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The agenda of national priorities includes the environmental licensing issue, which lately has been increasing the tension between entrepreneurs and the government. It’s a giant liability. According to the financial newspaper Valor Econômico, the list of halted works totaled R$ 7 billion, but other sources indicate R$ 25 billion. The first question is: Who’s to blame? And the answer falls in the vicious cycle of mutual accusations. Entrepreneurs complain about the slowness, bureaucracy, corruption, and poorly defined rules. We all know how badly politicians covet state jobs in the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama, Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis) and how they get them. We wonder why. To help friends and allies, but also as a preventive protection from opponents in the regions where they act.
Environmental agencies complain about the excess of work and the lack of tables and information required for releasing the licenses. They accuse the productive sector of making too much of a problem resulting from its own neglect. According to environmental authorities, the interruption of the construction works is using the environment as an scapegoat, since the deadlock is also due to other reasons. To make the situation even more complicated, a new player has entered the stage – the Department of Justice, which, on behalf of the population’s overall interests, slows things down when environmental authorities, pressured by other government sectors, try to bypass or ignore the legislation.
In fact, the issue needs to be seen from a new perspective, since the old command and control model, based on legislation, inspection and fines, is outdated, and gives way to a business self-management model. Today, large companies invest in the environment with the new sustainable development vision, thus assuring advantages in terms of market positions, both in terms of image and increase in productivity and competitiveness, as a result of more qualified human resources and technology. Now we need to figure out how to guarantee the inclusion of small and medium companies in this select club.
However, there are two structural bottlenecks that deserve a deeper reflection. First we have the infrastructure works, whose impacts on the environment are well known and notorious. Back in 1997, when the Commission for Sustainable Development and Brazilian Agenda 21 was created in the Ministry of Environment, we innovated the international format of the Agenda 21, including a special theme on “infrastructure and regional integration.” It was based on the notion that the country, because of its large reserves of natural resources in areas with extremely poor infrastructure, such as the Amazon, needed to approach the theme with due attention, strengthening a planning model based on prevention and sustainability. The opposite problem is observed in overpopulated areas with accelerated degradation, such as São Paulo, where environmental awareness grows as free areas for occupation and investments become exhausted. Or in the Northeast, with poor infrastructure and few natural resources, such as water and vegetation, widely deforested and threatened with desertification. Unfortunately, federal authorities, more concerned with other issues, haven’t given due attention and care to this document, included in the Brazilian Agenda 21 in 2002.
In the current worldwide scenario, international organizations, the public at large, and local populations make as difficult as possible the construction of roads, hydroelectric plants, gas pipelines, ports, or anything else. Such undertakings become increasingly harder, unless they are mitigated by strong relief and compensatory measures in a broad and tough negotiation process with several collective players. All over the world, the purpose is very simple: make human impact on the environment more difficult, although the outbreak of violence and wars manages to cause an unprecedented mass destruction. There are land mines all over Africa. There’s mass devastation in the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the countries doing so, who speak and act in the name of civilization, were never obligated to perform an EIS-EIR (Environmental Impact Study-Environmental Impact Report).
The second major bottleneck has been going around unnoticed even to more experienced eyes, including companies themselves. Since the state and federal governments don’t observe the constitutional obligation of performing territorial organization and Economic and Ecological Zoning (EEZ) – that is, dividing the areas and determining the vocations and limits of each one of them – this serious omission of public power falls in the hands of companies, as amazing as that may seem. In order to obtain licenses for their undertakings, private companies have to perform a comprehensive and costly data survey, which isn’t restricted to the impact that this undertaking will cause in a certain sub region. Companies have to accumulate endless subsidies over the entire area, which are usually beyond their capacity and competence. It’s amazing, but today, environmental authorities have their best source of information on economic ecology, territory occupation, and regional mapping from companies. These data are then used for other projects, as a sort of institutional smuggling that assures the performance of public functions by the private sector, as a result of the lack of action from federal or state agencies. Maybe the time has come to think about municipalities – and cooperation between municipalities – as the adequate location for building this database, which is vital for accelerating a new growth cycle. The Legislative Assemblies could create laws about this theme. •
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