A new culture of development

The Workers’ Party (PT) greets the political and social militants gathered in the city of Belém, state of Pará, from 27 January to 1 February 2009, to participate in yet another edition of the World Social Forum.

When we first held the World Social Forum, we were living under the hegemony of neoliberal ideas and practices; the government of the United States sought to be the ultimate metropolis of a unipolar world. At that time, we fought against conventional wisdom by stating that “another world is possible”.

Today, the international economic crisis has demoralized the ideas of “self-regulated market” and “minimal State”; the U.S.A. faces an economic crisis of huge proportions; and we may say that not only another world is possible but more necessary and urgent than ever.

In Latin and Caribbean America, we are taking important steps to build that other world. Never before in our history have so many countries been governed by leftist and progressive forces, especially in Latin America. We are creating the capabilities for a development and an integration of a new kind, capable of facing and overcoming the crisis for the benefit of the majorities.

The ongoing transformations in the region are far from easy, nor are they fast, or free of contradictions. Our success will depend, to a large extent, on the coordinated engagement of cultural struggle, social movement, and partisan action – including at the parliamentarian and government levels. Thus, we strongly oppose all those who raise “Chinese walls” amidst the popular forces, and thereby sever and oppose movements to parties.

The Workers’ Party, the member parties of the São Paulo Forum, and the governments we take part in, we all feel we are an integral part of the World Social Forum, whose first edition occurred in the city of Porto Alegre, at the time governed by the Workers’ Party. Since then, the administrations run by the PT have been committed to and contributed to the success of the World Social Forum.

The Forum in face of the international economic crisis

The Workers’ Party will strive to enable the present edition of the World Social Forum to produce, in addition to diagnoses, leftist alternatives to the crisis, thus helping to build the post-neoliberal world that is emerging.

Long announced, the crisis of the world economy became more intense as of late September 2008. With its epicenter situated in the financial sphere of the U.S. economy, the crisis rapidly evolved into an epidemic that contaminated all developed countries. Originally located in the speculative realm, the crisis hit the real economy of every capitalist country. The failures of banks and other financial institutions –as a fallout of the credit crisis– were followed by severe hardships to companies in the productive sector, which reduced or interrupted their activities, with disastrous social repercussions such as massive layoffs and the canceling of new investments.

The slowdown or, in several cases, the recession that has been affecting the developed economies and some of the new industrial centers (such as China) has melted commodity prices, transferring part of the losses to the developing countries. As exports shrink in volume and value, trade and payment balances of tens of economies are strongly impacted. Compounding the situation is a credit crunch triggered by the erosion of the world economy. This compromises world trade, productive investments, and countless economic and social development projects.

The flight of speculative capitals in search of safer havens is at the root of the enormous losses posted by the world’s stock exchanges, particularly in the developing countries, where they have brought about significant foreign exchange changes.

The atmosphere of nervousness – if not of outright hysteria – that affects financial markets and hits the real economy have not been efficiently tackled thus far by the leaders of the world’s main economies. Most of those leaders’ speeches and initiatives were incapable of reversing the current picture. Should the solution rest with the metabolism of the market, the latter will require time to digest the crisis and offer answers conducive to a new stability of the world’s productive system.

The piecemeal initiatives taken by the leaders of the most important capitalist economies tend towards furthering State intervention to reorganize the system. Such measures deepen the political and ideological crisis within the 25-year-long conservative hegemony and, accordingly, are met with resistance by the fundamentalists of economic liberalism. Events unfold as if “their Berlin Wall” had fallen.

It is worth recalling that the main consequence of the crisis of 1929 was the rise of Fascism and Nazism, the tragedy of World War II, and the ensuing reorganization of global capitalism.

The outcome of the current economic crisis will depend, to a large measure, on the Left’s capacity to respond to it, both in theoretical and practical terms. More than generic diagnoses, what is needed are objective reflections on the dynamics and magnitude of the problem and on the political alternatives that open up, for, as manifested by President Lula in his recent address at the United Nations, “the hour of politics has come”.

In Brazil, the alternatives the Lula government has been building and implementing signal to a progressive handling of the international turbulence insofar as they reject the opposition’s conservative proposals (of the kind “public spending cuts” or “adjustments”); they preserve social policies; give continuity to the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC, from the Portuguese acronym); and propose actions designed to preserve and boost job generation, among other measures of impact.

