A new logo has crept into the Free Trade Zone of Manaus, the Amazonian metropolis where hundreds of multinationals – Samsung, Siemens, Harley Davidson and many more – take advantage of tax benefits from the Brazilian government to assemble electronics, appliances and motorcycles. The letters C.V. Crimson-colored ones are seen at every intersection in the industrial park.
But it is not about a new smart TV brand but about the Comando Vermelho (C.V.) drug cartel. Like other criminal groups, the C.V. He is already working hard in the Amazon after seeing his business dwindle in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
It is one of the mafias that manage cocaine trafficking across the multiple borders of the Amazon while expanding an illegal business that is no less profitable: the illegal appropriation of land for deforestation, illegal gold mining, the extraction of wood or the trafficking of species such as turtles and exotic fish. In short, environmental crime.
"It's a perfect storm: we lose the jungle and we have a very high rate of crime and social pain," says Beto Veríssimo, founder of the Amazon Institute in Belem. “Crime in the Amazon is already 80% above the Brazilian average; many companies are afraid to invest here,” said Beto Veríssimo.
Fighting crime is the sine qua non of a new development plan outlined this week during the Amazon summit in Belem.
There, the creation of a multilateral police control center based in Manaus was announced, which will make it possible to coordinate the anti-crime strategies of the eight Amazonian countries: Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Suriname and Guyana.
Likewise, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has strengthened control and surveillance institutions in the Brazilian Amazon, 62% of the total, such as the environmental regulator, Ibama, the indigenous foundation, Funai, and the federal police, after the catastrophic blind eye to the Bolsonaro years.
But without alternative sources of employment in Brazil's poorest region, where eight million young people are unemployed, it will be impossible to combat environmental crime in the Amazon. “We had a demographic boom 20 years after the rest of Brazil, and young men without expectations often become labor for criminals,” Veríssimo said. "Of course, with investment and training, young people would be the workforce for a new development model."
Therein lies the challenge. “We need zero deforestation, but we also need a creative and innovative economy for the 28 million inhabitants of the Amazon,” said Aloizio Mercadante, the president of the Brazilian public bank Bndes, which announced in Belem a 1 billion-euro credit package for small companies in the Amazon. Lula described the Amazon as "an incubator of knowledge and technologies from which we have not been able to extract value."
What can be the new development model? “You have to understand that protecting the forest and its biodiversity is essential for economic development,” says Jacqueline Ferreira, from the Escolha Institute in Sao Paulo. “It's about generating new economic incentives and new public policies instead of subsidizing soybean and meat production,” she says.
The announcement is expected this month in Brasilia of a package of one hundred initiatives for sustainable development that will include actions in areas such as bioeconomy -biodiversity-based value chains-, decarbonised agriculture and forest restoration projects.
It will not be difficult to improve the economic results of the current model.
63% of the 85 million hectares deforested in the last 50 years is dedicated to livestock with very low productivity. In an area equivalent to the surface of Spain and Italy, large herds of zebu oxen roam vast areas of pasture. 18% –equivalent to the area of Ireland– has even been abandoned by farmers.
Paulo Barreto, another Imazon researcher, calculates that an increase in livestock productivity –more cows per hectare– would clear 37 million hectares, the surface of Germany. The planting of fruit trees, cocoa, Brazil nuts, coffee, or açaí (a type of berry), would have high commercial possibilities while expanding the extraordinary CO2 storage capacity of the Amazon.
The competitive economy of monocultures such as soybeans in Mato Grosso further south -after decades of deforestation- already increases its productivity without the need to deforest. For its part, the restoration of the original deforested vegetation would be offset by income from the carbon credit market.
After adopting these preliminary measures, the new model would be based on industrial policies to make the biodiversity of the Amazon profitable. According to Ferreira, the free zone of Manaus – whose products are transported through the Amazon River – could become the nerve center of an Amazonian bioeconomy sector.
Created in the 1960s with generous tax incentives and with more than 100,000 jobs, the Manaus industrial hub may have helped prevent extractivist destruction by offering alternative employment to crime and overexploitation. Now a second conversion is needed, says Ferreira. Manaus has “an isolated industrial pole; measures should be adopted so that the inputs arrive from the Amazon itself”, says Ferreira. Instead of subsidizing the assembly of electronic products with imported components, investments should be encouraged in sectors such as autochthonous foods, farmed fish, cocoa products, Brazil nuts, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics based on Amazonian plants and their oils, says our interlocutor.
New sources of protein made from 80,000 species of plants, 30 million species of insects or 27,000 species of mushrooms, can be a gold mine in a world looking for substitutes for animal meat. Other recommended sectors are sustainably exploited wood and ecotourism. It is necessary to invest in better river transport systems, innovation centers, and the expansion of internet connectivity, says Ferreira.
Like the transition from extensive cattle farming, the cost would be minimal, Ferreira calculates. Only a quarter of the 5,000 million tax incentives for multinationals that are currently set up in the Manaus Free Zone would be needed. It wouldn't just help save the planet. It would generate 20,000 jobs for young people who, at the moment, are the cannon fodder of Comando Vérmelho.
