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How Biden Can Change Bolsonaro’s Mind on the Amazon (Americas Quarterly)

BY OLIVER STUENKEL | JANUARY 11, 2021

Biden can learn important lessons from Europe’s failure to coax Brazil into moderating its environmental policies.

https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/how-biden-can-change-bolsonaros-mind-on-the-amazon/

SÃO PAULO – When U.S. President-elect Joe Biden suggested, during a presidential debate in September, that the U.S. offer Brazil $20 billion to end deforestation in the Amazon, he mentioned unspecified economic consequences if President Jair Bolsonaro refused. Bolsonaro reacted angrily, replying in an all-caps tweet that “OUR SOVEREIGNTY IS NON NEGOTIABLE,” and that Brazil would not accept “bribes” or “baseless threats.”

Bolsonaro’s frantic reaction was unsurprising. Over the past two years, neither France’s more aggressive approach nor Germany’s or Norway’s decisions to suspend their payments to the Amazon Fund – Norway, the fund’s largest donor, has contributed more than a billion dollars over the past decade – have led Bolsonaro to change course. The remarkably broad alliance of environmentalists, Western governments, international fund managers who control trillions of dollars, and European companies threatening to boycott Brazilian products has not had much of an impact. Quite to the contrary: In 2020, deforestation in Brazil hit a 12-year high, with 2.7 million acres razed in the year ending last July. Fines for illegal logging, a key indicator of the government’s commitment to combat deforestation, have plunged to their lowest in twenty years.

The scenario is challenging, but there is hope that the Biden administration could coax Bolsonaro into actually reducing deforestation. Likely to aid this effort significantly…

Read full article here.

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SOBRE

Oliver Stuenkel

Oliver Della Costa Stuenkel é analista político, autor, palestrante e professor na Escola de Relações Internacionais da Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) em São Paulo. Ele também é pesquisador no Carnegie Endowment em Washington DC e no Instituto de Política Pública Global (GPPi) ​​em Berlim, e colunista do Estadão e da revista Americas Quarterly. Sua pesquisa concentra-se na geopolítica, nas potências emergentes, na política latino-americana e no papel do Brasil no mundo. Ele é o autor de vários livros sobre política internacional, como The BRICS and the Future of Global Order (Lexington) e Post-Western World: How emerging powers are remaking world order (Polity). Ele atualmente escreve um livro sobre a competição tecnológica entre a China e os Estados Unidos.

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