On November 17, during his official speech at the BRICS summit, President Bolsonaro said he would reveal which countries are buying illegal lumber from the Amazon. The move was seen as a response to international pressure that Brazil has suffered as a result of record deforestation rates in 2020. “We will reveal in the coming days the names of the countries that import this illegal wood from us through the immensity that is the Amazon region” declared the president at the meeting of the group, formed by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
The speech echoed in the press over the following weeks and civil society organizations stressed the responsibility of the Brazilian government in the international illegal timber trade – “If Bolsonaro knows who buys illegal timber, he must know who sells it. What we also want to know is when he will reverse his own actions, which benefit the exportation of illegal wood,” Greenpeace Brazil published in a posting on social networks. In an interview with Deutche Welle, Dinaman Tuxá, lawyer and executive coordinator of the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil Network (Apib), stated that the president’s speech has as background an environmental policy complicit with the problem. “In fact, he threatens to release a list of countries that buy illegal timber from Brazil because he is being pressured by great powers to change their environmental policy. So he is trying, in some way, to embarrass these consumer countries. But it’s totally contradictory, because at the same time he’s trying to expose a situation, he also makes it more flexible and encourages, in a certain way, the increase in illegal logging. The government is in favor of cutting the wood, he is in favor of increasing this market and now he is trying to create a political incident because he is being pressured in the international field,” said Tuxá.
In the following week, a report in the newspaper O Globo revealed that on February 6, the president of the environmental control agency Ibama, Eduardo Fortunato Bim, met with an entourage of businessmen from the lumber sector in Pará State at the headquarters of the Ministry of Environment. Nineteen days after the meeting, Bim signed a dispatch releasing the export of native wood without authorization from the agency, which facilitates the commercialization of illegally extracted wood. According to the newspaper, two of the lumber companies that attended the meeting received more than R$ 2.6 million in environmental fines.
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