation Information System (SNIS), which served as the basis for the study.

As a result, it is the region with the highest rate of hospitalisations, 22.9 per 10,000 inhabitants. It is also the region that concentrates the country’s most generous water resources, as it is located entirely in the Amazon basin.

But the presence of so many large rivers does not mean the local population has drinking water. In fact only a little more than half of the population has access to clean water.

The result is a high incidence of diarrhea, dengue fever, leptospirosis, schistosomiasis, malaria and yellow fever, all of which are waterborne diseases.

One of the favelas or shantytowns of São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, where local residents have turned a stream into an open-air garbage dump and a source of frequent flooding due to lack of sewage and garbage collection. Nor do favelas in Brazil’s cities have piped water. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

At the other extreme, the Northeast region suffers from water scarcity in most of its semiarid territory. With only 28.3 percent of the local population served by sewer systems and 73.9 percent with access to treated water, it recorded 19.9 cases of hospitalisation per 10,000 inhabitants in 2019.

Part of the progress in sanitation in the region is due to the more than 1.2 million rainwater storage tanks that have been set up in rural areas by the Articulação do Semiárido (ASA), a network of 3,000 social organisations created in 1999.

The semiarid ecoregion, an area of 1,130,000 square kilometres (most of it in the Northeast) that is home to 27 million people, suffered the longest drought on record from 2012 to 2017, and even until 2019 in some parts.

But this time the hunger, violence and exodus to other regions triggered by similar calamities in the past did not occur.

Disparities in health

A comparison of Brazil’s 26 states reveals more alarming disparities. The northeastern state of Maranhão, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, registered 54.04 hospitalisations per 10,000 inhabitants, far higher than its Amazonian neighbour to the west, Pará, with 32.62.

“Maranhão faces huge challenges in sanitation, as does Pará, but it has higher population density, more people living close together and in contact with dirty water in the open air, for example. Its beaches, often polluted by irregular waste, are another factor to consider,” said Rubens Filho, head of communications at the Trata Brasil Institute and coordinator of its new study.

At the other end of the scale, Rio de Janeiro stands out with the lowest rate of hospitalisations, only 2.84 per 10,000 inhabitants, even though some of its low-income municipalities are among those with the poorest sanitation coverage.

“It is possible that some municipalities do not register cases of waterborne diseases or that people do not seek medical assistance,” Filho told IPS from São Paulo, in an attempt to put the low rate of hospitalisations into context.

“Above and beyond the differences between states, Brazil still has more than 270,000 hospitalisations for preventable diseases; these are costs that could be drastically reduced if everyone had sanitation coverage,” he stressed.

Rainwater harvesting tanks are now part of the landscape in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast, thanks to recent initiatives to help people live with drought. There are some 200,000 tanks for irrigating crops, like those of farmer Abel Manto, and 1.2 million to store drinking water. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The North and Northeast are the poorest regions in the country, despite the enormous contrast in terms of their ecosystems – rainforest vs semiarid. They are both far from the goal of near universal sanitation in the country by 2033, set by a law – the Legal Framework for Sanitation – passed in 2020.

More precisely, the aim is to bring treated water to 99 percent of the population and sewerage to 90 percent in this enormous country of 213 million people.

The three regions least affected by the lack of such infrastructure, the Midwest, South and Southeast, are suffering this year from the effects of reduced rainfall, apparently due to climate change and no longer to occasional, short-lived droughts.

The low rainfall began in 2020 and since then has caused interruptions in the water supply in cities such as Curitiba, capital of the southern state of Paraná, and an increase in forest fires in the Pantanal, wetlands on the border with Bolivia and Paraguay, and in the southern Amazon jungle.

This year, many cities in the southeastern state of São Paulo began rationing water. In the state capital, São Paulo, and surrounding urban areas, the local sanitation company reduces the pressure in the pipes at night, a measure that prevents leaks but leaves some areas without water.

The fear is that there will be a repeat of the 2014 and 2015 water shortage crisis, which was similar to other shortages that have occurred this century. Twenty years ago a similar drought caused blackouts and ushered in energy rationing for nine months, starting in June 2001.

Brazil depends heavily on rivers for its electricity supply. Even though the proportion was much higher two decades ago, hydroelectric power plants still account for 63 percent of total installed generation capacity.

