More than 70 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on Friday accused Brazil’s president of lying at the Summit of the Americas, saying the country has been exemplary in protecting the environment and critical to global food security.
The Observatório do Clima network, which brings together 73 organizations linked to the environment, including Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), said that the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, described a government and a Brazil that does not exist, according to the news agency. EFF.
At the IX Summit of the Americas, which ended on Friday in Los Angeles, Bolsonaro assured that Brazil is a “sustainable agricultural power” because it conserves 66% of the native vegetation, using only 27% of the national territory for the agricultural sector. . .
Despite being the 10th largest economy in the world, Brazil generates less than 3% of the planet’s carbon emissions, Bolsonaro said, noting that 85% of Brazil’s energy comes from renewable sources.
The leader also pointed out that the South American power “feeds one billion people.” And he concluded: “Without our agricultural business, part of the world would go hungry.”
“Bolsonaro spent a good amount of time in his speech doing what he does best in the environmental arena: lying. He said to take care of the environment, while everyone knows that deforestation in the Amazon has risen 76% since the beginning of his mandate, as has the destruction of the Cerrado, the Atlantic Forest and the Pantanal”, said the executive secretary of the Observatory of the Climate Marcio Astrini, quoted by the EFE agency.
Astrini’s statements received the support of the British NGO Oxfam, which also criticized the Brazilian president’s speech regarding food security.
“It is amazing to see a Brazilian President of the Republic brazenly claim, at a meeting of international leaders, that Brazil feeds a billion people around the world and has prevented a global food crisis, in the same week as a report from researchers in food security and nutrition revealed that there are more than 33 million hungry people in the country”, said Katia Maia, executive director of Oxfam in Brazil.
The aforementioned study was carried out by the Brazilian Network for Research on Food Sovereignty and Security (PENSSAN), which revealed that the number of hungry Brazilians almost doubled in the last two years, from 19 million in 2020 to 33.1 million in 2020. 2022
It is not the first time that the leader takes advantage of international events to make statements that do not reflect reality, accused the head of the Climate Observatory.
“The impression is that the Brazilian president is betting on the strategy that, by repeating a lie a thousand times, it will become the truth,” Astrini stressed.
Source: Observadora
