The president of the Brazilian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency (Apex Brasil), Jorge Viana, defended in China that the government and the business community should recognize their environmental problems related to the deforestation of the Amazon instead of trying to hide them.
Faced with a delegation made up mainly of agribusiness executives, who are under external and internal pressure for investments in sustainability and even boycott campaigns against their products, he associated the cutting down of the forest with the advancement of livestock.
“We Brazilians should stop saying outside Brazil that Brazil has no environmental problems. We have and have for a long time”, said PT Jorge Viana, who is a former governor of Acre and a forestry engineer.
He spoke at a seminar organized by the Brazilian Center for International Relations (Cebri), held at the Center for China and Globalization (CCG).
“If we recognize what has already been done wrong, we will be better able to defend the good things we are doing in the Amazon or are trying to do”, he said.
China is the main buyer market for national agribusiness products. And the petista spoke in front of an audience of around 100 representatives of local governments, Chinese authorities, and executives of giant companies in the Brazilian market, such as Suzano, JBS and Vale.
In the audience were representatives of Syngenta, Cargill and Chinese think tanks, as well as diplomats and specialists in international relations and members of the special advisory of the Presidency of the Republic.
The Minister of Agriculture, Carlos Fávaro, opened the seminar, but did not witness Viana’s statement.
Viana cited a series of data to support her thesis. According to him, in the last 50 years, 21% of the Amazon was deforested, an area of 84 million hectares. Another 79% percent of the Amazon remains preserved.
“I want to give very objective numbers. I said that 84 million hectares were deforested. What are these areas being used for? 67 million hectares for livestock; 6 million for grain farming. And 15 million (are) of secondary forest”, stated the Apex president.
He credited the data to institutions such as the Ministry of Agriculture, FAO, and satellite deforestation monitoring entities such as Mapbiomas and Imazon.
“Brazil, recognizing the problems it has, can present extraordinary solutions and these solutions can be very strong in terms of convincing our interlocutors.”
According to Viana, deforestation was reduced in the FHC, Lula 1 and 2, and Dilma Rousseff governments, but doubled in the Jair Bolsonaro government.
“We had problems with the past government. I recognize that the past government encouraged the occupation of indigenous lands and deforestation”, he said, considering that the productive sector and civil society decided to face deforestation.
He also said that the Brazilian Forest Code has not yet been fully implemented.
For the president of the Apex, when the country succeeds in reversing this trend, still on the rise in the Lula government according to Deter data, it should also be considered a victory for the productive sector. He proposed technological improvements in land use and forest restoration. He stated that Vale, Suzano and Marfrig will recover 4 million hectares of degraded areas.
Viana said that Lula wants to visit Beijing as soon as possible, after postponing the trip for health reasons, and defended the formalization of an environmental cooperation mechanism between Brazil and China, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, with emphasis on the market of carbon credits.
Source: CNN Brasil
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