The Brazilian government has had a strong presence in the international arena, where it advocates radical and urgent reforms of the economic and financial multilateral bodies.

It is important to underscore, lastly, that the developments of the economic crisis, and their social and political effects, will play a decisive role in the 2010 presidential elections in Brazil and in other succession processes nearing in South America.

The leftist parties and social movements linked to the workers must take advantage of the 2009 World Social Forum to hold a broad and qualified debate on the economic crisis and, foremost, on the alternatives.

Against the crises, a development of a new kind

The intelligence gathered at this World Social Forum must be capable of, among other things, materializing alternatives that incorporate social and environmental sustainability to a new culture of development.

The world economic crisis is coupled with a world food crisis and a world energy crisis, which have marked their presence throughout the first semester of 2008. The impacts of the economic crisis do not dissolve the food crisis, or the energy crisis. Rather, they compound it inasmuch as the solutions presented do not challenge the patterns of production and consumption that triggered them.

The alternatives of the Left for the crises must definitively incorporate social and environmental sustainability to the “culture“ of the new cycle of development. The popular forces of the world must declare the social and environmental question as an unavoidable dimension, one defining of a model of development for the 21st century.

The hegemonic development model for the Brazilian Amazon throughout history, for example, has had a predatory and inadequate character given its social and environmental reality.

The struggle against that model has gone through many phases and has had a number of protagonists, individual and collective. Among them we point out the organization of the “peoples of the forest” and leaderships such as Wilson Pinheiro and Chico Mendes, both assassinated (in 1980 and 1988, respectively).

In the 1990s, the struggle of the social movements, environmental organizations, scientific community, and leftist parties was reinvigorated by the conquest of important governments in the region.

In 1992, the PT reaches the municipal government of the city of Rio Branco (the capital of Acre state). In 1996, the PT wins the mayoral elections in Belém, the capital of Pará, the main city of the largest metropolitan region in the Amazon region, a government that is reelected in 2000. In 1998, it wins the government of the State of Acre, bearing the slogan florestania, a concept derived from the struggles of the peoples of the forest and of the exercise of the right to citizenship by the popular classes. It is worth bearing in mind that more than 90% of the State of Acre is covered by forests. In 2004, the PT won the municipality of Porto Velho, the capital of Rondônia, a state with strong social contradictions, under the hegemony of conservative sectors, a victory confirmed in 2008, while in 2006 the PT wins the race for the government of the State of Pará, with sister Ana Júlia Carepa, bringing to an end almost twelve years of PSDB/DEM hegemony. That state –whose capital now hosts the WSF– was in 2006 the first in the ranking of murders in the countryside and today boasts the title of the state with the greatest reduction in land-related violence.

However, the most important institutional victory was obtained in 2002, with the election of Lula to the Presidency of the Republic of Brazil.

The new administration that took office in January of 2003 found a strong trend towards expanding deforestation, which had risen 18% from 2001 to 2002 and another 18% from 2002 to 2003. Deforestation jumped from 18,000 square kilometers to 25,000, the second largest historical rate since 1988.

Until then, the issue was considered an environmental problem and thus one to be solved exclusively in the sphere of the Ministry of the Environment. The Lula government adopted an approach whereby deforestation was seen as a rather complex problem, whose resolution depended on the mobilization of all sectors, under the direct political coordination of the Presidency of the Republic. Thus was born the Inter-Ministerial Working Group, composed of 13 ministers, to elaborate the Action Plan to Prevent and Control Deforestation in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAM).

The new concept showed that the elimination of illegal deforestation and the promotion of the Amazon region’s sustainable development would only be accomplished by meeting the structural causes of that challenge. The programme was allocated the significant budget of BRL 394 mi for a four-year term, with 149 strategic actions distributed along three axes: Environment Monitoring and Control; Territorial and Land Management; Stimulus to the Sustainable Use of the Forest and Open Areas.

Despite cultural and political hindrances for integrated action and the magnitude of the challenge posed by the Amazon region, important breakthroughs were made throughout the Plan’s first three years.

We mention, among those breakthroughs, a 59-percent drop in deforestation in the Amazon region in the period comprising 2004 to 2007. Deforested areas fell from 27,000 km2 to 11,200 km2. The data, released in December 2007, are from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE). These results stem from a set of actions coordinated by the Plan for Deforestation Prevention and Control in the Amazon launched in 2003.

