BRASILIA (AFP) — Brazil's new environment minister, Carlos Minc, took up his functions Tuesday in a government increasingly split over how to balance preservation and development in the Amazon rainforest.
Minc, the 56-year-old former environment secretary for the state of Rio de Janeiro, replaces a greatly respected minister, Marina Silva, who unexpectedly stepped down early this month after losing a series of inter-ministry fights over the future of the Amazon.
His nomination was seen as part of an effort by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to restore confidence in Brazil's ecological credentials generally and its management of the Amazon specifically.
Lula said he has known Minc for 30 years.
"This means that the government's environmental policy will not change, and it is the same one that was in the program that helped me win the elections," he said.
The Amazon, a vast jungle which covers nearly half the surface of Brazil and also stretches into Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru and Venezuela, has suffered increasing deforestation in recent months.
Lula's government has tightened environmental protection laws and mounted police operations against illegal loggers, ranchers and soya farmers.
But it has also started emphasizing the need for economic development in the Amazon, drawn by the skyhigh prices fetched for commodities and food.
Some foreign politicians, particularly in Britain, have suggested that conservation of the area -- sometimes called the "lungs of the Earth" for its role in absorbing carbon dioxide -- was much too important to be left to Brazil.
That prompted Lula to say Monday that "the Brazilian Amazon has an owner, and that owner is the Brazilian people."
Minc will have to walk a thin line between asserting his environmental policies and maintaining communication with other ministries that hold great influence over the Amazon.
For instance, he will have no control over an ambitious sustainable development plan whose execution Lula has left up to his strategic affairs minister, Roberto Mangabeira Unger.
Marcelo Furtado, a representative for Greenpeace in Brazil, said Minc's first task, though, would be to "rescue the legitimacy of the environment ministry" that he said left with Silva.
"There is a question in the air about Brazil's ability to recover its environmental management. Confidence in Brazil's ability won't come back through speeches but through concrete action in the Amazon," Furtado said.
He added that he believed Lula was less than committed to protecting the Amazon, likening environmental issues to "a stone in the shoe" for the president.
A lobbyist for the Amazon, Alberto Cantanhede of the Amazonian Workgroup, said he believed Minc's first problem would be to wrest some of the decision-making power back from Mangabeira Unger.
But he will also have to "marry ideas for environmental protection, sustainable development and economic growth, which the former minister didn't manage to do."
Cantanhede rejected the argument that Brazil was incapable of looking after the Amazon, saying: "We certainly are (capable) -- and that's why the Amazon is still here."
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
