Environmentalists are criticizing the eight Amazon basin nations for failing to agree during a summit in Belém, Brazil this month to end land clearing in the rainforest biome by 2030, claiming the nations’ leaders caved in to pressure from agribusiness and mining interests.

Expectations for agreement on such a deadline had been high for the Aug 8-9 Amazon Summit, which was attended by the presidents of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, and by high-ranking officials from Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela.

But the failure of attendees to set quantitative targets and a timetable for reaching them—in particular, the absence of a goal to halt Amazon-region deforestation by 2030—was painfully apparent in the two-day meeting’s concluding document, called the Belém Declaration.

“The Belém Declaration does not provide clear measures to respond to the urgency of the crises the world has been facing,” Leandro Ramos, the programs director for Greenpeace Brazil, said in a statement. “There are no targets or deadlines for halting deforestation, nor mention of ending oil exploration in the region. Without these measures, Amazon countries will not be able to change their current predatory relationship with the forest, its biodiversity and its peoples.”

The result was a high-profile reversal for the summit’s host, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has staked his international reputation on improving his country’s environmental standing. Lula had been pushing for a regional policy commitment to end Amazon deforestation by 2030, a move that would build on his government’s pledge to ensure “net-zero” deforestation in Brazil by that year.

Neither Lula nor any of the other leaders commented on the Belém Declaration in the immediate aftermath of the summit. Five days later, however, Lula defended the eight-government meeting as a “a step towards transforming the region with a model that combines sustainable development and environmental preservation.”

Delivering a summit address before the Belém Declaration was signed, Colombian President Gustavo Petro sounded less sanguine. “[W]e are on the edge of extinction, and as politicians, we need to make tough decisions, given our short mandates,” Petro said. “So what are we doing besides making speeches, like we are doing now?”

In their summit communiqué, government leaders pledged to develop a “common cooperation agenda” to ensure that deforestation does not push the Amazon region past “the point of no return.” The lack of concrete commitments and timelines associated with that goal, however, drew heated criticism from many green advocates—among them Marcio Astrini of the Climate Observatory, a Brazil-based network of 95 nonprofits that tracks the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions.

“The Belém Declaration, a pretty letter of intentions, is a disgrace that fails the forest and the planet, given the climate catastrophe that the world faces,” Astrini, the Climate Observatory’s executive secretary, told EcoAméricas.

The declaration did endorse the protection of Indigenous rights and pledged regional cooperation on water management, health, and sustainable development. It also created an Amazon-specific scientific panel to examine ways to promote the region as a carbon sink.

The eight nations represented at the summit constitute the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), a recently revived group whose meeting this month was only the fourth in the organization’s 45-year history, with the last one occurring 14 years ago.

Brazil and Colombia pushed unsuccessfully to have the Belém Declaration include the regional goal of zero Amazon deforestation by 2030. The two countries, which together account for 70% of the Amazon’s land area, have been reporting marked reductions recently in their rates of Amazon land clearing.

Preliminary Brazilian government figures show a 42% drop in the rate of Brazilian Amazon deforestation in the first seven months of the Lula administration, a decline that environmental officials attribute to increased field enforcement since Lula took office on Jan. 1.

Definitive figures for Colombia show that in 2022, the deforestation rate dropped 26% in that country’s Amazon region and 29% nationwide. Experts say former President Iván Duque Márquez’s crackdowns on illegal land clearing played a role in the result, as did anti-deforestation efforts by the Estado Mayor Central (EMC), a rebel faction that serves as a de-facto authority of a sizable portion of the Colombian Amazon.

The EMC, largely made up of former fighters from the now-disbanded Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla group, ordered local farmers to stop cutting trees. It has said it did so as a goodwill gesture to help secure a peace agreement with the government of Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla who succeeded Duque Márquez in August of 2022.

But green advocates say progress of this sort—let alone a goal of zero deforestation by 2030—could be thwarted by woodland destruction caused by agribusiness and mining. Among those voicing this view is Carlos Nobre, a Brazilian climatologist who chairs the Science Panel for the Amazon, a grouping of scientists who conduct research on the region.

“[T]he eight Amazon Summit countries couldn’t reach the common goal of ending Amazon deforestation by 2030 because doing so is not in the interest of their nations’ agribusiness and mining sectors, which are very influential in shaping public policy,” Nobre told EcoAméricas.

But referring to the Belém Declaration’s recognition that the Amazon could reach a “point of no return,” Nobre said the statement nevertheless “marks the first time all eight Amazon nations realize that their shared biome is heading towards its ‘tipping point,’ which is a step forward.”

Nobre, together with the late U.S. ecologist Thomas Lovejoy, has posited that the Amazon is approaching a tipping point at which woodland drying caused by land clearing will feed on itself, turning 50% to 60% of the rainforest into savanna. Studies drawing on computer-simulated projections suggest this tipping point will be reached when 20% to 25% of the Amazon has been deforested. Currently 16% to 17% of the region has been cleared.

Carlos Bocuhy, president of the nonprofit Brazilian Environmental Protection Institute (Proam), suggests the trend is likely to continue unless illegal appropriation and clearing of land in the Amazon region is definitively halted.

