Murilo Oliveira
Brazil, August 23, 2023.
President Lula yesterday, August 22, 2023, at the BRICS Summit in South Africa, sought to respond to the reflection I proposed here, using the term “environmental neocolonialism” to explain why he despises the Additional Protocol of the free trade agreement between the Union Europe and Mercosur. It was not the sense in which I proposed the question, or rather, the neocolonialism that I propose to reflect on is that of Russia and China, and of large monocultures and extensive livestock that threaten the forest. Everything that is not on the Brazilian table and that goes against the intention of keeping the forest standing and avoiding global warming.
In the current government, of President Lula, there is a very well placed concern to have the forest standing, and to obtain forms of sustainable economic development for the 50 million people who inhabit the Amazon region in all the countries that comprise it. The concern with sustainable development for this population has come before the other concerns in several proposals in Brazil, as I believe it should. But there is no need to talk about or abandon a preservationist perspective, as we can count on collaboration, notably financial, from part of the world that has already deforested its forests, to keep the Amazon forest standing, especially in the stage of human and scientific development that we meet all over the world when we talk about climate issues, for example.
A concern that did not exist when we were talking about classic colonialism, which due to extreme irony cannot be called the “environmental neo-colonianism” of the European Union, as President Lula intends. The answer found by President Lula when he distorts the proposed question, moves away from facts about how, for example, it exists today for Russia perhaps especially, which had a strong influence on the Bolsonaro Government, which was extremely harmful to the preservation of the Amazon, this evolutionary stage that already we struggled to understand and which is repeated not only for Brazil sponsored by Russia but for all of Africa in the race for mining on that continent. As well as agricultural and livestock crops that advance on the forest to feed China, which has as much influence over this government of Brazil, as Russia over the previous one, and it is not exactly in the food that Brazilians have on their table, nor only solving the issues of those 50 million people who inhabit the Amazon in a sustainable way.
Operating this type of appropriation of the reflection proposed in his first speech at the BRICS Summit does not help a discussion that was quite well done by the Lula Government on how to keep the forest standing, a proposal certainly from our traditional colonizers in the past, from several cycles of monocultures for export, but which today manifest a different concern in their current evolutionary stage, with the delay that can even be repetitive as the reflection proposed here, of the neocolonialism of Russia and China at this point in time.
@CoexistenceLaw
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