We also mention the following actions: creating 24 million hectares of conservation units; doubling the areas for conservation units in extractivist reserves (from 5 to 10 million hectares); titling of 10 million hectares of indigenous lands; voiding the registration of 37,000 illegal properties; supporting the states to set up the Ecologic-Economic Zoning (EZZ); creating satellite-based DETER System, made available on the Internet for public access; holding of annual technical and scientific seminars on deforestation; seizure of 1 million cubic meters of illegal timber; fines of 4 billion reals; arrest of 750 people, 125 of whom were IBAMA civil servants; Executive Order 6,321, which instituted a moratorium in 36 municipalities responsible for 50% of the deforestation in the Amazon region; accountability of the productive chain; resolution by the National Monetary Council establishing criteria for extending credit; creation of Electronic System DOF to control the flow of forest products to replace former ATPF system, highly vulnerable to corruption; creation of the Brazilian Forest Service; creation of the BR-163 Highway Sustainable Plan; formulation of the Sustainable Amazon Plan (PAS).

Land regularization of the Amazon region is the sine qua non for socially just and environmentally sustainable development. This is a slogan the Workers’ Party will continue to carry in the field of social struggles and at the head of the administrations it conquered, whether the Union or leading state governments as in Pará and in Acre. It is critical that social movements and leftist parties keep tracking such processes so that they do not result in an instrument for land concentration, opportunity to fatten squatters, or a chance for the de-nationalization of areas by means of the acquisition of land by foreign companies.

The Brazilian society held from early 2007 to May 2008 a mobilization process that involved in excess of 100,000 people, in every state of the country, to promote the 3rd National Environmental Conference. The themes of climate change and the formulation of alternatives to resolve the issue of global warming structured the agenda of debates. The document produced by the 3rd Environmental Conference was handed over to the President of the Republic as a subsidy to the National Plan on Climate Change to be sent to Congress. This process positions Brazil at the forefront of the quest for concrete solutions to mitigate the impacts of climate change on the most vulnerable populations and adapt society to the new reality stemming therefrom.

Likewise, the initiative of creating the Amazon Fund, associating the environmental services engendered by the forest and its populations with private and international support to public policies, inaugurates a new phase of the policy changes underway in the region.

The PT, alongside with other leftist parties and Amazon region rural and urban movements, has sought to be an instrument of the struggle for a new model of development.

Hence, we reaffirm our commitment to the upholding of the rights of the indigenous peoples to their territories; to defending the sovereignty of Brazil in relation to the Amazon region’s natural heritage; to protecting natural resources to benefit the development of the nation; to formulating public policies that ensure citizenship to all the Amazon peoples; to strengthening popular movements in defense of social and environmental policies; to creating the Ecological-Economic Zoning of the Amazon region as a fundamental instrument to speed up the land regularization process; to those policies designed to combat the illegal exploitation of the Amazon forest; and to formulating fiscal incentive policies to companies developing socially and environmentally responsible forest activities.

Broadly speaking, the goals are:

a) to redefine the role of the Amazon region in the new cycle of development, by considering the concrete possibilities it may play in the hemispheric integration and by surpassing the traditional condition of supplier of raw materials and energy;

b) to diversify the pattern of production that has prevailed over the last decades, hinged on the agribusiness, to incorporate technologies adapted from traditional, indigenous, quilombola (runaway African descendants), and riparian populations, techniques which are responsible for the conservation of biodiversity;

c) to redefine and reorient the cargo and people transportation matrix – which today privileges the individual, highly costly and environmentally unsustainable road modal, in order to expand and consolidate an inter-modal model (rail, water, road), thus fulfilling the immense potential the country has and extracting thereof economic and environmental benefits.

Amazon Challenges

It is publicly known that the economic activity that occupies most land in Brazil is cattle ranching. According to Brazil’s National Statistics Office (IBGE), 172.3 million hectares are used as pastureland, while only 76.7 million hectares are croplands. It is also acknowledged that Brazil was the world’s fifth exporter of beef in 2000, with 455 million tons, and five years later became the first exporter, with 1.6 million tons (IBGE). Last but not least, a piece of information that speaks for itself: today over a third of the country’s cattle herd is in the Amazon region, and the three municipalities with the largest herds are located in the region: Corumbá and Ribas do Rio Pardo, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, and São Félix do Xingu, in the state of Pará.