“Although pressure exerted by agribusiness is the main reason the Belém Declaration was such a huge environmental disappointment, it must be remembered that agribusiness relies on land grabbers who illegally occupy and clear public land in the Amazon, then fraudulently sell it to farmers and ranchers, large and small, who want to expand their pastures and croplands,” Bocuhy told EcoAméricas after the summit. “Without such land grabbing, a crime not even mentioned in the Belém Declaration, agribusiness would lack the partner in crime it needs to push further into the rainforest.”

At the same time, however, economic incentives to curb deforestation are building. The Climate Observatory’s Astrini points out that while agribusiness and mining interests are indeed opposing a zero-deforestation deadline, pressure is building in Europe to refuse imports of commodities linked to woodland destruction. That pressure has complicated ratification of a long-anticipated free-trade deal between the European Union and Mercosur, the four-nation South American trade bloc. (See "EU-Mercosur trade deal hits an environmental snag" —EcoAméricas, July 2023 and "EU proposal alarms region’s agricultural exporters" —EcoAméricas, December 2022.)

“Brazil, along with Colombia, took such a strong stand on zero Amazon deforestation at the summit because international commodities markets, mainly in Europe, have already began to refuse to accept deforestation-linked Brazilian exports, like soy,” Astrini says. “And the European Union is now putting environmental demands on a stalled Mercosur trade pact that could affect Mercosur beef and agricultural exports, linked to forest degradation and destruction, demands that Brazil and Argentina oppose. The other Amazon countries, none of whom are Mercosur members, and whose primary-goods exports to Europe are small, aren’t under similar pressure to take such a stand, even though Colombia did so.”

The Belém Declaration also did not set a deadline for ending illegal Amazon gold mining, pledging instead to “strengthen regional and international cooperation in combating illegal mining and other related crimes.” In Brazil, illegal gold mining is most rampant in Indigenous territories, particularly that of the Yanomami people. The country’s largest Indigenous reserve, the Yanomami territory encompasses an area in the northern Brazilian Amazon that is larger than the U.S. state of Maine, and extends across the boarder into Venezuela as well.

One month after taking office, Lula launched a major environmental crackdown with the goal of expelling the estimated 20,000 gold miners who have converged on Yanomami territory in Brazil. The operation was prompted by concerns about extensive environmental damage that riverine gold mining is doing to the vast area’s rainforest and by health impacts that this destruction is having on the Yanomami people. (See Q&A in this issue and "Lula targets illegal mining as a matter of health" —EcoAméricas, February 2023.)

Mining a sore point

A report released on Aug. 2 by three Yanomami community associations said that although the crackdown had brought some improvement, “miner resistance [to leaving the area] continues” on Yanomami land. Titled “We are Still Suffering,” the report added that the operation was also hindered by “a lack of government coordination” in addressing issues of Indigenous health, malnutrition, food security and territorial protection.

Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, a prominent Yanomami leader, said in an Aug 2 interview with O Globo, Brazil’s largest newspaper, that “gold miners [who fled across Brazil’s border with Venezuela] are returning.” And a document sent to federal prosecutors in August by one of the three Yanomami associations that issued the report said “miners have returned to one of our communities.”

Calls from Indigenous leaders for a deadline on ending illegal gold mining in the Amazon prompted several hundred protesters to assemble outside the summit hall on the first day of the event. They held placards with messages including “Save the Amazon,” “Our Future is not for Sale,” and, in a reference to illegal miners, “An Amazon Free of Gangsters.”

When the summit ended, Kleber Karipuna, executive coordinator of the Coalition of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), the country’s main Indigenous association, said in a statement that “the Belém Declaration’s lack of specific goals related to Indigenous people and the environment is frustrating.”

Nobre is optimistic that by 2025, when Brazil is slated to host the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém, “the possibility exists that all Amazon countries may agree to zero deforestation in that biome by a fixed deadline.” An important reason, he says, is that “the voices of Indigenous and traditional riverine Amazon communities are getting much louder and more influential.”

The Belém Declaration also did not set a deadline on ending or reducing oil exploration and production in the Amazon, despite a proposal by Colombian President Petro that the eight nations declare a moratorium on drilling in the rainforest region. Just one sentence of the summit document referred to fossil fuels, urging countries to “initiate a dialogue on the sustainability of sectors such as hydrocarbons and mining in the Amazon region.” And leaders of all but one of the summit nations—Colombia—opposed the moratorium proposed by Petro.

Oil issue left hanging

Though Brazilian President Lula supports strong national and regional forest-protection goals, analysts say that his longstanding developmentalist tendencies prompted him to resist a curb on oil projects. They point out that he specifically supports Brazilian plans to develop an offshore oil reserve near the mouth of the Amazon River called the Amazon Falls Basin.

In May, Ibama, the permitting arm of Brazil’s Environment and Climate Change Ministry, denied the state-owned oil company Petrobras a license for exploratory drilling in the basin. The denial was due partly to technical questions but more importantly to Petrobras’ failure to prepare a Sedimentary Basin Impact Assessment, a broad assessment of environmental impact within the Amazon Falls Basin that could take two years to complete.

Petrobras has responded to Ibama’s technical questions in hopes of resolving them so drilling can move forward. Meanwhile, President Lula’s legal office in late August issued an opinion asserting that Petrobras does not need a basin-impact assessment to qualify for an Ibama license because the planned drilling is exploratory, not for production purposes.

Analysts disagree on whether Ibama ultimately will grant the license; but if it doesn’t, the state oil company could file suit in federal court to challenge the decision.