Flush with settlement cash, Brazilian states begin deforestation fight

BRAZILIAN states are bolstering the fight against destruction of the Amazon rainforest with millions of dollars from an oil company’s corruption settlement that allows them to partially compensate for weakening environmental protections under President Jair Bolsonaro.

State environmental agencies will have a one-off windfall that Reuters calculates will total at least $27 million (R456m). The cash, which comes from a massive settlement payment from state-run oil firm Petrobras, will be spent on patrol officers, Jeeps, surveillance technology and other outlays to protect the rainforest, officials in all nine Amazon states told Reuters.

“It fell from the sky. You open and look at your bank balance and there’s money you didn’t even know that you had,” said Roberio Nobre, the head of the environmental agency in Amapa state, on Brazil’s northern border with French Guiana.

The amount of money going to the state environmental agencies has not been previously reported.

Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon climbed to an 11-year high in 2019 and continues to rise this year.

That has coincided with a decline in resources at Brazil’s federal environment agency Ibama. Its budget has been repeatedly cut in recent years and it now has less than half the 1 600 field agents it had in 2009.

“The transfer of money from the Petrobras Fund comes at an opportune time. The states can fill the vacuum and act as a counterpoint to the federal government,” said Ana Karine Pereira, an environmental policy professor at University of Brasilia.

Petroleo Brasileiro SA, as Petrobras is formally known, was the centre of Brazil’s largest corruption scandal – the Car Wash probe – that involved bribes being paid to hundreds of politicians and business leaders to fix public construction contracts.

The oil company admitted wrongdoing related to record keeping and internal controls, ultimately agreeing to pay a $853m fine to settle charges that it violated US anticorruption laws.

For normally cash-strapped states, the money has radically expanded budgets.

Pará is hiring an additional 100 environmental field agents to patrol for deforestation and other crimes, 10 times the number of agents they had before.

Several of the states have lengthy written plans for how the money will be used. |