Reforestation and recovery of springs and headwaters have become part of the country’s sanitation and energy policy.

The frequency of droughts in south-central Brazil confirms the role of the lush Amazon rainforest in increasing rainfall in large areas of this country and neighbouring Argentina and Paraguay.

So-called “flying rivers” carry moisture from the Amazon to South America’s most productive agricultural lands and to watersheds that play a key role in the production of hydroelectricity. But deforestation of the world’s largest tropical forest is taking its toll.

A view of the shantytown in São Bernardo do Campo, the hub of Brazil’s automobile industry, near São Paulo. A common sight in the poor neighbourhoods in Brazil’s cities: unpainted cinderblock houses are stacked on top of each other over streams, into which they dump their debris and garbage. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Lessons learned from Covid-19

Covid-19 has highlighted the urgent need for sanitation. There is a consensus among epidemiologists that the lack of sanitation is one of the factors in the unequal spread and lethality of the coronavirus, to the detriment of the poor, by limiting access to proper hygiene as a preventive measure.

With 598,152 deaths recognised by the Ministry of Health up to Oct. 4, Brazil’s death toll is second only to that of the United States, which counts more than 703,000 deaths due to Covid. But in proportional terms, 280 Brazilians have died per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 214 in the U.S., according to the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland., which keeps a global record on the pandemic.

The need for improved sanitation infrastructure is also gaining momentum for financial reasons. Brazil’s states, whose governments control the main sanitation companies, see privatisation as a source of revenue to overcome their fiscal imbalance and possibly give the sector a boost.

The 2020 Legal Framework for Sanitation encourages the concession of the service to the private sector as a way to attract investment and meet the goal of near universal coverage.

Companies in four Brazilian states have already been privatised. In Rio de Janeiro, on Apr. 30, 2021, the sanitation services of three of the four areas into which the state was divided will be handed over to private groups for 4.2 billion dollars, 133 percent more than expected.

The fourth area is to be privatised later this year. The 35-year concession requires larger investments than the sums paid for the operation of the services.

Cleaning up rivers, lakes and bays, expanding and repairing the pipeline network, improving water quality and reducing distribution losses, estimated at 41 percent, are tasks that will fall to the new owners.

Solar panels cover the rooftop of a hotel in the southern state of Santa Catarina - an example of the distributed generation of electricity that has been expanding widely in Brazil in the last decade, thanks to a resolution by the regulatory agency that encourages consumers to generate their own electricity, as part of the changes in the country's energy mix. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RÍO DE JANEIRO, Sep 8 2021 (IPS)

As most of the world seeks to modify its energy mix to mitigate climate change, Brazil has also been forced to do so to adapt to the climate crisis whose effects are being felt in the country due to the scarcity of rainfall.

It will be hard to avoid blackouts, or even perhaps electricity rationing, by October or November of this year as a result of the declining water level in reservoirs in the southeast and midwest regions, which account for 70 percent of the country’s hydroelectric generation capacity.

“The crisis did not start this year, it has dragged on for almost a decade,” said Luiz Barata, former director general of the National Electric System Operator (ONS) and current consultant for the Institute for Climate and Society. “The climate has changed the rainfall regime, which will not go back to what it used to be. Droughts are no longer periodic and spread widely apart; they have to do with deforestation.”

The ONS is an association of generation, transmission and distribution companies, together with consumers and the government, which coordinates and oversees the entire structure that ensures electricity in this South American country of 214 million people.

In Brazil, hydroelectric power now accounts for 62 percent of the total generating capacity, currently 174,883 MW, according to the National Electric Energy Agency (ANEEL), the sector’s regulatory body.

As a result, what happens to the rainfall has a strong impact on national life, because of the environmental, climatic and energy effects.

The regions hardest hit today suffered severe droughts in 1999-2002 and 2013-2015, and the phenomenon could be repeated in 2021, said Barata, an engineer who worked in three state-owned companies in the sector and since 1998 has served in various management posts, including as ONS director general from 2016 to 2020.

The southeast and midwest of Brazil are the main recipients of the moisture carried in by the winds – the so-called “flying rivers” that originate in the Amazon rainforest, according to climatologists. The current drought is reportedly a consequence of deforestation, which already affects nearly 20 percent of the Amazon jungle.

