BY OLIVER STUENKEL | JANUARY 11, 2021
Biden can learn important lessons from Europe’s failure to coax Brazil into moderating its environmental policies.
https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/how-biden-can-change-bolsonaros-mind-on-the-amazon/
SÃO PAULO – When U.S. President-elect Joe Biden suggested, during a presidential debate in September, that the U.S. offer Brazil $20 billion to end deforestation in the Amazon, he mentioned unspecified economic consequences if President Jair Bolsonaro refused. Bolsonaro reacted angrily, replying in an all-caps tweet that “OUR SOVEREIGNTY IS NON NEGOTIABLE,” and that Brazil would not accept “bribes” or “baseless threats.”
Bolsonaro’s frantic reaction was unsurprising. Over the past two years, neither France’s more aggressive approach nor Germany’s or Norway’s decisions to suspend their payments to the Amazon Fund – Norway, the fund’s largest donor, has contributed more than a billion dollars over the past decade – have led Bolsonaro to change course. The remarkably broad alliance of environmentalists, Western governments, international fund managers who control trillions of dollars, and European companies threatening to boycott Brazilian products has not had much of an impact. Quite to the contrary: In 2020, deforestation in Brazil hit a 12-year high, with 2.7 million acres razed in the year ending last July. Fines for illegal logging, a key indicator of the government’s commitment to combat deforestation, have plunged to their lowest in twenty years.
The scenario is challenging, but there is hope that the Biden administration could coax Bolsonaro into actually reducing deforestation. Likely to aid this effort significantly…
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