Another element to be considered when analyzing the expansion of agribusiness and its impacts on the Amazon biome is the evolution of the soybean-harvested area. Only in Brazil’s Northern Region the area quintupled: from 106,000 hectares in 2001 to 518,000 hectares in 2006.

Such data point to the necessity to invest, in close cooperation with states and municipalities, in a stringent, medium- and long-term Ecological-Economic Zoning (EEZ) policy, as well as in an immediate and intensive policy to recover degraded pasturelands, by fostering research initiatives to improve cattle-farming productivity, so as to ease the pressure to open up new areas in the Cerrado and Amazon regions.

The picture portrayed, that builds on data that involve two key commodities both in terms of Brazil’s domestic consumption and exports, reflects the urgent nature the environmental issue poses even as it occupies the center of the agenda of Brazil’s new cycle of development.

How will the Brazilian Amazon be incorporated into the new cycle of development? Will Brazil, in the 21st century, assign to the region the same role it was assigned ever since the Portuguese set up the foundations of the Santa Maria de Belém do Grão Pará fortress, that is, the role of supplier of labor, energy, and raw materials for the development of the remaining regions?

We must not adopt the same perspective that guided the previous development cycles, as this is a perspective that reduces the historic horizon, at best, to the boundaries of one generation and belittles the debate, for it approaches it from within the same narrow limits dictated by the rationale of immediate profit that rules the market’s action. It is shackled to the present. It holds no responsibility for the Brazilians that will be born and for the children of the Brazilians who will come. And it does not contribute toward the formulation of sustainable alternatives that will protect the country’s most vulnerable populations against tragic climatic phenomena and others resulting from the impact of economic activity on the environment.

Nor should we ignore the continental dimension of the Amazon region. To respond adequately to this critical issue, coordinated and urgent action is required in three fronts: to implement the Ecological-Economic Zoning (EEZ) in the Amazon, in coordination with states and municipalities, with deadlines and responsibilities defined by the federated entities; to speed up and adopt more stringent criteria in the environmental licensing process, since the legislation in force suffices to achieve such objective; to vote, in Congress, a bill regulating Article 23 of the Federal Constitution.

Today Brazil has the economic, social, political, and technological capabilities to incorporate the potentiality of the right bank of the Amazon River –obviously, provided the unquestionable need to reduce environmental impacts to a minimum is respected. The economic cycles that ensured Brazil’s high growth rates in the 20th century have imposed on Brazilians a very costly, insecure, and environmentally unsustainable transport matrix. Brazil has become the single case in the world of a country that has destroyed a significant portion of its rail system, an investment made by generation after generation. Presently, the Brazilian State is once again investing in the reconstruction and enlargement of that indispensable infrastructure for any developed nation.

In the horizon defined for the works of the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC), the conclusion of the Tucuruí, Estreito, and Lageado floodgates along the Tocantins River, and their relation with the hydroelectric power plants planned for the right bank of the Amazon River will allow Brazil to reorient the flow of cargo – a production estimated today in 20 million tons of grains – harvested in the Center-West and distributed through the ports of Belém and Itaqui. Today that cargo is transported from the producing region, for some 2,000 kilometers of highways, to the ports of Santos and Paranaguá; in other words, in the opposite direction of the consuming markets of the Northern hemisphere.

Since 2003, the government of President Lula has released the impulses of an economy that had been dammed for twenty years. Though still partially, it has recovered the State’s capacity to induce the development process. It has set off a series of public, social, and economic initiatives that have come together to affirm the new cycle we are witnessing.

Historical analysis into the cycles of development that characterized the expansion of the Brazilian economy during the 20th century reveals that those cycles were marked by some recurrent features: authoritarianism – we grew under dictatorships; wealth concentration – we have generated an unacceptable social fracture between the rich and the poor in the country; inflation; scarce or no sensibility toward the sustainable utilization of natural resources; and failure to consider a hemispheric development project.

We have, therefore, before us, the challenges of: growing as we consolidate and broaden the democratic breakthroughs of the past thirty years; growing without inflation and with income distribution, thus getting Brazil out of the shameful condition of one of the world’s most unequal societies; growing while incorporating the social and environmental sustainability dimension to Brazil’s culture of development; and growing in a way that is integrated with the other countries of the region. But above all, keeping in our historic and strategic horizon the building of a society of a new kind: the socialist society.

January 2009

Workers’ Party