Word: brazil
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Across the world, Brazil's democratization has also fueled an indigenous growth in local Green groups, 900 of which have sprung up in the past ten years. But perhaps the best example of the movement's infectious power is that it has even touched Japan, where the intimacy between business and government has kept environmentalism from penetrating far into the nation's legal and political fabric. Even there, bands of environmentalists have formed to protest Japan's frenetic construction of golf courses, successfully stopping the destruction of woodlands in about 20 cases...
Jose Lutzenberger, an ecologically oriented agronomist, is Brazil's most unflinching environmentalist. Lutzenberger aroused the anger of the administration of former President Jose Sarney by daring to declare publicly that the rest of the world had a legitimate interest in the fate of the Amazon rain forest. "If you set your homes on fire, it will threaten the homes of your neighbors," Lutzenberger noted with simple eloquence. Because of his reputation for outspokenness, the international environmental community was dumbfounded in March, when newly inaugurated President Fernando Collor de Mello named Lutzenberger Secretary of the Environment...
...first priority will be to halt the destruction of the Amazon, but he has also vowed to protect Brazil's last remaining Atlantic forests and gravely threatened savannas. Some Brazilians are concerned that the new Secretary might be too inflexible and idealistic for the rough realities of government, but Lutzenberger, 63, calls himself a "possibilist." The Gaia Foundation, a private organization he set up, finances problem-solving environmental projects. Example: an effort to help poor settlers improve agricultural techniques so that they do not have to clear as much forest land to produce enough crops...
...cash crunch was deliberate, the result of new President Fernando Collor de Mello's desperate all-or-nothing attempt to "obliterate" Brazil's inflation spiral, which hit a monthly rate of 73% in February. The severe clampdown, which the President unveiled just hours after his inauguration on March 15, went into full effect last week. By presidential decree, the plan freezes 80% of the country's banking and investment accounts; no one can withdraw more than $1,200 from savings for the next 18 months. And to cement his reform, Collor replaced Brazil's latest currency, the new cruzado, with...
...make his plan work, Collor, 40, will have to overcome a stubbornly resistant economy. Under former President Jose Sarney, Brazil tried to implement three anti-inflation programs in four years. All failed, mainly because as soon as the reforms were announced, consumers rushed to buy goods, creating a new surge in inflation. They were betting that the government could not control prices, and they were right. Thanks to Collor's freezing of assets, that shopping surge seems unlikely to happen this time. But labor leaders have vowed to strike if the President follows through on plans to sell or close...