Word: collor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Fernando Collor de Mello won the Brazilian presidency in 1989 by reaching out to the descamisados, the country's shirtless poor. Now Brazilians by the thousands are putting on shirts -- black ones -- to demonstrate their disgust with a Collor regime that is haunted by scandal and economic failure. An inflation rate of 20% a month and record unemployment had already eroded support for the once popular Collor even before congressional investigators recently uncovered a kickback and bid-rigging racket engineered by top presidential aides. The embattled President made the mistake of asking followers to dress in green and yellow...
...gist of Collor's disagreement with his former Environment Secretary goes right to the core of the Rio summit agenda. Lutzenberger refused to endorse Collor's version of "sustainable development" -- the notion that preservation of Brazil's rain forests and other natural resources is compatible with economic growth. The interim Secretary, a nuclear physicist named Jose Goldemberg, is a strong advocate of this vision of controlled development...
...Collor argues that "we cannot discuss the environment issue without taking into account the situation of poverty and misery in which three-quarters of humanity lives" -- including the 70% of Brazil's 146 million people who < barely earn enough to feed themselves. Even fervent environmentalists concede the point. "Brazil is very important to the international community because of its biological diversity," says Feldmann, "but within the country, other issues are much more important. It's hard to relate to sustainable development when you also have problems of equity and social justice...
...join what it describes as "schemes to transform forests in developing countries into preserved areas in return for compensation from the industrialized world." This is an apparent reference to suggestions that Brazil should receive relief from its huge foreign debt in return for protecting the Amazon Basin. While Collor in principle has endorsed debt-for-nature swaps for small projects, only one deal has been negotiated...
...Collor's opponents charge that Big Business is the real force behind the government's policy. "The antiecology lobby is better organized than we are," says Alfredo Sirkis, head of Brazil's Green Party. "What does sustainable development mean in the Amazon? The big polluters are hiding behind these two words." In fact, a wood-pulp producer in the Amazonian state of Para has described as "sustainable development" a plan to clear-cut 5,000 hectares (12,000 acres) of virgin tropical forest and replant the area with eucalyptus trees...