Brazil’s Amazon dilemma: Rein in environmental commitments or face a far-right resurgence

If vast fires consuming the Amazon represented the global threat posed by Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil, his replacement last year by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva gave hope to environmentalists worried about the fate of the planet’s biggest rainforest.

His reappointment of veteran campaigner Marina Silva as environment minister promised a vigorous rebuilding from the institutional wreckage done to the country’s environmental policies during the four years of Bolsonaro’s far-right administration.

Marina (as she is universally referred to) had once before put in place a regime that eventually brought deforestation down to record low levels during her previous stint in the job under Lula between 2003 and 2008. And while this year’s impending burning season will probably see more forest go up in flames many environmentalists are optimistic about her impact after just 18 months back on the job.

The administration has already rebooted a federal action plan to combat deforestation, restarted important state financing mechanisms designed to fund conservation and promote the energy transition and is rebuilding state environmental bodies that were gutted by the Bolsonaro administration, says Suely Vaz, a former head of Brazil’s environmental protection agency.

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But this optimism is tempered by a new threat coming into view. Many activists are nervously monitoring a struggle under way within Lula’s government that could yet see the Amazon region become the next frontier for Brazil’s oil and gas industry.

The debate within government centres on whether to explore for billions of barrels of oil that geologists say could lie in waters near the mouth of the Amazon river. “In the area of climate policy there has been important progress but the energy sector presents a clear contradiction to this strong narrative of not just preserving the Amazon but of Brazil’s effort to assume a leadership role in global environmental policy,” warns Vaz, who now works on environmental policy at Climate Observatory, a coalition of non-governmental groups.

The so-called Equatorial Margin is already exerting a growing hold over the global oil industry and countries in the western hemisphere.

After a successful exploration campaign neighbouring Guyana has declared proven reserves of 11 billion barrels, meaning its population of 800,000 could soon become some of the richest inhabitants on earth.

This in turn has provoked neighbouring Venezuela to reactivate a long-standing border dispute with its small neighbour that it now accuses of stealing its oil.

Brazil, with reserves already approaching 16 billion barrels, would potentially become a front-rank oil exporter were its own portion of the Equatorial Margin to hold reserves similar to those found off Guyana. The current focus of bureaucratic infighting is exploration block FZA-M-59, which lies offshore of the Amazon river estuary. The decision by the environmental protection agency within Marina’s ministry to refuse a permit for state oil company Petrobras to drill there has led to the mobilisation of other parts of the federal government, led by the energy ministry, to overturn the decision.

A coalition of over 80 environmental and indigenous groups have warned this mobilisation is part of a broader effort to open up Brazil’s portion of the Equatorial Margin for the oil sector. While Petrobras insists it can safely drill off the Amazon coast environmentalists warn that the potential impact on the region’s unique and fragile ecosystem has not been fully studied. They also question why a government seeking to be a global leader in the energy transition is so eager to add potentially billions of tonnes of carbon to the global atmosphere.

But the energy sector is an important motor of capital investment in Brazil and the flow of cash into a new oil frontier is a tempting prize for a government struggling to fire up an economy that has spent over a decade in the doldrums. In recent comments president Lula mas made it clear he favours drilling over the objections of his environment ministry. He says everything will be done to respect the environment “but we are not going to throw out any opportunity to make this country grow”.

That has caused some in the environmental movement to worry Lula is repeating the cycle from his first two terms in the presidency which saw Marina put in place an environmental regime that led to a steep decline in deforestation, only to then be pushed out over her objections to large scale infrastructure projects in the jungle that caused new cycles of environmental degradation and violence.

“The drop in deforestation is a fact and should be celebrated. But this cannot be used to justify an acceleration of oil and gas exploration in the Amazon. It is obvious that the environment ministry’s efforts in reducing deforestation are being used as a smoke screen by the government so it can implement an expansion of oil exploration in the Amazon,” says Juliano Araújo, of the Arayara Institute which advocates for Brazil’s transition away from carbon.

Allied to the economic question there is also a difficult political one involved for Lula. This is illustrated by the decision of Randolfe Rodrigues, a senator from the Amazonian state of Amapá, to quit Marina’s Sustainability Network party following the refusal to allow drilling in block FZA-M-59, which lies offshore of his state. He had called for more studies on the viability of exploration and his resignation reflected the fact any politician opposed to exploration has little future in Amapá, one of Brazil’s poorest and least developed states.

“People in Amapá feel abandoned by the rest of Brazil and the oil sector could have been an opportunity to combat the misery that already drives deforestation in our state and misery is not compatible with a successful environmental policy,” says Mary Cruz, a Sustainability Network leader in Amapá who is sympathetic to the dilemma faced by her former party colleague.

The block on exploration has been exploited by far-right politicians who are increasingly powerful in Amapá. They claim it is proof that the demands of outside environmentalists are responsible for the widespread poverty in the Amazon, the poorest of Brazil’s five regions. “The difference is Rodrigues and many of us here advocate development with sustainability while the extreme right wants growth without the minimum interest in environmental questions,” says Cruz.

For now Marina’s ministry is resisting efforts to have the ban on exploration reversed by other parts of the administration. But the pressure is building as Lula’s team struggles to achieve the economic growth it sees as necessary to avoid a resurgence of the far-right.

Whether the government’s environmentalist wing can hold other colleagues to the decision to leave on the table the huge sums of money oil companies would offer to exploit the Equatorial Margin looks set to be tested further.

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