But water shortages are affecting almost the entire country. The northeast, which is semi-arid for the most part, experienced its longest drought since 2012, six years all together and even longer in some areas.

View of the Itaipú hydroelectric plant shared by Brazil and Paraguay on the Paraná River, which forms part of the border between the two countries. In years of abundant rainfall it is the largest power plant in the world. With an installed capacity of 14,000 MW, it is much smaller than China’s Three Gorges, with a capacity of 22,400 MW. But this year the Itaipu dam’s generation will fall sharply due to drought. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Brazil lost 15.7 percent of its territory covered by water, the equivalent of 3.1 million hectares, between 1991 and 2020, according to a satellite imagery study by the Brazilian Annual Land Use and Land Cover Mapping Project known as Mapbiomas, a network of non-governmental organisations, universities and technology companies.

The minister of mines and energy, retired admiral Bento Albuquerque, acknowledged that global warming was a factor in the gravity of the water crisis that is threatening the power supply. But the minister forms part of a government that denies climate change, as well as the need to preserve forests and the environment overall.

Brazil is experiencing “the worst drought in its history,” he said in a message to the nation on Aug. 31 to announce incentives to reduce consumption during the peak demand period – between 17:00 and 21:00 hours – by means of discounts on the electricity bill.

But the real push for savings is a gradual rise in the electricity bill by the government since May, when dry season began with reservoirs at critical levels, similar to those of 2001, when Brazil had to resort to heavy rationing to avoid an energy collapse.

At that time, hydropower was overwhelmingly predominant, accounting for more than 85 percent of the electricity consumed in the country.

Angra 1 and 2, the two nuclear power plants currently in operation in Brazil, in a coastal locality 150 km south of Rio de Janeiro, have a capacity of 640 and 1,350 MW, respectively. Angra 3, under construction intermittently since the 1980s next to the first two, will have the same capacity as Angra 2. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

There were very few thermal power plants. Since then, various administrations have fomented construction of thermal plants, boosting energy security to the detriment of the environment by increasing the use of fossil fuels, and of consumers, by raising the cost of electricity.

The increase is due to the greater use of thermal power plants and also to the importation of electricity from Argentina and Uruguay, the minister said. The cost is sometimes ten times that of cheaper sources, such as hydro, wind and solar.

To reduce consumption, and thus avoid blackouts and the use of more expensive power plants, the regulator ANEEL slapped an additional charge for each 100 kilowatt-hours of consumption, which gradually increased to 14.20 reals (2.75 dollars) as of Sept. 1, up from 4.17 reals (0.77 cents of a dollar) in May.

Brazil’s electricity mix has recently been diversified with the expansion of new renewable sources. Wind power now accounts for 10 percent of the total installed capacity and solar power makes up 1.87 percent, while thermal power, mostly from oil derivatives, rose to 25 percent.

There will probably be enough supply to weather the current drought and water shortage, thanks to this increase in diversified generation, the measures to curb consumption, and an economy that is not taking off as expected after a large part of the population received anti-COVID vaccines.

The authorities rule out the possibility of rationing because the total extension of transmission lines has doubled since 2001, which allows electricity to be delivered where it is needed, and negotiations are underway with large consumers, mainly industrial, to reduce consumption during peak hours.

Hydroelectricity is no longer the overwhelmingly predominant source of energy in Brazil, as sources such as wind and solar gain ground. All that remains of some mega-projects are old signs, like this one in Cachuela Esperanza, a Bolivian town where former presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil announced the construction of a large binational hydroelectric plant on the Beni River, which never materialised. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

But the damage, both social and economic, has already been done. “Expensive energy aggravates poverty, hits businesses hard, and drives up insolvency, inflation and unemployment,” Barata told IPS by telephone from Rio de Janeiro.

Moreover, this process is not neutral. Costly energy is a burden for distribution companies that are already facing the negative effects of the pandemic and the evolution of the electricity sector.

“They will probably ask for tariff corrections next year, but since it will be an election year, the government will reject the anti-popular measure,” said Roberto Kishinami, energy coordinator at the non-governmental Institute for Climate and Society.

