Camila Moreno Green Economy and Development(alism) in Brazil – Resources, Climate and Energy Politics
of the motors of growth. The federal government and the private sector opened a new round of development and occupation of Legal Amazon, which is a region where 24.4 million people live and that represents only 8 percent of the Brazilian GDP. A survey from 2011 based on the federal government’s Growth Acceleration Program points out that the package of investments for the nine Brazilian federal states in the Legal Amazon region will already add up to $127 billion by 2020. According to this survey (Wiziack and Brito 2011), this number will probably be bigger when all the projects have their budgets ready. This quantity of resources is two times larger than the Petrobras investment for pre-salt up until 2015. Basically, they consist of infrastructural projects (energy, transport, and mining). Together, they will create conditions for industries to settle and they will generate an export corridor to the “North arc,” from the city of Porto Velho (Rondônia), passing through the states of Amazonas and Pará, up to Maranhão. This cargo handling will be done by a logistical network of highways, railways, and waterways that will reduce export costs, mainly for the agro-business sector, which today basically only uses the ports of Santos (São Paulo) and Paranaguá (Paraná). The energy sector is the driving force of this wave of investments. The main hydropower plants planned by the government will be installed in the region, and, with them, the waterways as well.
(New) “green” development? Of all the fast-growing commodities in Brazil, perhaps the fastest one is selfconfidence. The national context is marked by widespread, enthusiastic selfpride. There is this sensation that Brazil is no longer the “country of the future” but finally the “country of the present” – this was demonstrated when expectations became reality with Brazil selected to host the soccer World Cup in 2014 and the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. The great expectations that come with Brazil’s new role in the world go hand in hand with the political conviction – and increasingly theoretical one as well – that we are in the middle of a “new” economic stage that will be marked by incorporating “new” issues (like sustainability, democracy, and social justice) to the “old” agenda of development. The New Development model, which today is identified by critics as the official ideology of the Brazilian government and its support base, is built on the electoral success of social welfare politics that the states managed to implant recently (in Brazil, the Bolsa Família program, said to be the largest money-transfer program in the world, is an example of the way public policy fights poverty). These programs are key elements for guaranteeing the maintenance and reproduction of the model, which we also see in other Latin American countries. In the case of Brazil, as a result of the social protection policies, official data shows that in the last decade 31 million people have become members of the middle class. This is a result of the recovery of inclusive economic growth, the expansion of the job market, and access to credit, as well as the increase in the level of education of the society. Those who positively identify the current 55