Planet Earth and Brazil’s Election

Brazil is holding the final round of its presidential election this coming Sunday. There are so many reasons this election is a big deal. It could deepen the shift to the right across Latin America. It could install a second generation of the Bolsonaro family in the presidency. But one big reason is the Amazon.

Brazil is home to the most important rainforest in the world. Its trees absorb a huge amount of our carbon emissions and regulate global weather patterns. What Brazil’s government does or doesn’t do about deforestation will affect us all.

Today my colleague Adam Ellick, our Brazil bureau chief, writes about how the left lost the Amazon — and why a local backlash could have global consequences.

How the Brazilian left lost the Amazon

By Adam B. Ellick

It wasn’t so long ago that the Amazon was a left-wing stronghold. In 2010, the Workers’ Party of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won nearly 70 percent of the vote in the nine states that make up the Brazilian Amazon.

This year, in the first round of voting on Oct. 4, Lula won just 46 percent of that vote.

A region once associated with Indigenous tribes and environmental activists is increasingly dominated by cowboy-chic culture — rodeos draw massive crowds, and country music celebrating ranch life tops the charts. And on Sunday, voters in one of the world’s most important environmental regions will head to the polls, with all signs indicating that a majority will vote in favor of Flávio Bolsonaro, who denies that humans are responsible for climate change.

It’s a stunning swing, with potentially enormous consequences beyond Brazil. And what it reveals is that Brazil’s main left-wing party — a party that cares about environmental protection — has been unable to come up with an approach to saving the Amazon that is also politically sustainable.

“For decades, Brazil has been alternating between plundering the Amazon for resources or keeping it bucolic and green,” Salo Coslovsky, an expert on the Amazonian economy at New York University told me. “But neither option produces a stable outcome.”

The ‘What comes next’ problem

The Amazon is incredibly important for the world. It’s the planet’s largest tropical rainforest. Its trees store well over 100 billion tons of planet-warming carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere. It has also long been viewed as a potential source of income — from the rubber boom at the turn of the 20th century to the logging, cattle and mining industries that have recently razed large swaths of its trees.

Leftist governments have made huge progress slowing deforestation, which in the last year reached a record low, deploying satellites to spot clearings in real time and sending agents to seize illegal timber and cattle.

Where they’ve failed, experts say, is on the “What comes next” part of the equation.

Those who lost their income in those raids were often neglected afterward. They didn’t receive support for transitioning to alternative ways to make a living through, say, sustainable farming. “All that mattered was getting a lower deforestation rate that everyone outside of Brazil likes,” said Beto Veríssimo, the co-founder of Imazon, an Amazon conservation organization.

The result has been a deepening resentment that has pushed the region right. Take Novo Progresso, a town in Pará State notorious for illegal land grabs. Lula’s party won 55 percent of the vote there in 2010. After federal crackdowns against deforestation, Novo Progresso became one of the most pro-Bolsonaro places in Brazil. More than 84 percent of the vote there went to Bolsonaro this month.

Bolsonaro’s father, Jair, a former president, oversaw a surge in deforestation during his time in office. (My colleagues Sergio Peçanha and Ana Ionova have an in-depth look at just how much rainforest was lost here.)

Flávio Bolsonaro has now pledged to end illegal land clearing; what many fear is that he’ll do so by making it easier to clear land legally.

Missed opportunities

Some economists see missed opportunities. Brazilian companies spend about $800 million a year importing cocoa beans from Ivory Coast and palm oils from Indonesia and Colombia. These crops grow well in the Amazon, and they could be farmed on land that was cleared years ago.

Brazil also sells raw Amazonian goods like robusta coffee and black pepper to other countries, which then do the lucrative part — processing them for markets like Europe.

The most egregious example is probably Brazil’s namesake nut. Some Brazil nuts are harvested in Brazil, but then sold to Bolivia and Peru, which shell and package them. These nuts are later exported to Europe — or sometimes even back to Brazil.

Brazil’s stock of deforested land in the Amazon is double the size of California, and a lot of it remains idle or underutilized. While cattle ranching remains one of the more lucrative uses, experts say nuts, cacao, exotic fruits and coffee are all part of an untapped forestry system that, paired with forest plantations and more productive cattle ranching, could provide more sustainable economic alternatives, if anyone pushed for them.

But the economy of the Amazon, simply put, has never been a priority for the rest of Brazil, which has competing infrastructure and development needs, Veríssimo said. It is often an afterthought for national leaders, many of whom have never visited or don’t grasp its complexity and opportunity.

The Amazon holds at least a third of the world’s remaining tropical forests. Some sources put it at more like half. Its rains supply farms and cities across South America. That makes the Brazilian presidential election one of the most important in the world for anyone who cares about the planet.

The 20 million voters who live in the Brazilian Amazon will vote in an election in which the two candidates were separated in the first round by roughly 2.2 million votes. That no major party in Brazil has yet figured out a sustainable way to persuade many of these voters to preserve the environment where they live is now poised to have consequences for everyone.

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