The administration of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro is not interested in rationing either. “Rationing energy involves planning rational measures, something alien to this government, which has shown little concern for preventing the nearly 600,000 deaths from COVID-19,” he told IPS during a telephone interview, also from Rio de Janeiro.

Given the complexity of Brazil’s electric system and of crisis management, blackouts are likely to occur in limited areas, for which blame can be attributed to specific actors, Kishinami said.

According to Barata: “It is more serious than rationing, because blackouts create chaos in the economy and everyone’s life.”

To avoid this risk and other damage, the expert believes it is necessary to “obligatorily reduce residential and commercial consumption” and thus take pressure off the system.

The medium- to long-term solution would be to “help the water reservoirs recover by means of the expansion of new renewable sources and hydrogen” – that is, with wind, solar and other energy sources meeting a large part of the demand, so that water can be saved, for other purposes as well, such as human consumption, agriculture and river transport, he said.

Barata predicts that wind and solar will lead electricity generation in Brazil in the next decade. Hydropower will become merely complementary, providing security of supply, a role currently played by fossil fuels.

“The world is moving towards renewables; thermal power plants do not solve anything,” he said.

In Anapolis, Brazil's North-South railway line, which took more than 30 years to complete, was unable to connect with the existing network due to the different width of its tracks and its southern section remained inactive for several years, until it was privatised in 2019. Precedents like this one create concern about the new planned railway lines, dedicated to the transportation of grains to the export ports. CREDIT: Mario Osava

By Mario Osava
RÍO DE JANEIRO, Aug 27 2021 (IPS)

The sea of soybeans that sprouts every November will spread even further in the state of Mato Grosso if three new railway lines that would boost soy production in central-western Brazil and growing parts of the Amazon rainforest are built.

The most controversial railway line, the EF-170, is better known by its nickname “Ferrogrão (grainrail)” because it is to be built for the export of grains from the mid-northern part of Mato Grosso, the area where most soybeans and corn are produced in Brazil, through Amazonian rivers and ports in the north of the country.

Mato Grosso already produces 70 million tons of grains per year, a total that will reach 120 million tons by 2030, said Minister of Infrastructure Tarcisio de Freitas, who described the Ferrogrão as “the most important logistics project in Brazil,” in a digital meeting with foreign correspondents in June.

It would lower freight rates in general, by creating competition in the transportation of the bulk of the national agricultural production, replacing thousands of trucks and expanding exports through the ports of northern Brazil, relieving pressure on ports in the south and southeast.

The government intended to auction the concession for the rail line this year, but is unlikely to do so in the face of environmental obstacles and economic uncertainties.

The railway would cause the deforestation of between 1,671 and 2,416 square kilometres by stimulating the expansion of the planted area in the state of Mato Grosso alone, according to a study by the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI), an international non-profit organisation with which the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro is associated.

The study does not take into account damage in the state of Pará, where two thirds of the 933 kilometres of the line would be built and where the port of Miritituba on the Tapajós River, the railway’s destination, is located.

In Brazil’s Amazon region, the EF-170 railroad, known as Ferrogrão, is a project of agricultural transnationals supported by the Brazilian government. The aim of the railway, construction of which has not yet begun, is to bolster soybean and corn exports through the ports of northern Brazil. Map: National Land Transport Agency of Brazil

At the port, grains are transferred to barges that travel about 1,000 kilometres on the Tapajós and Amazon rivers to reach the export ports where the large transatlantic ships dock.

In addition to underestimating the extent of the deforestation, the project would violate indigenous rights, threaten conservation areas and stimulate illegal land appropriation, says a group of 38 social organisations in an “extrajudicial notification” to banks that could finance the construction of the Ferrogrão.

“The most serious thing is that it does not evaluate alternative routes,” said Sergio Guimarães, coordinator of the Infrastructure and Social Justice Working Group, a coalition of 47 organisations that headed the notification pointing out nine flaws in the project. (The Working Group is one of the 38 social organisations that sent the notification.)

There are alternatives for transportation already in place or under way for soybeans in Mato Grosso, where 35.9 million tons were produced this year (26.5 percent of the country’s total), such as the BR-163 highway along the same route as the Ferrogrão, a railroad under construction and two others in the planning stage. They should all be assessed in order to find the best economic and environmental options, he told IPS by telephone from Brasilia.

