While the proximity of , in , places Brazil in the global showcase and with speeches in defense of nature, the federal Budget numbers expose the priority given by Brazilian congressmen to the topic. Less than 1% of the billion-dollar amount of parliamentary amendments was allocated over a decade to the environmental ministry.
In the same period, deputies and senators allocated public funds that took 1,648 heavy machines to the Amazon states, with a total of resources at least three times greater than that for environmental protection actions in the Amazon forest region.
Inspection agents, authorities, environmentalists and indigenous leaders heard by the Sheet associate the abundant distribution of equipment with deforestation and the opening of illegal roads by city halls and other public bodies, combining developmental discourses with violations of the law.
The report was in the interior of Acre and observed the environmental impacts behind the lack of planning and technical criteria in the use of amendments. Federal deputy Zezinho Barbary (PP-AC) uses his share of funds to regularize the work on a road opened illegally during the period when he himself was mayor of the municipality of Porto Walter.
The general value of reserved amendments (pledged, in financial jargon) for all areas in the federal Budget since 2015 was R$298 billion, already corrected by the IPCA index, according to data from the official Siga Brasil portal.
Of this total, only 0.17% was allocated to the environmental portfolio — which, in the current government (PT), is called the Ministry of Climate Change. This corresponds to R$520 million.
Even this funding is not focused on the Amazon region, which it should be due to COP30, a conference of the (United Nations), as approved by Congress.
The sum of amendments allocated to the ministry for specific employment in the states of the Legal Amazon, made up of Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Mato Grosso, Pará, Rondônia, Roraima, Tocantins and part of Maranhão, was R$ 11.6 million — equivalent to 2.2% of the funds received by the environmental department.
The amounts allocated to the Southeast correspond to around 28% of the total (R$ 147 million).
Still from a territorial perspective, the amounts recorded as nationwide, which may have been distributed to all states, total almost R$272 million. Most of these values came from rapporteur amendments directed to Ibama (Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources) and ICMBio (Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation) in 2020.
A survey by Inesc (Institute of Socioeconomic Studies) found amendments registered with the subfunctions “environmental preservation and conservation” and “environmental control” sent to other bodies, but in values far below representing at least 1% of funds for the area.
In total, R$ 245.8 million were sent to the ministries of Agriculture, Defense, Regional Development and Health. With this budget, actions such as the ABC Plan (Low Carbon Agriculture), research into environmental health, strategies for containing floods and land regularization were carried out.
Also over the course of a decade, the Legal Amazon received, through amendments, an unprecedented volume of heavy machinery, at a cost that exceeds R$900 million. The 1,648 pieces of equipment include a tracked and tire tractor, hydraulic excavator, backhoe loader, wheel loader, motor grader and compactor roller. The calculation does not consider agricultural tractors, trucks and cars.
Although these heavy machines can have different purposes, their dissemination in the forest area is seen by environmental technicians as an aggravating factor for deforestation, the opening of uncontrolled roads and the installation of illegal mining sites.
The main distributors of the equipment in the Amazon were the Calha Norte program and the state-owned Codevasf (Companhia de Desenvolvimento dos Vales do São Francisco and Parnaíba), which had their historical purposes distorted in recent years to become the preferred pipelines of Brazilian congressmen.
Calha Norte, champion with 755 deliveries since 2015, is a traditional project created by the Brazilian Armed Forces 40 years ago with the original objective of strategic military action on the borders.
His led the federal government to transfer the program from the Ministry of Defense to the Ministry of Integration and Regional Development, which already has under its responsibility the state-owned company, vice-leader of distribution in the Legal Amazon, Codevasf, which delivered 440 machines to the region.
There are several parallels in the recent trajectories of Calha Norte and Codevasf. One of the ones that attracts the most attention is the territorial expansion in recent years to cover more municipalities of interest to deputies and senators.
Codevasf currently operates from the Legal Amazon to the Northeast coast, while Calha Norte even moves away from the border regions, reaching the state of Tocantins.
Boosted by billions of reais in parliamentary amendments in , Codevasf changed its historical vocation of promoting irrigation projects mainly in the Northeast to transform itself into a state-owned company delivering paving works and machines even in metropolitan regions.
It expanded its operations from the semi-arid region to the Amazonian states of Pará, Tocantins, Amapá and Mato Grosso and had this new profile maintained under Lula, as well as its control by congressmen linked to the center.
Third place in the distribution ranking of heavy machinery in the Legal Amazon is the Ministry of Integration and Regional Development, with 265 pieces of equipment. Next comes the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, responsible for 188 deliveries in the region.
The surveys of Sheet take 2015 as the starting point, as it was in that year that an amendment to the Federal Constitution forced the Executive to pay for the individual amendments requested by congressmen and inaugurated a period of increasing control by the Legislature over the Budget, changing the way politics is done in the country.
In a decade, the R$6 billion that congressmen had annually in amendments (in corrected values) diversified and exploded to the approximately R$50 billion expected this year.
At that time, each parliamentarian was entitled to a maximum of R$16 million individually (equivalent to R$26 million today). Now, each deputy has R$38 million at their disposal, and each senator, around R$70 million to send to their electoral strongholds, not counting other types of collective amendments.
The president of Ibama, Rodrigo Agostinho, says that there is great concern in the supervisory body regarding the illegal use of machines donated with amendment resources.
“What we see is a mistaken use, an illicit use, in many places this machinery is an instrument of crime. In the same way that someone uses a weapon to commit a robbery, the machine is the instrument itself for committing the environmental crime of deforestation and illegal logging”, says Agostinho.
“You have bulldozers being bought and donated in the Amazon, they are not for burying a city’s trash. Bulldozers are used to cut down a forest, whether to open a road or open an entire farm. So, we view this type of situation with great concern, we need responses from society and public authorities. We have a challenge there”, adds the president of Ibama.
Wanted by Sheetthe advisor to the President of the Senate, Davi Alcolumbre (União Brasil-AP), sent a note stating that “the Presidency of the Federal Senate and the National Congress does not make a value judgment on the allocative choices of parliamentarians”.
“Environmental preservation and sustainable development are global commitments that require joint action from governments, institutions, citizens and the international community”, stated Alcolumbre in the note.
The report also sought the presidency of the Chamber of Deputies through its press office, which stated that the issue should be addressed by leaders of the House’s budget committees. The leaders were contacted, but did not speak out.
