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Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made environmental protection a central promise of his campaign for the presidency of Brazil. After his victory, Lula said "the world expects Brazil to once again become a leader in tackling the climate crisis and an example of a socially and environmentally responsible country." At the November 2022 UN Climate Change Conference Lula declared, "Brazil is ready to join once again [the] effort to build a healthier planet."
These lofty words cannot be squared with Lula's wholesale embrace of the People's Republic of China, which was on public display during his April visit to Beijing. With a huge delegation of Brazilian businessmen and politicians in tow, Lula sidestepped the fact that China is responsible for about 30 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, and its CO2 emission per capita has been increasing for years. What's more, by deepening ties with China, Lula is inviting even greater environmental destruction into his own country.
For Brazilians, China's disrespect for environmental protection is more than an abstract global problem—it's degrading their air, water, and forests.
For example, Brazil is being exploited by environmentally irresponsible Chinese agribusinesses. Researchers found that China's role in Brazil's soy sector is a major cause of deforestation in Brazilian Amazonia. According to a report published in October 2019, exports of beef to China are responsible for at least 22,700 hectares of Brazilian deforestation. A December 2019 study found that "in 2017 soy imports into China were associated with 6.5 million tons of CO2 emissions linked to deforestation for soy expansion in the Amazon and Cerrado. This represents 43% of all CO2 emissions risk from soy deforestation in these regions."
China is also using Brazil to satisfy its ravenous appetite for fossil fuels. Petrobras, a Brazilian state-owned oil company, and the state-owned China Development Bank signed a $10 billion loan agreement to help develop deep-sea oil reserves discovered by Brazil in 2008. The loan will, among other things, provide financing for goods and services to be purchased from China. Petrobras in 2011 promised to supply China with 100,000 to 160,000 barrels of crude oil per day over the next decade. In 2020, Brazil became China's third-largest crude oil supplier.
Chinese energy projects in Brazil routinely opt for economic expediency at the expense of the environment and public health. SEPCO1, a subsidiary of state-owned Power China, has financed three coal-fired power plant projects in Brazil, to produce a total of 1.3 gigawatts of new coal-fired power. Meanwhile, China Gezhouba Group Corporation, a subsidiary of another Chinese state-owned energy company, intends to build a thermal power plant in Maricá, Brazil. When the "Complexo Power Maricá" project is complete, the new plant will have the potential to generate 2,600 megawatts of energy per month. The Pampa Sul thermal plant, which has a 345 megawatt capacity, is also being constructed by a Chinese company.
Sadly, Lula is importing more into Brazil from China than environmental pollution. In Beijing, Lula told Xi Jinping, "we hope that Brazil-China relations are able to go beyond trade. Nobody can stop Brazil from continuing to develop its relationship with China." Lula's conservative predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, had expressed concerns about massive Chinese purchases of Brazilian assets, and angered the Chinese Communist Party with his "friendly leanings toward Taiwan," even as he broadly developed economic relations with China. Brazil's strategy seemed to be to compartmentalize relations with China within the economic realm, while retaining support for Western nations' efforts to promote human rights and democracy. That strategy appears to have changed.
Perhaps most egregious of all, Lula has followed China's lead on Ukraine. The Brazilian president asserted moral equivalency between Russia and Ukraine, arguing that supporting Ukraine's defense prolongs the war. Given this de facto Chinese approach, his "active nonalignment" appears to be a deception: China's official information site quoted Lula as saying that "Brazil is committed to building closer relations with China from the strategic perspective of shaping a just and equitable international order." By parroting such Chinese Communist Party rhetoric while keeping silent about China's massive violations of human rights, Lula is aligning with China not only economically, but politically. For Brazil, the crisis of Chinese pollution, both environmental and moral, is growing more destructive by the day.
Aaron Rhodes, PhD is Senior Fellow at the Common Sense Society, where Cheryl Yu is Senior Researcher.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