“It is very difficult for the Ferrogrão to be competitive, considering that the BR-163 highway is already in place and there are other alternatives,” said economist Claudio Frischtak, president of the InterB International Business Consultancy.

“It’s a bad project,” he told IPS in a conversation in Rio de Janeiro. “It underestimates the investments and the time needed for implementation and runs the risk of having the same fate as two other railroads whose construction was interrupted in the last decade, leading to the loss of public resources.”

The state of Tocantins in central Brazil aims to repeat this century the soybean boom that transformed the neighbouring state of Mato Grosso, the country’s largest soy and corn producer, which has record exports. To do this, producers are demanding the extension of rail transport. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The economist compared the data from the government’s proposal with figures from the Midwest Integration Railway (Fico), a project under construction by the mining company Vale, which has years of experience in railways. Fico will link Agua Boa, a city in central-eastern Mato Grosso, and Mara Rosa, 383 kilometres to the east, in the state of Goiás.

Based on this comparison, Frischtak calculates that the actual cost of building the Ferrogrão would be 3.4 times the amount reported by the government: 5.45 billion dollars rather than 1.58 billion dollars.

The projected rate of return of 11.05 percent is also totally unrealistic, he said, as is the estimated construction time of nine years.

Frischtak projected that construction would actually take 21.9 years, or even longer given the complicated terrain where the Ferrogrão would be built.

The Fico does not reach the most productive soybean production area, which is around the city of Sinop, the planned starting point of the Ferrogrão. Instead, it connects with the North-South Railway that reaches the port of Itaqui, on the Atlantic coast of the northeastern state of Maranhão, which has the capacity to serve the largest ships.

The third new rail alternative for grains in Mato Grosso is the Ferronorte, a 730-kilometre stretch planned by Rumo, the largest national railroad transportation company, with access to the Port of Santos, the country’s biggest, after crossing the state of São Paulo, the most densely populated productive, agricultural and industrial state in Brazil.

The large warehouses next to the BR-163 highway, used by trucks to transport soybeans to the Amazon ports through which they are exported, have turned Lucas do Rio Verde into a hub of the agro-export economy of the state of Mato Grosso, in central-western Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Rumo’s rail network already reaches Rondonópolis, in the south of Mato Grosso. The idea would be to extend it to the mid-north of the state, where large quantities of soybeans are produced between October and February, and corn in the following months, on the same land. Agriculture in tropical climates has the competitive advantage of producing two harvests per year.

But the biggest competition for the Ferrogrão, according to Frischtak, would be the BR-163 highway, the paving of which was completed in 2019. Management of the highway was awarded to a private company this year. Overland trucking costs fell and continue to decline, which will hinder the financial viability of the new parallel rail line.

The economist argued that it would make more economic sense to upgrade existing infrastructure, such as widening the highway and improving the waterways that also serve agricultural exports through the north. “We must not continue to make the same mistakes,” he said.

But Tiago Stefanello Nogueira, coordinator of Agricultural Policy and Logistics of the Association of Soybean and Corn Producers of Mato Grosso (AprosojaMT), said there is no doubt about the viability and benefits of the Ferrogrão.

“There will be less pollution, because it will reduce the consumption of petroleum derivatives, greater transportation capacity, less carbon emissions and thousands of jobs created during construction, as well as demand for services; there are many benefits,” he asserted.

Railroads are mostly used for freight transport in Brazil, and passenger trains like this one on the Carajás line in Maranhão state often run at a loss, as compensation for the local populace from the companies that control the rail lines. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Only 11 percent of the land in Mato Grosso is dedicated to agriculture, according to Aprosoja, and this could expand to 40 percent, Nogueira estimates.

“To achieve this we need all modes of transportation, whether railways, highways and future waterways, and the paving and widening of roads,” he told IPS by telephone from Sorriso, a city located in a soybean-growing area in the north of the state.

But that’s the problem, according to Alexandre Sampaio, Policy and Programme coordinator of the International Accountability Project (IAP), an international organisation that works for human and environmental rights in development. He said Ferronorte would exacerbate the already unbalanced development model in its area of influence.

Of the 90.3 million hectares in Mato Grosso, 9.7 million are under agricultural production. That includes nine million hectares where soybeans are grown and then corn and cotton after the soybean harvest. The remaining 0.7 million hectares are dedicated to other agricultural activities, according to Aprosoja.

In other words, even though the state of Mato Grosso is known as a huge breadbasket, it produces abundant agricultural production for export but little food, which it has to buy from other regions. In fact, only 18 percent of the state´s population is rural.

Although it is intended to be used for export agriculture, “the railroad is a great investment that drives up the value of the land, boosts the economy and wealth, in addition to reducing traffic on the roads. In other words, it indirectly benefits family agriculture,” said Nilton Macedo, president of the Federation of Agricultural Workers of Mato Grosso.

“We have 148,000 members, 97,000 of whom were resettled as part of the agrarian reform programme,” he told IPS by telephone from Pontes e Lacerda, in the southeastern part of the state. The federation says it represents 500,000 workers, including wage-earning farmworkers and family farmers who work their own land.

In contrast, soybean and corn producers number only 7,300, according to Aprosoja, but they dominate the state’s economy.

Brazil's infrastructure minister, Tarcísio de Freitas, speaks during a videoconference with foreign correspondents, co-organised by IPS, during which he detailed plans to improve roads, ports and airports, build new railways and interconnect them, using private investors in the face of domestic fiscal constraints. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RÍO DE JANEIRO, Jun 4 2021 (IPS)

Health, fiscal, environmental and political crises have not prevented Brazil from attracting private capital to expand infrastructure, according to the sector’s minister, Tarcísio de Freitas.

Concessions for airports, highways, railways and port terminals, auctioned in the last two years, total 14 billion dollars in investments, the infrastructure minister announced at a press conference with some twenty foreign correspondents, in which other leaders from the areas of trade and transport also took part.

Accelerating this process from July will allow the country to raise the total investment to 200 billion dollars over the next five years, if resources and services under the management of other ministries, such as power plants and sanitation, are included, he projected.

“It is the largest infrastructure concession programme in our history,” Freitas said in a Jun. 2 video conference with foreign correspondents.

The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to Brazil’s success in drawing international capital, contrary to what might have been expected.

“We forged ahead when many countries pulled back and stopped offering their assets due to the uncertainties of the economic situation,” said Freitas. “We decided to bet on investors’ long-term vision and seek out the excess capital available in the world, as unique sellers.”

The operation of 22 airports was privatised on Apr. 7 for a sum equivalent to 17 times the minimum price set, despite the air transport crisis caused by the pandemic. A French company acquired the 30-year concession for a block of seven airports in northern Brazil. The others are now in the hands of a Brazilian consortium.

The success was due to “Brazil’s tradition of respecting contracts,” the large portfolio of projects and their excellent profitability, said the minister at the virtual press conference, promoted by IPS in partnership with the Association of Foreign Media Correspondents, the National Confederation of Commerce and the Federation of Chambers of Foreign Trade.

Attracting national and international private capital is the way to cover the infrastructure deficit in Brazil, given the “delicate fiscal situation” that limits public investment, the infrastructure minister said.

A passenger train meets a freight train on the Carajás Railway, built for the export of iron ore in northern Brazil. Railways in Brazil are mainly used to transport grains and minerals, accentuating the weight of commodities in the economy. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

“The Ministry of Transport had 20 billion reais (about 7.5 billion dollars at the time) for investments in 2014 when it was only in charge of land transport; today the Ministry of Infrastructure has six billion reais (1.2 billion dollars) and oversees ports, airports, roads and railways,” he pointed out, to underscore the need for private capital.

Brazil invested 2.2 percent of its GDP in infrastructure from 2001 to 2014 and “should invest four to five percent to overcome its historical deficiencies,” said José Tadros, president of the National Confederation of Commerce.

That is much less than neighbouring countries such as Chile and Peru invest in infrastructure, and the consequence is high costs, “bad roads and ports, and lack of railways and intermodal connections,” he lamented.

But “it’s a virtuous moment” in the railway sector, with a strong rise in investments expected after the renewal of existing concessions and the future construction of two new major lines, said Fernando Paes, executive director of the National Railway Transport Agency.

The Ministry of Infrastructure’s National Logistics Plan sets a target for railways to carry 36 percent of national freight by 2035, an increase of 70 percent from the current share.

Ferrogrão (part of the plan) is the “most important project in Brazil,” according to Freitas. The 933-kilometre route will mainly serve the export of soy and maize from the mid-north of the state of Mato Grosso, the country’s largest producer of these exports, accounting for 27 percent of the total. The northern Amazonian route will be used instead of the more distant southern ports.

A view of the Brazilian BR-163 highway before its final northern section was paved in 2020. It is mainly used to export soy from the state of Mato Grosso. Now the plan is to build a railway next to it in order to make grain transport cheaper. CREDIT: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

Exports are currently transported via the BR-163 highway, the paving of which was only completed in February 2020, after decades of soybean-laden trucks getting stuck in the mud while crossing more than 900 kilometres of Amazon rainforest to reach the port of Miritituba on the Tapajós River, before the soy is carried over 1,100 kilometres down the river to the Atlantic ports.

The railway serves the interests of the multinational corporations that dominate these Brazilian exports and the global agricultural trade, such as the U.S. companies ADM, Bunge Limited and Cargill.

But Ferrogrão will make transporting these exports cheaper and will help reduce freight costs across the country, by expanding the scale of agricultural exports throughout northern Brazil and establishing a logistical hub between the heart of the Amazon and central Brazil, the infrastructure minister hopes.

Products from the Manaus Free Trade Zone, an industrial park in the capital of the state of Amazonas, will reach major national markets via waterways and the railway, he predicted.

He also said its construction will have beneficial environmental effects by cutting greenhouse gas emissions by trucks and curbing the more intense deforestation provoked by roads.

But environmentalists and indigenous rights advocates disagree.

“It will stimulate the expansion of the agricultural frontier in the Amazon rainforest, where there is a lack of governance, which results in deforestation,” said Sergio Guimarães, executive secretary of the Infrastructure Working Group, in an interview with IPS by telephone from Brasilia after the press conference.

The environmental assessment does not include the indirect impacts of the project over an area wider than the railway route and its margins, he said. Cheaper, largescale transport tends to expand the area of production in a region already affected by huge monocultures on the edges of the Amazon rainforest.

A road in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, with an endless line of trucks transporting soy beans and maize for export. The plan is that by 2035 at least 36 percent of freight transport in this continental-sized country will be by rail. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

In addition, more supply and demand studies and comparative analyses of alternatives are needed, the activist said.

Three railway projects have been presented to transport exports of soy and maize from the mid-north of Mato Grosso, which currently stand at 70 million tons per year and will increase to 120 million tons in the near future, according to Freitas.

In addition to Ferrogrão, an isolated line to the north, the Central-West Integration Railway (Fico) will run from the east, connecting to the North-South Railway which is already in operation and has access to ports in the Northeast and Southeast of Brazil.

The third alternative is a proposal by the Rumo company to extend its Northern Network, which now reaches the south of Mato Grosso, to the centre of the soy-producing region. This network has the advantage of connecting to railways with access to Santos, Brazil’s main export port, and crossing the state of São Paulo, the most economically productive and populous state.

But “there is not enough freight to make the three railways viable,” said Guimarães, who is calling for comparative studies on the Ministry of Infrastructure’s Logistics Plan’s other projects and concessions.

Other risks identified by Guimarães regarding the Ferrogrão are the possibility of overloading and accidents on the Tapajós-Amazonas waterway, if most of Mato Grosso’s production is exported via this route, and variations in river flows due to climate change.

Another railway, the West-East Integration line (Fiol), which crosses the northeastern state of Bahia and had a 537-kilometre stretch granted to a mining company controlled by Kazakhstan’s Eurasian Resources Group, also faces environmental opposition for threatening local biodiversity, especially in the area where a port is to be built.

Ports, which were a “bottleneck” for exports, are also undergoing improvements and extensive privatisation, the minister announced.

And waterways, an undervalued resource in Brazil, are also included in the transformations his ministry intends to make. But this is where the effects of climate change are being felt most even now with a severe drought in midwestern and southeastern Brazil. Navigation on the Tietê river, which crosses the state of São Paulo in southeastern Brazil, is expected to be suspended.